WPT World Championship Reaches The Money
This was published 23-05-2011The poker room at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada, had many of the world’s best poker players descend on it last week for the £25,000 World Poker Tour finale, the World Championship.
A total of 220 players paid a massive entry fee in exchange for 100,000 tournament chips and only 15 of these players remained after four arduous days of dynamic poker.
52 players had returned to the poker room at the Bellagio with the knowledge that 25 of them would be walking away from the poker room without any money to show for all their efforts over the past four days. Former WPT World Championship winner, Yevgeny Timoshenko, Roberto Romanelo, Sam Trickett and Jon “PearlJammer” Turner were all unfortunate to go home empty handed.
Ali Tekintamqac, who is alleged to have cheated at numerous live tournaments in Europe and who was at the mercy of Daniel Negruenu’s trade on Twitter on the second day of play was yet another player who went home without any prize money.
The bubble was eventually burst five hours after the restart of the tournament, when Hafiz Khan found himself all in with a pair of aces and looked on course to double up through Justin Young who held pocket jacks. However Khan was sent to the rail in 28th place resulting in a guarantee of at least $37,167 for all the players with chips still in front of them. This was followed by a steady stream of eliminations with Brunson in 24th place and Dave “Devilfish” Ulliott in 22nd place.
Once play resumed Galen Hall lead the way and managed to turn his 100,000 starting stack into 3,438,000. He started Day 5 as the chipleader and finished it with a 20,000 chip advantage over WSOP bracelet winner Scott Seiver.
Day 5’s plan of action was to play five 90-minute levels or until the 15 surviving players had been scaled down to the final table of six.
Once the 15 starters had been reduced to the final six competitors David Peters lost a race and the tournament was paused until the Friday.
