Wednesday will mark Day 4 of the $15,000 buy-in Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic. A World Poker Tour (WPT) event, the tournament is now just 48 hours from its conclusion. The winner will walk away with $1.5 million and leading the pack are Evan McNiff and World Series of Poker (WSOP) November Nine member Chino Rheem. The money bubble burst on Tuesday and in total, 55 players are left standing.
McNiff has been near the top of the pack for the last two days. The San Diego, California native finished 373rd in the 2008 WSOP Main Event, cashing for $28,000. He’s joined by the man who finished seventh in that tournament, David Rheem, known in the poker world as Chino. Rheem’s seventh place finish in poker’s most prestigious tournament was worth $1.7 million. He also finished second in a $1,000 rebuy event in 2006 for $327,000. McNiff and Rheem hold 1.03 million and 905,000 chips, respectively, more than double the average stack of 407,000. Rheem eliminated a player while holding aces full of tens in order to burst the money bubble on Tuesday, much to the delight of everyone else in the room.
A player who caught fire during the sixth season of the WPT, Steve Sung, holds the fourth largest chip stack at the Bellagio, the site of the Five Diamond. Sung made not one, but two final tables during the most recent WPT season, finishing fourth in the Spanish Championship in Barcelona for $166,000 and also notching a runner up showing at the Bay 101 Shooting Star event for $585,000. Sung will become a self-made poker millionaire on the WPT after cashing in this event. He enters Wednesday’s play armed with 787,000 chips.
Another decorated WPT veteran, Nick Schulman, sits with the fifth largest chip stack at 720,000. Schulman won the WPT Foxwoods World Poker Finals in 2005 and, two years later, was back trying to claim victory number two at the Connecticut casino. He ultimately finished second in the event in 2007. Schulman owns over $3 million in WPT earnings. He also has two career WSOP final table appearances to his name, including a $108,000 payday for taking sixth in a $5,000 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event in 2007.
“The Alabama Cowboy” Hoyt Corkins holds 681,000 chips in the Five Diamond, good for the seventh best mark. Like Schulman, Corkins is a former WPT Foxwoods winner, taking down the World Poker Finals during Season II for $1.1 million. Corkins has a total of four final table appearances on the World Poker Tour and has earned $2.3 million in career winnings on WPT felts. He’s also tallied two WSOP bracelets for victories in a $2,500 No Limit Hold’em Six-Handed event in 2007 and a $5,000 Pot Limit Omaha event 15 years earlier. In fact, his first WSOP cash came all the way back in 1989.
Here’s a look at the top 10 chip stacks at the Bellagio heading into Day 4 on Wednesday. Fifty-five players remain in total:
1st: Evan McNiff (San Diego, California), 1,035,000
2nd: David Rheem (Las Vegas, Nevada), 905,000
3rd: Jack Wu (Palo Alto, California), 847,000
4th: Steve Sung (Torrance, California), 787,000
5th: Nick Schulman (Las Vegas, Nevada), 720,000
6th: Arthur Azen (Staten Island, New York), 700,000
7th: Hoyt Corkins (Glenwood, Alabama), 681,000
8th: Benjamin Straate (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), 645,000
9th: Daniel O’Brien (Mt. Sinai, New York), 632,000
10th: Abe Masseri (New York, New York), 591,000
Other notable players in the extremely talented field include:
11th: Robert Mizrachi, 584,000
12th: David Benyamine, 571,000
15th: Amnon Filippi, 547,000
16th: John Hennigan, 529,000
18th: Clonie Gowen, 505,000
25th: David Oppenheim, 412,000
27th: Allen Cunningham, 363,000
29th: Kido Pham, 353,000
34th: Barry Greenstein, 336,000
43rd: Andy Bloch, 204,000
46th: Mike Matusow, 176,000
47th: Tuan Le, 175,000
48th: Martin Deknijff, 169,000
52nd: Tom Franklin, 137,000
55th: Nam Le, 110,000
The money bubble burst on Tuesday, which meant that several high-profile poker stars grabbed some extra holiday spending money from the WPT tournament. They included Dutch Boyd (60th place for $23,420), Antonio Esfandiari (61st place for $23,420), Victor Ramdin (63rd place for $23,420), Doyle Brunson (66th place for $23,420), Michael Binger (67th place for $23,420), Annie Duke (76th place for $21,620), Roy Winston (77th place for $21,620), Humberto Brenes (78th place for $21,620), Amit Makhija (81st place for $21,620), David Sklansky (91st place for $21,620), Johnny Chan (92nd place for $21,620), Phil Hellmuth (93rd place for $21,620), and Marco Traniello (97th place for $21,620).
Day 4 picks up today at 12:00 Noon Pacific Time. The tournament wraps up on Friday.
