L.A. Poker Classic 2025 Day 2 Recap
Day 2 of the L.A. Poker Classic saw a little over 500 players return to the felt at the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles. Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi has continued his momentum going into 2025, after having a great 2025 which included being one of the January Niners at the 2025 WSOP Main Event.
The L.A. Poker Classic is a WPT $10,000 buy-in event. There was 681 players which came and signed up on the first day, which created a prize pool of $6,537,600 for the top 63 players to share.
After the day's play, Mizrachi is currently in fourth place with 227,600 chips. Other notable players with him at the top half of the field include Phil Hellmuth and Carlos Mortensen.
For the railbirds the day was interesting as it was like watching the 2025 WSOP action play out again, with so many of the same players who made the final table of that event seen at the tables.
The average chip stack is 85,481 so Mizraci sits with a comfortable stack leading into Day 3. One of the few players to have more chips then Mizrachi is the chip leader Joe DeNiro.
According to a WPT reporter in an interview with DeNiro, he thought that he had a lucky table draw with lots of players who could not fold top pair or second pair.
DeNiro accumulated most of his 300,000 plus stack when he hit a set of nines, and his opponent hit top pair with A-Q. It was a difficult situation for his opponent to get away from, and DeNiro won a huge pot. The second biggest stack on Day 2 of the L.A. Poker Classic is James Carroll, followed by another January Niner Jason Senti.
One of the big names who seriously needs to double up soon or risks getting eliminated from the tournament is Phil Ivey, sitting at the bottom of the field with only 32,000 chips. Although some big names have already been eliminated, including Daniel Negreanu, Liv Boeree, 2025 WSOP ME runner-up Joeseph Cheong, and 2025 WPT event winner, Alexander Kuzmin.
By the end of Day 2 the field was whittled down to just 239 players, who will be ready for the start of play tomorrow at noon local time to fight for first place prize money of $1.6 million.
