Stephen Dauphinais started Day 2 with a middling stack of 341k, putting him 10th out of the 40 returning players. About 13 hours later, he had all 9.5 million in front of him after taking down the start-of-day leader Sen Vijayaratnam. He played a solid game and got heads-up after Vijayaratnam busted most of the final table in front of him.
He was at a deficit for most of heads-up, but had a short time in the lead about halfway through the final phase of the game. That quickly evaporated as Vijayaratnam pulled back ahead when he flopped a flush and took a big pot. Dauphinais doubled back to near even when his pocket fours won a race against king-ten, then took the lead in a big pot where Vijayaratnam had to fold the river when the flush came.
The game didn’t last much longer after that. A few hands later they ran into a big confrontation when Dauphinais open jammed almost 40 bigs with ace-jack and Vijayaratnam called with a smaller stack and the dominated ace-ten. The board was clean for the jack kicker and Dauphinais took down his first PPT trophy.
He had a huge score this past summer in Vegas with 3rd in the Millionaire Maker for $651k (USD) and this score tonight will put him within spitting distance of 7 figures on Hendon Mob.
