The final opening flight is in the books and it attracted another 849 runners to bring the grand total up to 5,799 smashing all records on the island and perhaps throughout all of Europe for this buy-in range. The prize pool reached a whopping €2,578,172 prize pool, also a new record for the Battle of Malta and creating one of the largest events in all of Europe in 2024.

The prize pool will be announced shortly after the start of play at 10 p.m. We will share on the blog if we get a sneak peak but can at least share that all 762 Day 2 qualifiers, including 126 on the final opening flight that just ended, earned at least an €800 min-cash and there will be six-figure digit prizes on the line.

Anthony Ouillon will head into Day 2 in a couple of hours €10,000 richer thanks to bagging the overall Day 1i chip lead with 1,077,000 in chips. Michael Howard may not be a chip millionaire with 999,000 but he also earned a healthy €5,000 bonus for the second most chips on Day 1i while Domenico Candido earned €3,000 for bagging up the third place stack of 879,000 in chips.

Day 2 will start at the earliest point the opening flights have finished with blinds at 4,000/8,000 along with an 8,000 big blind ante. It won’t be a long and tiring day even for those 126 souls that qualified through Day 1i as just four blind levels of one hour each are planned with blinds increasing to 75 minutes in length for Day 3.

Check out the full Day 1i chip counts below and we will post the starting Day 2 chip counts and the seat draw in approximately 30 minutes.