There were no bracelets awarded Tuesday at the World Series of Poker (WSOP), but there were several big stories that kept people riveted to the tables of the five different bracelet events that were running. The most star-studded field had to be Event #6, the $10,000 World Championship Stud Hi event, which drew only 142 runners at the start of the tournament on Monday, but was populated with known pros.
Going into the second day of play Full Tilt Pro David Oppenheim held the chip lead, but he fell by the wayside midway through the afternoon, as did former WSOP Main Event Champion Johnny Chan, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Andy Bloch, PokerStars Pro Alex Kravchenko and Phil Ivey. The big names who did survive the day were Hasan Habib, Greg “FBT” Mueller, Jeff Lisandro, chip leader Eric Drache and Daniel Negreanu. Negreanu dipped as low as 10,000 chips, half the size of the Day One starting stack, but managed to grind his way back up over 100,000 chips at the end of the day.
Players in the stud event were originally scheduled to play down to a final table last night, but they failed to get down to eight players before the newly instituted 3 AM deadline, so the eleven remaining players will return tomorrow to play down to a champion. A new rule, put into effect this year, says that play in an event cannot continue past 3AM. As a result, many events, including the Stud Championship, have seen their schedules change slightly.
Another event that saw a slight schedule change was Event #4, the $1,000 No Limit Hold’em “Stimulus” special. The fifty players remaining from Day Two were originally scheduled to play down to a winner Tuesday, but the final nine players took a vote and agreed to return tomorrow to play their final table down to a winner. The two big names remaining in the event are also the two chip leaders. Dan Heimiller and Steve Sung have 4.2 million and 3.4 million chips respectively, putting them ahead of the rest of the field by substantial margin.
The $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha final table will also take place on Wednesday. Jason Mercier started the day as the overwhelming chip leader, but after giving up almost half his stack to Steven Burkholder in one of the biggest pots of the tournament, he dropped back to the middle of the pack. Both Mercier and Burkholder survived the day to make the final table. This will be Mercier’s third high profile PLO final table in less than a year. He finished 8th at the 2008 WSOP Europe PLO final table and won one of the preliminary PLO events at this year’s Los Angeles Poker Classic.
There were also two events that kicked off on Tuesday: Event #7, a $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em event and Event #8, a $2,500 Deuce to Seven Draw event. Grant Hinkle, the defending champion of the Hold’em event, was one of the 2,791 people who showed up for the event and he was also one of the 350 players to survive the first day of play.
Hinkle drew an interesting table for the event, as he spent much of the day playing against another WSOP bracelet winner he is quite familiar with—his brother Blair. Both Hinkles made headlines at last year’s WSOP when they became the only two siblings to bracelets in the same year. They spent at least a couple of hours sparring with each other at the table before Blair was eliminated. Some of the others players who survived the day were Sorel Mizzi, Brandon Cantu, EPT London winner Michael Martin and chip leader Victor Greeley. They will return at 2 PM Wednesday to play down to the final table.
Last, but not least, the $2,500 Deuce to Seven event drew 147 entrants and featured several big names atop the leader board by the end of the first day of play. Layne “Back to Back” Flack is the end of day chip leader and Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth and Mike “The Mouth” Matusow are also in the top ten chip counts of the 35 remaining players.
