September 22 2011, Donnie Peters

The World Poker Tour Malta resumed play on Wednesday with the second starting flight. Day 1b added 139 players to the field and brought the total entries to 240, which created a prize pool of “698,400. At the end of the day, Tommy Vedes finished on top, with a stack of 115,500.

Plenty of notables were in action, and some of them for the second time in this re-entry event, including John Eames, Sam El Sayed, Ivan Freitez, Steven Kelly, Dragan Galic, McLean Karr and Phil Hellmuth. Out of that bunch, only Eames, Galic and Hellmuth were able to advance, and all three did with relatively low numbers of chips. Hellmuth bagged up 34,075, Galic finished with 23,350 and Eames finished with the smallest stack moving to Day 2 with 17,100. They’ll all have plenty of work cut out for them on Thursday.

At the end of the day, 90 players remained from the 139 that started. Combining those survivors with the ones from Day 1a, the returning field for Day 2 will be 154 players. Everyone will be chasing Day 1a chip leader Fabien Sartoris, but there’s still plenty of firepower left in the field to provide some great poker action.

Among those advancing to Day 2 are Antoine Saout, Marvin Rettenmaier, Sofia Lovgren, Tobias Reinkemeier, Steve O’Dwyer and William Thorson. Some of the other players who fell on Day 1b in their last chance to move on were Davidi Kitai, Fabrice Soulier, Kara Scott and James Akenhead.

Day 2 will take place on Thursday, beginning at 1600 CEST (1500 BST). PokerNews will have the recap from the day’s action after it is complete, so be sure to stay tuned.

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*Photo courtesy of the World Poker Tour

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