If you are going to make a final table on the World Poker Tour (WPT), you might as well get there with more chips than all of the other players combined. That is exactly what is happening at the WPT Rolling Thunder Main Event final table, as Jim Collopy heads into Tuesday’s six-handed final table with an absolutely, monstrously overwhelming chip stack.
Collopy has 5.715 million chips entering Day 4, while the other five players have 5.485 million COMBINED. Nobody has more than 1.7 million chips. Dylan Linde, the player in second place at the moment, could win a five-way all-in with everyone not named Jim Collopy and still go into heads-up behind.
Collopy told WPT.com that his strategy for Tuesday is to “divide and conquer.” Sounds like he will be swinging his big stack around.
It wasn’t until very late in Day 3 that Collopy grabbed the chip lead. During the “unofficial” seven-handed final table, he got into a pot with Ajay Chabra. The board read K-T-6-T-9 (three clubs) and with just 145,000 chips in the pot, the fun began. Chabra raised to 200,000, Collopy check-raised to 750,000, and Chabra re-raised all-in, having Collopy covered. Collopy made the call for all of his 2.695 million chips.
Chabra turned over T-9 for a boat, but Collopy revealed K-T for a better full house and a massive double-up, taking his stack to near where it is now.
“It was a cooler,” Collopy said later. “I was overthinking if there were straight flushes or not. I had to triple-check that I had the second nuts. That was a really unique spot certainly with all the final table considerations.”
Not counting the money he is about to make, regardless of how he finishes, Collopy has just about $2 million in live tournament earnings in his career. His best cash was for $274,924 when he finished as the runner-up in the No-Limit Hold’em High Roller Heads-Up event at the 2010 World Series of Poker Europe. Should Collopy go on and finish the job today, it would be his first major title.
There are three players at the final table who have not only won major titles, but are looking to add to their World Poker Tour championship count. Dylan Linde just won the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic in December and Erkut Yilmaz nabbed the Borgata Poker Open in September. And of course there is Anthony Zinno, who led the tournament going into Monday, has three WPT titles, and was Player of the Year just a few years ago.
2019 World Poker Tour Rolling Thunder Main Event – Final Table Chip Counts
1. Jim Collopy – 5,715,000
2. Dylan Linde – 1,675,000
3. Erkut Yilmaz – 1,635,000
4. Ajay Chabra – 1,135,000
5. Jerry Robinson – 795,000
6. Anthony Zinno – 245,000