Negreanu Grinding
by Court on 10.01.09, 11:08 pm
For the last couple of hours Daniel Negreanu has been grinding away, trying to recover from the huge all in pot he lost earlier where he was a beat away from claiming the title. After that hand Negreanu was down to 2.35 million chips while Barry Shulman help the other 7.7 of the just over 10 million chips in play.
Daniel has been able to get up as high as 4.5 million to the 5.5 million for Shulman but each time he has stalled at that plateau and dropped back down into the mid 3 million range, even getting back down as low as 2.8 a couple of times. The players are into the 50k / 100k blind level and the standard raise is to 200k preflop. There have been almost no walks and very few preflop folds to just an opening raise.
Both players are moving along quickly, Shulman acting so fast in most situations it seems he almost has his mind made up before the card or cards hit the table. Shulman had aces and after raising preflop, betting the flop and turn and getting called all three times it looked like he might have Negreanu hooked, but Daniel managed to get away on the river folding to the all in bet from Shulman after running through the hand in his mind a few times.
At this exact moment Daniel has right at 3 million chips, which is slightly less than what Jason “treysfull21″ Mercier started the day with well over 13 hours ago.
Last year the final table of the World Series of Poker Europe lasted well into the next morning, finishing up after 10am local time. It is 4am here now, and there is no sign of this ending soon. In no limit things can happen in the blink of an eye, but for now things have been steady and methodical with both players pretty much spinning their wheels and not making a whole lot of visible progress.
