From the early stages of the tournament the camera’s were regularly trained on Jason “treysfull21″ Mercier. He built up a stack early and if you found yourself at Mercier’s table it is likely you were at a feature table, or had a camera looking over your shoulder for much of the day at one of the auxilary tables. Mercier did stall out on day 3 and came into the playdown day as one of the shorter stacks but quickly vaulted to the chip lead during day 4 play and finished up with a monster stack representing 30% of the total chips in play holding 3.2 million of the just over 10 million chips in play.

At the final table things never got going for Jason. He hung in there, holding the chip lead for much of the day, but that was based on his starting stack with Mercier never making much forward progress today. As nice as a big chip lead is, at the later stages of a tournament winning hands is a must and it wasn’t in the cards for Mercier today. His stack had fallen to around 1.7 million and after a raise from Negreanu and a call from Shulman the 1.7 million went into the middle. Negreanu thought for a moment before calling the all in and Shulman let go of his hand.

It couldn’t have been worse for Mercier as his pocket sevens were dominated by Negreanu’s pocket nines instead of the coinflip situation that was more likely. The board came K-J-3-Q-3 and with that one of the most visible faces of the 2009 World Series of Poker Europe presented by Betfair was eliminated. For finishing 4th Mercier earns £267,267 which comes to roughly $426,500 when converted to US dollars.

For Negreanu the elimination of Mercier rids him of a fierce competitor and also gives him a solid chip lead to take into 3 handed play against Shulman and Praz Bansi.

Final 3 Chip Counts:

• October 1, 2009 -- Dinner and a Double
• October 1, 2009 -- Table For Four: Ristola Out 5th
• October 1, 2009 -- Action: Hawrilenko Out 8th, Saout 7th, Bjorin 6th
• October 1, 2009 -- Next Up November: Akenhead Eliminated 9th