Rapid Fire
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - Gene Bromberg
When play wrapped up last night the talk around the room was how long it would take to reduce the field from 27 players to the November Nine. “A long, LONG time,” was the consensus, though the particulars were up for some debate. One friend said that anyone who thought we’d wrap up before 7AM was crazy. I took the under on that, but I thought we’d still be here when the Dawn touches the Rio with her crimson fingertips.
Well, we’ve been playing for just three-and-a-half hours and we’re halfway there. We’re down to 18 players and consolidating to the two feature tables. Can they players keep up this up? The math says that as the stacks deepen, and the payouts dramatically increase, the pace will slow. The players will tighten up until the squeak. The deliberations will drag on and on and on. And last year we got down to 18 without much fuss…and Dean Hamrick wasn’t eliminated in 10th until 4:30 in the morning.
So, we shall see. The news so far is that Billy Kopp has a monster chip stack, 26.2 million to Darvin Moon’s 2nd-place stack of 18 million. Phil Ivey has slipped way down, to just 5.5 million. And Antonio Esfandiari was one of the early casualties, going out in 24th place. But all that’s happened in the first two levels–we may play many, many more before the night (and day) are done.
A few quick pics from today. The main Feature Table:
Billy Kopp, at the start of play today:
Joseph Cada:
George Caragiorgas, who was eliminated in 20th place:
I’ll be posting a lot more pictures at our WSOP Photo Gallery and posting more pics and updates on Twitter. So you can follow along with the Main Event action while you play in tonight’s Ante Up for Africa freeroll!
Related posts:
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- This Is Starting to Get Serious This is Day 7 of the Main Event, though we...
- Time for Some Drama Not that the action wasn’t exciting before the dinner break,...
- The November Nine We thought, based on stack sizes, the blinds, the rapidly...
Tags: 2009 main event, 2009 world series of poker, 2009 wsop, 2009 wsop main event, Main Event, world series of poker, WSOP
