Although The Festival Series Malta officially began today, yesterday there were plenty of players around to get an early start with Day 1a of the €250 PokerListings Championship beginning a day before the official festivities.
Day 1a witnessed 89 entries with 13 players finding a bag into Wednesday's Day 2 already in the money. John Forsman parlayed his 30,000 opening stack into 399,000 with Karl Sundin and Jonas Kovacs also finding big bags of over 300,000 in chips. Here is a look at the chip counts of the 13 survivors:
| Place | Player | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | John Forsman | 399,000 |
| 2 | Karl Sundin | 343,000 |
| 3 | Jonas Kovacs | 326,000 |
| 4 | Karl Gialanze | 232,000 |
| 5 | Marius Morel | 229,000 |
| 6 | Tanguy Pellerin | 227,000 |
| 7 | Michele Amirante | 212,000 |
| 8 | Lachezar Tsenov | 184,000 |
| 9 | Antoine Degiorgio | 152,000 |
| 10 | Benedetto Caruso | 148,000 |
| 11 | Jacob Dideriksen-Nielsen | 130,000 |
| 12 | Sinead Priestley | 77,000 |
| 13 | Allan Arjut | 22,000 |
Meanwhile, The Festival Series photographer Dominik Demcak, who is working alongside The Festival Series Head of Photography Mairo Toom, was busy snapping away some early photos of this event.
