Three Way All In: Elky 3rd, Harder 4th
by Court on 04.25.09, 10:19 pm
Four handed play didn’t last for long before there was a three way all in pot that ended up with the worst hand going in winning and two players eliminated. Yevgeniy “Atimos” Timoshenko had been controlling the play, winning most of the pots and adding another million chips to his stack, but in the big hand he was the only player watching from the wings.
Christian “charder” Harder started the action by moving all in for 1.9 million and Ran Azor called. Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier (right) then moved all in over the top for a total of 2,790,000. Azor thought for a few seconds but was pretty committed to the pot and ended up calling having both of the other all in players covered.
Elky had the best hand going in with his A
J, Harder had the A
8 and Azor had the A
7. The board came out K73Q2
and there was no need to worry about divvying up a side pot since Azor was able to pair his 7 and fade the outs of Harder and Grospellier on the turn and river.
Since Elky started the hand with more chips he got the 3rd place finish for $776,245 while Harder (left) was officially the 4th place finisher for $571,965. With his third place finish Elky locked up the World Poker Tour Season VII Player of the Year award, overtaking John Phan in the last tournament of the year to take the title. Elky’s other big WPT score came when he won the Festa Al Lago tournament here at the Bellagio in October.
Winning the three way all in sends Ran Azor into the heads up battle with Timoshenko and gives him more ammunition to work with, but his 10 million is still well behind the 23 million chip stack of Timoshenko.
The two are battling for the $703,695 difference between the first place payout of $2,149,960 and the second place earning of $1,446,265.
