The 2013 World Series of Poker awarded two more bracelets over the past couple of days, with a rapid finish to one of those events (you’ll see why in a moment) and the denial of a wire-to-wire victory in the second.
Event #33 – $2500 Seven Card Razz
Fourteen players came back on Thursday in the battle for the Event #33 bracelet and there was potentially history in the making. Poker professional David Bach held the lead after Day One and Two, putting the potential for a rare wire-to-wire win in a top tier poker tournament. Bach, on a 300K stack, saw other WSOP bracelet winners in Randy Ohel and Frankie O’Dell on the leaderboard behind him, but it was another player who would eventually prove to be the main challenger.
Bryan Campanello scooped up an early three-way pot with Ohel and Joel Alpert to put his name on the leaderboard right behind Bach. He would move into the lead after another fight against Ohel where, with an A-4-4-4 showing in his up cards, Campanello showed (5-3-2) in his down cards to make an unlikely wheel to win the pot. Campanello then took some chips off of Bach to extend that lead, showing an 8-5 low to outpip Bach’s 8-6 low.
Ohel and O’Dell would be eliminated on the same hand by Sebastian Pauli to set the Razz final table, with the hand giving Pauli a slim lead over Jim Wheatley and Campanello. It was Brent Keller, however, who struck early first blood at the final table, taking chips off of Pauli while knocking out Ismael Bojang in eighth place. Bach, who started the final table in the middle of the pack, nearly doubled up against Pauli to get back into the fight as it moved into the evening hours.
Keller’s stack would yo-yo after his early aggression, however. Campanello made a better low (8-7) against him to drop him to just over 100K in chips and, although he would eliminate Rick Fuller in seventh place, dropped a huge pot against Wheatley to get close to the felt. After starting off with a (A-2) 3-5 against Ivan Schertzer, Keller couldn’t find the right card to complete a strong low, losing to Schertzer’s ten low on Seventh Street to leave the Rio in sixth place.
Campanello began to dominate once five handed play began. Campanello would drop Schertzer in fifth and Wheatley in third (Wheatley eliminated Pauli in fourth) to set the heads up match with Bach for the bracelet. Holding more than a 4:1 lead over Bach, Campanello would never let the former Poker Players’ Championship winner back into the match, ending it when he drew an 8-6 low on the final hand against Bach (who could only create a King low) to capture the bracelet.
1. Bryan Campanello (Southlake, TX), $178,052
2. David Bach (Athens, GA), $110,098
3. James Wheatley (Harrisonburg, VA), $72,346
4. Sebastian Pauli (Germany), $52,844
5. Ivan Schertzer (Miami Shores, FL), $39,128
6. Brent Keller (Horsham, PA), $29,369
7. Rick Fuller (Snohomish, WA), $22,351
8. Ismael Bojang (Hamburg, Germany), $17,235
Event #34 – $1000 Turbo No Limit Hold’em
It took less than two days for the 1629 players in the Turbo NLHE event to work their way down to a champion, with Belgium’s Michael Gathy earning his second ever WSOP bracelet to join Davidi Kitai in the Belgian double bracelet winner’s club.
35 players returned on Thursday for action and there was plenty of that going around the Amazon Room. It would only take five hours for those 35 to be taken down to the final table, with such notables as Simon Charette (18th) and Jennifer Tilly (13th) falling during that time. Daniel Bishop held the lead at this point with his 1.4 million chips, with Jake Cody in second (almost 700K in chips behind Bishop) and the remainder of the field with no player over 500K in chips.
The final table makeup was impressive in being one of the first truly “international” final tables to this point of the 2013 WSOP. Along with the four Americans, two Canadians, a British pro, a Russian player and a Belgian represented their countries.
Cody made the first knockout at the final table, sending Russell Crane out in ninth to join Bishop over the million chip mark. Gathy, however, seized those chips from Cody to move up to 1.85 million and, with Bishop fading down the leaderboard, took over the lead at the table. Gathy would continue to dominate the table as, by the dinner break, he was the one with a dominant lead with seven players remaining.
Coming back after that break, Gathy continued to assault his opponents. He would eliminate Cody in seventh place (his pocket tens standing up to Cody’s A-J), Sergey Rybachenko in fourth and Yueqi Zhu in third to go to heads up action against Benjamin Reason holding a 4:1 lead. Although it would take 22 hands for him to complete his mission, Gathy would defeat Reason when his A-9 stayed in front of Reason’s K-J on the final hand after flopping a nine and turning another.
1. Michael Gathy (Brussels, Belgium), $278,613
2. Benjamin Reason (Whitehouse, TX), $172,252
3. Yueqi Zhu (Rowland Heights, CA), $113,358
4. Sergey Rybachenko (Moscow, Russia), $81,720
5. Daniel Bishop (Houston, TX), $59,816
6. Jason Duval (Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada), $44,422
7. Jake Cody (Rochdale, the United Kingdom), $33,456
8. Noah Vaillancourt (Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, Canada), $25,539
9. Russell Crane (Howell, NJ), $19,748
