Friday was all about the Main Event on the Pure Poker Tour. 2025 PPT Series #1 is coming into the final weekend of play with the opening flight to the Main Event as the only big game running on Friday.
Friday evening ended off with a final satellite to the Main that ended up giving out 12 tickets, but the big story of the day was Day 1a of the Main Event.
Day 1a of Main Event Goes Big
The field on the opening day of a multi-day game can be a bit underwhelming sometimes, but that wasn’t the case on Friday here on the PPT. Day 1a pulled in 124 entries before the end of registration at 7:15 PM for 1a prizes of more than $115k.
Once dinner was over and entries closed, a total of 16 players were set to find a bag at the end of the night. It took them almost 14 levels to play down to that level with the final hand coming near the end of Level 14 just after midnight.
When all was said and done, Burnaby, BC resident David Ko was sitting on the big stack by a considerable margin. He ended the opening flight with more than 20% of the chips in play and was about 300k ahead of his next closest competitor, WSOP-C Main Event winner Alex Liu with Ryan “Rybo” Smith close behind Liu.
Colten Yamagishi (who won the PLO Bounty game the other night) and Shane Cutinha rounded out the top five with PPT Main Event champ Ryan Cairns just missing out on the top 5 with sixth place.
There is still one more flight to the Main Event running on Saturday with he final action coming on Sunday’s Day 2. The game is scheduled to end on Sunday evening, but staff may decide to bring back some players on Monday to finish it out, depending on how late Sunday goes.
2025 PPT #1 Main Event Day 1a Stacks
| Player | Chips |
|---|---|
| David Ko | 753,500 |
| Alex Liu | 447,000 |
| Ryan Smith | 428,500 |
| Colten Yamagishi | 308,500 |
| Shane Cutinha | 273,000 |
| Ryan Cairns | 259,000 |
| Bowen Leung | 253,000 |
| Sharmark Mohamed | 228,500 |
| DNR | 174,000 |
| Joseph Anderson | 116,500 |
| Brenda Robertson | 107,500 |
| DJ Sharma | 105,500 |
| Naleen Narayan | 86,000 |
| Shawn Taghavi | 74,000 |
| Jeff Forester | 68,000 |
| Andy Truong | 38,000 |
