Although the excitement of Michael Mizrachi’s historic win in the $50,000 Poker Players’ Championship was the dominant story of Thursday’s action at the 2012 World Series of Poker, two other very difficult disciplines of poker were also able to determine champions also, although one tournament wasn’t done until early Friday morning.
Event #47 – $1500 Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo
Wading through the 978 players who started this tournament on Tuesday, the final ten men came together in the Amazon Room to figure out who was the best at PLO Hi/Lo – at least for this tournament. Charalampos Lappas was a slim chip leader over Steven Loube; in fact, these two gentlemen were the only ones above the 900K mark. Before a champ could be determined, however, they had to set the official nine-handed WSOP final table, which didn’t take much time at all.
Viatcheslav Ortynskiy (who was the victim of Lappas’ late night double on Wednesday that catapulted him to the lead) got his scant stack of chips to the center against Sonu Sharma. Ortynskiy had a nice drawing hand for Omaha Hi/Lo – A-8-6-5 – but Sharma had him crushed if no low card came with his A-K-K-J. A King on the flop gave further domination for Sharma, but the trey and the eight along with it brought hopes for a chopped pot for Ortynskiy. A Queen on the turn and a nine on the river didn’t deliver those low draws, eliminating Ortynskiy in tenth place and the official final table “bubble boy.”
Loube maintained his position on the leaderboard through the early going, knocking out Sharma in sixth place, to push his way over a million in chips. He was joined in the “million club” by Roch Cousineau, who crippled Lappas to take over the chip lead, and Timothy Finne, who eliminated Lappas in fifth place, as these three staked their claims to the title as the tournament hit the dinner break.
Cousineau would be the first to depart from the fray. After missing a low draw to split a pot, he was eliminated in third place by Loube to send Loube and Finne to heads up play with Loube holding a 3:1 lead. After a couple of hands, the chips would get to the center with Loube’s A-7-4-3 (double suited in diamonds and hearts) holding an edge on Finne’s K-Q-J-6.
The board brought a King to put Finne into the figurative lead (top pair, open ended straight draw), but it also brought two hearts for Loube (flush draw, backdoor trips in treys) to give him the mathematical edge. A Queen on the turn improved Finne to two pair, but the nine of hearts on the river was the backbreaker, giving Loube the heart flush and the championship of Event #47.
1. Steven Loube (Norcross, GA), $267,345
2. Timothy Finne (Tucson, AZ), $165,486
3. Roch Cousineau (Gatineau, Quebec), $103,538
4. Cameron McKinley (Vancouver, WA), $75,151
5. Charalampos Lappas (Brighton, Greece), $55,479
6. Sonu Sharma (Edmonton, Alberta), $41,589
7. Paul Taylor (Las Vegas, NV), $31,634
8. Kyle Carlston (Las Vegas, NV), $24,386
9. Paul Ewen (Hartley, IA), $19,052
Event #48 – $3000 Limit Hold’em
While the other two final tables on the day raced through their proceedings as if they had a party to go to, the Limit Hold’em event decided to take their own sweet time in crowning a champion. It would take over fourteen hours for a champion to be determined from the twenty men who came back on Thursday, including two hours of heads up play.
Paul Berende was on point when the tournament restarted yesterday and kept that lead as Vladimir Shchmelev and Justin Bonomo were eliminated within the first twenty minutes of action. Down to two tables, the players actually wasted little time in whittling the field down, knocking former World Champion Jonathan Duhamel out in seventeenth place and a Limit specialist, Chad Brown, from the tournament in fourteenth. It would only take four hours to determine the final table, at which time action slogged down.
Matthew Woodward had emerged as the chip leader at this mark, but the field was tightly bunched together (separated by only 260K in chips from first to ninth) leaving a favorite hard to pick. Dwyte Pilgrim looked to be one of those contenders as final table play began but, by the dinner break, he had fallen to the second shortest stack (Berende was the shortest) as the ideologically named John Virtue held the lead.
Virtue’s time in the sun wouldn’t last long as, after dinner, he donated some chips to Pilgrim and doubled up Berende to fall under 200K in chips. He would show himself to be quite the Limit player as he worked his way back up into the lead when he took a big pot against Kenny Hsiung. Pilgrim was dumped by the resurgence of another player – Berende – in fifth place to set up four handed play.
At this point, things ground to a halt. Although Berende was dispatched in fourth place after about an hour and a half of play, Hsiung, Hwang and Virtue would battle it out for another hour before Virtue left. Hsiung held more than a 3:1 lead at this point over Hwang, but Hwang would chip away at the disadvantage until it had disappeared after more than an hour of heads up play. This would be the last hurrah for Hwang, however, as Hsiung made his rebound to draw the match to even as 3AM this morning passed.
It would take another hour for the battle to be decided. After a J-7-8 flop and a Queen turn, the players would get their remaining chips to the center with Hwang in danger. Hwang’s 6-5 was looking for the completion of an open ended straight, while Hsiung’s K-9 wanted the river to blank to keep him in the lead. The river blanked with another Queen to give Kenny Hsiung the hand and the championship.
1. Kenny Hsiung (Pico Rivera, CA), $165,205
2. Robert Hwang (Barnegat, NJ), $102,118
3. John Virtue (Newport Beach, CA), $76,244
4. Paul Berende (Oosterhout, the Netherlands), $57,310
5. Dwyte Pilgrim (Brooklyn, NY), $43,345
6. Matthew Woodward (Waterboro, ME), $32,994
7. Mitchell Davis (Irvine, CA), $25,266
8. John Myung (Dunn Loring, VA), $19,474
9. Stephen Hung (El Cerrito, CA), $15,098
