One of the marquee events of the year on the high roller circuit, the €100K Super High Roller at 2018 PokerStars and Monte-Carlo©Casino EPT, kicked off Thursday with an eight-level appetizer that saw exactly half of the 44 entries make it through to Day 2.

Chief among those at this point is Mikita Badziakouski, as the Belarusian turned a 250,000 starting stack into 1,381,000. He's had success in the principality before, taking second in a different €100K event here in 2016 for €501,800.

Level 6 (1,500/3,000/3,000) proved to be the turning point for Badziakouski as he won a huge pot against Koray Aldemir that saw the latter use up four of his six time extensions. They had battled with four bets preflop and saw a pretty dead board paired with two eights. Badziakouski, the four-bettor, barreled all three streets and Aldemir called his river shove with queens, mucking to the kings shown down by his foe.

The only other player to reach six figures was Isaac Haxton, who finished with 1,033,000. However, he's likely feeling considerably less cheery about his bag than Badziakouski as it took him three bullets to get there.

That last shell very nearly stayed in the holster, too, as the structure originally called for a single reentry format. Some early bustouts by deep-pocketed players had players grousing about the change, and that only got louder when many of those same players busted again.

Haxton was among that number, and a unanimous vote by the roughly 20 players left cleared the way for a change to unlimited reentries.

"It always was an unlimited reentry and [single reentry] came as a surprise to many," PokerStars Team Pro Igor Kurganov said. "The tournament is for the players and the players decided they all wanted unlimited."

Third time was the charm for Haxton, and joining him on Day 2 with above average stacks are the likes of Ole Schemion (949,000), Justin Bonomo (930,000), Christoph Vogelsang (890,000) and Sam Greenwood (616,000).

Greenwood has been one of the hottest players of late on the high roller circuit, booking scores of about $450,000 in Macau and about $1.2 million in Spain, as well as shipping a small high roller at WPT Amsterdam for €125,785.

There's still a long way to go in this thing as registration won't even end until the start of Day 2, which gets going at 12:30 p.m. Friday. Players can buy fresh 250,000 stacks going to 3,000/6,000/6,000, and a long day is on tap with the plan to play down to six players. Stay tuned to PokerNews for more feature coverage while the PokerStars Blog takes care of hand history updates.

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