Falling Fast
by Court on 04.21.09, 6:40 pm
After just two levels of play on the third day of play at the WPT Championship the field is down to only 124 players. Shaun Deeb, Mohsin “ChicagoCards1″ Charania, Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar, Matt “Mattg1983″ Graham, Luke “IWEARGOGGLES” Staudenmeir, Aaron Been and Howard Lederer are among the recently fallen.
Rajkumar (left) lost a big pot with pocket queens against AK when an ace hit on the river. Vivek was left with a very short stack and was all in the next hand with J2 against the pocket kings of Quinn Do. In the pot Quinn had opened for 8,500 and Graham had raised to 23,500. Vivek called all in and Do then raised another 38k on top of Matt’s bet. Graham folded and Quinn picked up the side pot, but his kings didn’t hold up against Vivek’s J2 that made 2 pair on the 8-4-2-J-3 board.
The two pair double up put Vivek back up around 20k, but he was still short stacked. He moved all in and Quinn raised to isolate forcing Shane “Shaniac” Schleger out of the pot. This time Vivek had Q2 and Quinn had AJ. Vivek wasn’t able to outrun Quinn a second time and is now out of the tournament.
In between Vivek’s all ins, Matt Graham mixed it up with Quinn and Schleger as well and took a bad beat to bust from the tournament. Quinn had opened for 8,500 and Shane called. Graham then raised to 36,600 and Quinn reluctantly folded. Schleger quickly said all in and Graham thought briefly before calling off the 110 k he had behind. Once the cards were turned up Matt’s A
Q
was dominating the KQ
Shane had, but with a king high flop Schleger was able to take the lead in the hand and ultimately eliminate Graham.
Aaron Been (right) doubled a player up and was left with only 20k chips. He moved them all in a few hands later and Phil Laak contemplated calling the 22,300 bet from the big blind. Finally he did add the additional 19,300 to the 3k he already had in the pot for the blind to make the call. Laak showed the Q9
and Been was poised to double up with his QT but a 9 high flop paired Laak. Been didn’t improve on the later streets and has been eliminated.
Walt Williams started the day as the third shortest stack but has been able to hang on and recently got a double up through Jonathan “FatalError” Aguiar (left). Williams was on the brink of elimination with his pocket queens all in preflop against Aguiar’s kings, but a queen on the flop staved off elimination and Aguiar had to send 43,200 out of his stack to Williams. Aguiar commented that he was “getting his run bad out of the way,” and didn’t seem phased by losing the relatively small all in pot. He still has a mountain of chips and is in comfortable shape going into the 2k / 4k blind level.
A severely short stakced Howard Lederer was eliminated by Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier. Elky is still among the chip leaders along with Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke and Steve “MrSmokey1″ Billirakis. The three are all in the 800k range and trail only Steve Sung who recently cracked the 1 million chip mark.
