Eliminations Galore
by Court on 10.22.09, 8:31 pm
After 8 levels and 12 full hours of play time spread over two days the registration at the Festa al Lago WPT event is now all but officially closed. Players have through the end of the 15 minutes break to sign up to play and once the clock starts on level 9 no more players will be allowed.
Andy Bloch, Howard Lederer and Phil Hellmuth were among the late arrivals with Freddy Deeb coming in during the break making him likely to be the last official registrant. The final and official numbers should be available shortly 
with the payout structure soon to follow. The last level saw some late arrivals but it saw more players make an early exit from the tourney. The board shows 149 players remaining of the 274 signed up so far and a whole fleet of top players are among the 125 or so eliminated players.
Shawn “jordankickz” Busse fought with a short stack all day going from 10k to 30k and back down to 10k a few times before finally being eliminated. Isaac “mr. menlo” Baron, Yevgeniy “Jovial Gent” Timoshenko, Andy “BKIce” Seth, Matt “Mattg1983″ Graham, Scott Seiver and Zach “CrazyZachary” Clark (right) have all been sidelined as well.
Steve “MrTimCaum” O’Dwyer saw his day end when his last 18k or so was all in with AQ against Matt “All In At 420″ Stout’s pocket nines. The nines held to eliminate O’Dwyer. Aaron Been sent his chips to Jordan “Scarface_79″ Smith in AK vs queens confrontation. A set of queens on the flop did the trick for Smith and ended Been’s tournament.
Jason “JCarver” Somerville (left) was able to deal two blows to John Juanda, taking some chips the first hand and finishing him off in the second. On a T
97
flop Jason called a 5k bet from Juanda and then both players checked on the 2 turn. With the Q river Jason went into the tank when faced with an 8k bet but ended up making the call with his 88
which was good enough to win the pot.
A few hands later both Somerville and Juanda made a spade flush but Jason’s QT gave him a bigger flush than Juanda had with his 76. After eliminating Juanda Somerville is back over 200k sitting with a comfortable 240k. Mike “goleafsgoeh” Leah has cracked the 300k mark and his 326k chips put him at or very near the top of the chip counts going into level 9 with blinds of 800 / 1,600 and a 200 chip ante.
