The current chipleader in the $5K short-handed No Limit Hold Em Event is Steven “CornellFiji” Ware (pictured at left).  In addition to being an online cash game player, Ware was also one of the people who uncovered the “nionio” scandal at Ultimate Bet.  He is currently, in his words, “getting crushed by the deck” and has virtually doubled his already large stack in the span of one level.

One hand that helped propel him past the 200K mark occurred when, on a flop of 974, Ware’s opponent bet out 10K.  Ware then asked how much the other player had, and when he learned it was around 50K more, he raised to 30K.  The other player quickly moved all-in and Ware made the call with QT.  He then learned he was in bad shape against his opponent’s A5, but the board came J8 to give Ware a straight.  After the hand, he was up to 225K and is the chip leader by a substantial margin.

One player who has been headed in the opposite direction is Jason “JCarver” Somerville.  When we last reported on Jason, he was sitting with a hefty 63K stack, but he has since dropped to under 10K.  Jason explained he didn’t get involved in any huge altercations with other players, but kept taking, “lots and lots of little stabbings–like Caesar”.  His downswing started when he took a 15K hit when he got it all in with pocket jacks against a short stack’s pocket queens.  Since then, he has continued to lose chips and is now sitting with less than ten big blinds once players return from break.

Some players who have been eliminated in the past two levels include Leo “Superfluous Man” Wolpert, Alex “AJKHoosier1″ Kamberis, and Shawn “sbuck21″ Buchanan.  One hundred-sixty eight of the initial 805 players remain and it was recently announced that 78 of them will be making the money.  Here are some updated chip counts of a few of the players remaining in the field:

Shannon Shorr - 78K
Alex Jacob - 68K
Chad “lilholdem954″ Batista - 58K
Vivek “psyduck” Rajkumar - 45K
Jonathan “FatalError” Aguiar - 35K
Jason “treysfull21″ Mercier - 33K
Steve “MrTimCaum” O’Dwyer - 30K
Matt “mattg1983″ Graham - 30K
Jimmy “gobboboy” Fricke - 27K
Glen “choron” Chorny - 26.5K

• June 27, 2008 -- Short-Handed Event Calls It a Night
• September 28, 2008 -- Running Good
• June 16, 2008 -- Pop Goes the Bubble
• June 16, 2008 -- Strong Online Presence Deep in $3K NLHE