Wednesday could be quite a fun day for Peter Tran at the 2015 World Poker Tour (WPT) L.A. Poker Classic Main Event as he has a massive lead with just twelve players remaining. And since the tournament will play down to the six-handed final table today, Day 5 should be short. Heck, Tran might be able to sit back, do nothing, and advance to the final table.
Tran enters Day 5 with 4.12 million chips, nearly 2 million more than the second place Mike Leah. Nobody else has more than 1.7 million. Tran’s stack is more than the bottom six remaining stacks combined. Of course, it doesn’t take much to flip the table in a poker tournament, but still, Tran has got to feel mighty confident going into Day 5’s action.
Tran was the chip leader going into Tuesday’s play, starting the day with 1.369 million chips. It took him a while to really start building his gigantic stack, but it does not appear that he really had too tough of a day. It helps, too, when you flop a virtually unbeatable hand. With just 21 players left, Tran held pocket Fours and – what do you know – flopped a couple more Fours. He was able to extract some chips from his opponent, Brian Yoon, on the turn, but failed to get more on the river when he checked and Yoon wouldn’t get aggressive.
One developing story is the presence of the lone remaining WPT Champions Club member in the field. Anthony Zinno is fresh off a victory at the WPT Fallsview Poker Classic and is gunning to become the third player history to win back-to-back WPT events and only the second to win back-to-back titles in the same WPT season. Darren Elias pulled off the feat just a few months ago, when he won the WPT Borgata Poker Open and the WPT Caribbean Main Events. Zinno has an uphill battle in store for him, as he is third-to-last in chips with just 565,000 and thus an underdog to even make the final table. But at the same time, he only needs to outlast eleven more players to win, so glass half full, right?
Play will resume at the Commerce Casino at noon PT (3:00pm ET) as the final twelve players try to get to the final six.
2015 World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic Main Event – Day 4 Chip Counts
Peter Tran – 4,120,000
Mike Leah – 2,240,000
Peter Neff – 1,682,000
Edward Ochana – 1,401,000
Igor Yaroshevskyy – 1,215,000
Valdimir Dobrovolskiy – 1,185,000
Chris Klodnicki – 1,054,000
Ray Henson – 759,000
Tim Cramer – 621,000
Anthony Zinno – 565,000
Ken Aldridge – 543,000
Vadim Baranovsky – 451,000
