Dario Sammartino in the lead at the Super MILLION$ event

Added: January 20, 2021

2019 WSOP Main Event runner-up Dario Sammartino is at the final table of the most recent Super MILLION$ event on GGPoker with the chip lead.

Italy’s Sammartino made headlines back in 2019 when he came into the action at the WSOP Main Event final table 7th in chips of the nine players, but he exceeded all of our expectations and got all the way to the heads-up before subsequently losing to the champion Hossein Ensan. Back then, Sammartino was quite upset about the fact that he missed out on the title.

Poker has witnessed a drastic change in the 18 months since that achievement. That is mainly because of the COVID-19 pandemic that has seen either no WSOP Main Event champions or two WSOP Main Event champions crowned since that day, all varies on your opinion. A lot of poker is conducted virtually nowadays to comply with lockdown restrictions and the vast majority of poker players have become used to depositing five or six-figure sums (or seven if you’re Daniel Negreanu) in order to go after greatness at the online felt.

The latest tournament in which to do that is this week’s $10,300-entry GGPoker Super MILLION$ event, the 32nd iteration of this tournament and with Sammartino leading, the chip leader will be looking to obtain his first ever Super MILLION$ title. The Italian has made the final table twice before but hasn’t managed to win one yet – so tonight might just be his time to shine.

Sammartino ended up in third place back in October for a career-high Super MILLION$ result of $202,045, but can he go two places higher and win this week’s top prize, which amounts to a whopping $454,907?

One of his biggest challenges will be the Canadian player Ami Barer, who has 3,132,590 chips and has participated in every single one of the 32 Super MILLION$ events that have taken place to date – an astounding record! Barer shares one painful record with Sammartino, and that is that both men have never finished higher than third in the Super MILLION$.

One man who knows the exact way to close this tournament out is Isaac Baron, who will be looking to repeat his win of this event four months ago, way back on September 13th of 2020. Baron comes into play with 2,199,601 chips, significantly more than another man who has experience of winning this event, Kyle Menard. The Canadian has over 2.1 million chips too, and will start hoping to put around 35 big blinds to good use once more.

With other regulars in Super MILLION$ events such as Irish player ‘Pluto The Doggo’ (2 million), Germany’s Pascal Hartmann (1.5 million) and Cypriot player Aliaksei Boika (824,457), there’s all to play for as it starts off at 6pm GMT.

GGPoker, poker, WSOP