Phil Ivey Busts in APPT Macau

Phil Ivey’s first tournament back after his long hiatus ended unceremoniously, as the poker superstar was eliminated late on Day 2 of the PokerStars Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau Main Event.

Ivey, who had not played tournament poker since before the Black Friday indictments and the resulting publicity nightmare for Full Tilt Poker, reportedly played well on the first day to build a reasonably solid stack. However, down to just a few big blinds late on Day 2, Ivey called an all-in bet with K9. His opponent, Darren Judges, held AJ. Ivey needed to improve, but his hand never connected with the board, eliminating him from the competition.

The tournament was a fairly large one for Macau, featuring 575 players who competed on two starting days. While 303 of those players made it back for Day 2, only 96 will continue on for Day 3 of the competition. With only 70 players making the money, that still leaves many players in danger of busting on the bubble.

While Ivey’s elimination will likely remove much of the attention from APPT Macau, it is worth noting that there are a couple of different storylines still ongoing in the tournament. Singapore’s Nathaniel Seet is the leader heading into Day 3, holding a massive chip stack of 774,500 chips – nearly 300,000 more than his nearest competitor.

While the rest of the leaderboard is filled with relatively unknown players (at least outside of Asia), there are a few notables still in contention. Most notably, there’s one player in the field who may even have a better tournament pedigree than Ivey himself – Johnny Chan, who has 10 World Series of Poker bracelets, and has won the WSOP Main Event twice. Chan currently sits in 23^rd place, with 244,400 chips.