After 502 entries swelled the prizepool to over a million dollars, the PokerStars SCOOP Event #73 ended on Monday evening with Pavel Plesuv the last man standing, making himself $177,964 richer in the process.

The $2,100-entry event saw just 37 players return to the virtual felt on Day 2, and it was Plesuv who went on the attack right away, racing up the leaderboard to threaten the overnight advantage held by ‘zivziv’. Day 1’s dominant player would eventually finish in 3rd place, but before that, play had to get to the final table.

In the early levels, zivziv’s lead only grew, as their stack of 3.6m chips more than doubled as they ran up a monster stack, but while players were falling regularly, just 16 players being left in seats by the end of the second break of the day, plenty of big names were still involved.

A pivotal hand for Plesuv that PokerNews reported on was a three-way all-in where he knocked out both Simon Ravnsbaek and Alex Difelice, but he then repeated the trick with a pre-flop all-in with pocket queens which held across a nine-high board to bust both Maksim Viktorovich (ace-ten) and ‘6omen6’ (ace-king), a hand that took Plesuv into the lead in a big way.