WSOP 2008
Early Action, Big Pots and Basketball
by Court on 04.19.08, 7:22 pm
Usually a few levels into a tournament the stories that begin to emerge are the few big stacks. In this room almost everyone is a ig stack, relative to the blinds. The 50k starting stack is where most of the field is still hovering in chips, a few thousand chips on either side, though some have moved up considerably and of course the chips had to come from somewhere so others are seeing their stacks dwindle.
So far the big winner has been Steve “MrSmokey1″ Billirakis. He was able to rake in a pot worth what looked to be over 120k from Guy Laliberte of Cirque du Soleil fame. It was a confusing pot that required a floor decision on the river. With over 60k in the pot and a board reading {Qc9c8d}7
8 Laliberte somehow exposed his hand and said call. He had JT for a straight but seemed to be under the impression that Billirakis had not bet.
Steve had said all in, and Laliberte had said call in some context, though it was after his hand had been exposed. There was no real argument since everyone including Guy agreed he had said call and he had to add another 28,900 to the already large pot. Guy had headphones on and did not know he was calling an all in and Billirakis found himself on the good end of both a rivered full house {9s9h} and a technical mistake from his opponent.
The field for today is small, under 200 players, but for some reason it has still been divided between the Fontana Lounge and the poker room. While the majority of the action is in the Fontana Lounge, there are a handful of tables being played in the normal poker room. Peter “#1Pen” Neff, Shane “Schaniac” Schleger, Tim “Tmay420″ West, David “Nutsrt84444″ Redlin, Corey “UGOTPZD” Carroll, and Dario Minieri are among those in the poker room awaiting a table break before they are moved to the main area.
Neff was able to pick up a nice pot with the {AhKc} in the big blind. With a few players in hand on the {Kh5h2c} flop and about 4k in the pot Neff checked and then called a 3k bet from another player. The two were heads up on the T
turn and Neff again check called, this time a bet of 7,500. The river was the A
and both players checked. Peter showed his two pair and raked in the pot after his opponent mucked.
While some players have been able to build their chips, others have seen their fate go in another direction. Alvin “alsmooth” Zeidenfeld is down to 23k after two levels of play, running big hands into bigger ones but minimizing his losses enough to still maintain almost half of his starting stack. Eric “EFro” Froehlich is down to 21k going into the third level after running into a full house.
Even though this is one of the biggest tournaments of the year, there are still things going on outside the poker world. The playoff game between San Antonio and Phoenix has one table of poker players fixated. With the game going into multiple overtimes table 62 had more players watching the basketball game than the action at their table. Barry Greenstein, Phil Hellmuth, Adam “Roothlus” Levy, Mike Sexton, Hoyt Corkins, and Lee Markholt were all turned and focused on the game while a hand was played out at the table. Once the Spurs finally sealed the deal everyone seems to be back into the poker action. At least until the Dallas New Orleans game gets into the fourth quarter.