One To Go
by Court on 09.26.09, 6:26 pm
The planned schedule for Day 1A at the World Series of Poker Europe was to play 6 full levels and then any additional time needed to get under 100 players remaining. The Casino at the Empire can only find space to squeeze in 23 tables so the combined day 2 field needs to be under 230 players and to keep play 9 handed the number of combined day 2 players will have to be 207 or less. 
With the second flight of day 1 play expected to be larger than the 155 that started today getting Day 1A play to under 100 players makes it likely that the combined field will fall within the needed ranges. All that is said with the caveat that if more players show up tomorrow than are expected we are confident that space for another table or two will be found and the same will be true for combined day 2 play.
For today though, the field is already below the 100 player mark, dropping to the century mark around the time the 5th level of play ended for the day. The 6th level is the 250 / 500 50 ante blind level and more players will fall during the last 90 minutes of play. Tom “durrrr” Dwan was one of the eliminations that got the field below 100, eliminated when his full house ran into a bigger full house. Dwan raised from the button with his T-5 and was called by Marc Goodwin in the blinds. Goodwin had JJ and hit the J-T-5 flop hard but checked. Dwan checked behind and with an offsuit 4 on the turn Goodwin again checked and this 
time Dwan bet 2k and was raised to 5k. After Tom called the river paired the ten making a full house for both players. The chips went in with both players having to be pretty happy to see the pot get big, right up until Tom saw that he was up against a bigger full house.
Markus “LURPED” Gonsalves had to give up on a hand after putting a decent chunk of his stack into a pot. After a button raise of 1,200 Gonsalves 3-bet from the small blind to 3,700 and was called. With the all heart flop of Q-8-4 Gonsalves led out for 4,200 and the other player raised to 9,500. Markus folded his hand and was left with only 18k chips.
After dinner the feature tables were flipped and the table with Ben “MilkyBarKid” Grundy and Jason “treysfull21″ Mercier (pictured left) was moved to be the main feature table while Christian “charder” Harder and his tablemates were moved to the secondary feature table. Harder’s table is chock full of name players with Erik Seidel, Men Nguyen, Andy Black, Jeff Madsen, Alex Kravchenko and a couple of other players the Euro folk seem to know.
