Making Friends
by Court on 10.01.09, 9:31 am
In the early going Jason “treysfull21″ Mercier picked up a few pots and tournament director Jack Effel did his best to get the crowd to liven up. In one sequence Jason bet to win a pot and the room was eerily silent. Over the loud speaker Effel announced “Jason wins the pot.” After the silence he followed up with “Jason did you not bring one friend with you today.” A sheepish Mercier gave a quick grin as he went about stacking chips and one somewhat awkward gentleman in the crowd decided he would be Mercier’s fan and gave some applause. He has kept it up, since then applauding, on his own, every time Jason wins a pot.
For Mercier there hasn’t been a whole lot of winning pots going on though. The early goings here have seem about 1/3rd of his stack get handed out around the table. A chunk went to Daniel Negreanu when the two were all in on an A-9-2-3 flop where both had sets. Daniel had the set of nines and Mercier’s turned set actually turned out to cost him a lot of chips. His three threes were only good enough to get him involved enough to double up Daniel. Negreanu was up to 1.3 million chips, but right after the blinds went up to 12k / 24k with a 3k ante he had Chris Bjorin all in preflop with his pocket jacks against the AK of Bjorin. A flop of K-Q-Q put Bjorin out front and he was able to double his 400k stack at the expense of Negreanu when the turn and river were blanks.
Mercier is still the chip leader, but losing a few pots and doubling Negreanu has dropped him back into the range of the other players. At last check he had chipped up slightly to get back near the 2.5 million chips mark, giving him roughly double the next few big stacks.
Pictured: Mercier tossing his cards away.
