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A total of 168 survivors from two starting flights took to the felt yesterday at the World Poker Tour Jacksonville Main Event. 126 of those faced elimination over the course of seven intense levels, but Vitor Coelho wasn’t among them. In fact, Coelho took the outright lead by the end of the day, bagging up 945k chips along with a huge lead over second place.

Coelho’s big break came when he pushed all-in with pocket aces against Joel Schmidt’s pocket kings. The board was garbage, allowing Coelho to exceed 1 million chips and knock out Schmidt. He continued to build his momentum by defeating Jeff Forest, a former WPT winner, with A-5 offsuit over K-10 offsuit.

A string of noted pros were eliminated along with Forrest, including Harrison Gimbel, Matt Glantz, John Racener, Tony Dunst, David Pham, Jonathan Little, Tommy Vedes, Victor Ramdin, Nick Schulman, Michael Gracz and Shaun Deeb. Deeb was sent to the rail by John Liu’s flush while holding A-J offsuit. Deeb faced a seriously bad beat when his pocket aces were crushed by Q-10 offsuit, which drew to trip 10s on the flop.

A number of talented pros remain to compete with Coelho, including Artie Rodriguez, Chris Tryba, Lisa Hamilton, Corey Burbick, Mike Beasley and Dwyte Pilgrim. All of the aforementioned players have chip stacks ranging from 100k up to 284k. The lowest stacks belong to Zoltan Czinnkota and Deshun Boone, who will need to rally on Day 3 if they wish to avoid the dreaded position of money bubble boys.

Just 42 players remain in WPT Jacksonville, with places 40 and under slated to receive money prizes. In terms of chip counts, Coelho’s stiffest competition currently includes Darryll Fish, Alexander Venovski and Connor Drinan, all of whom have over 550k chips.