By Pauly
London
Since the field at the WSOPE main event was smaller than anticipated, TD Jack Effel broke up Day 2 into two flights in order to have everyone play at one venue... The Empire. Day 2a was made up of 111 players, while Day 2b will feature 119 players. Out of the 362 entrants at the £10,000 No-Limit Hold'em Main Event championship, only 130 advanced to Day 2.
On Day 2a, 40 players advanced to Day 3 on Friday. Day 2b begins shortly and around 45 players are expected to survive the day.The action started out slow on Day 2a and slowly built up momentumn. Most of the action went down after the dinner break and monster stacks began to emerge. The biggest... from Gus Hansen.
The Great Dane had been sitting at the feature TV table for most of the day and he took out Greg Raymer and Ram Vaswani en route to a 349,000 stack. Nothing could slow him down. And he did most of that damage by playing good cards. Seriously. He busted Raymer with 7-7 (and flopped a boat) and took down Vaswani with pocket Kings.
Norwegian teenager, Annette_15, also went on a run late on Day 2a and jumped to the top of the leaderboard.
Here's the chipcounts...
End of Day 2a Top 10 Chip Counts:Day 2a eliminations included... Devilfish, Paul Jackson, Ram Vaswani, Bruno Fitoussi, Greg Raymer, Humberto Brenes, Paul Wasicka, Beth Shak, Patrick Bruel,Thor Hansen, Barry Greenstein, Pascal Perrault, Pamela Brunson, sbrugby, Sarah Taylor, Fabrice Soulier, Sherkhan Farnood, Jesus, Erik Seidel, ActionJeff, Thomas "The Eggman" Wahlroos, Brandon Adams, and Sorel Mizzi.
Gus Hansen 349,400
Janne Lamsa 253,800
Pat Scanlon 240,000
Annette_15 d 214,400
Annie Duke 191,700
Johannes Korsar 148,400
Huseyin Yilmaz 143,500
Jan Sorensen 118,500
Terry Cook 117,700
Sergey Feklisov 115,500
The Rest:
Paul Ephremsen 113,700
Erick Lindgren 108,800
Dave Colclough 105,800
Farzad Bonyadi 102,300
Will Durkee 92,600
Joe Le 85,100
Steven van Zadelhoff 72,800
Tom "Durrr" Dwan 70,600
Amat Ashgar 69,200
Hoyt Corkins 61,200
Phillip Hilm 60,200
John Ridge 57,000
R W Stain 50,700
Matthew Gilbert 50,600
Sergey Rybachenko 48,000
Marco Traniello 45,700
Krzysztof Gluszko 44,200
Jennifer Harman 42,200
Vicky Coren 39,500
Matthew Kay 38,200
Peter Murphy 37,500
Neil Pearson 32,800
Jeffrey Lisandro 31,100
Rehne Pedersen 26,000
Gary Jones 21,700
Matthew Hankins 21,200
Mark McCluskey 16,900
Simon Wing 12,700
Phil Hellmuth 10,500
Jani Sointula 5,600
Out on the floor, most of the attention was given to Phil Hellmuth's table. He busted Jesus early on after Jesus shoved with a shortstack and A-Q only to get rivered by Phil Hellmuth's A-10. At one point, there were 18 total bracelets at his table (Humberto Brenes, Jan Sorenson, Farzad Bonyadi).
Hellmuth had been jawing back and forth with Bonyadi for most of the day. He also mounted a relentless assault on Ramzi Jelassi. Apparently, the young Swede made a few faux pas and breached poker etiquette. Hellmuth was quick to point out the kid's mistakes and unleashed a barrage of Hellmuthian insults.
"You need ammunition, kid. You have no bullets. How can you fight without any bullets in your gun?" he constantly told Jelassi.
Hellmuth eventually busted Jelassi with K-4 against the Swede's A-9. Brenes and Lindgren (who moved to his table) gave him a ton of shit for playing K-4.
Then, it got ugly. Hellmuth lost two big pots and he exploded spewing venom over everyone and anyone.
"Nice fucking dealing in this place!" he screamed after he doubled up Mark McCluskey.
Hellmuth held 7-7 and McCluskey had J-J. The flop was J-7-4 and that's when all the money went into the pot.
"That's the fuckin' second time I've been coolered," screamed Hellmuth. "Unfuckin' believable."
Hellmuth was crippled to 7,000 and attacked the dealer. She was on her way out of the box and Hellmuth told the new dealer, "Don't push her. Let her deal me one more fuckin' cooler. That was twice in ten hands. Nice fuckin' dealing."
Of course, there is no specific f-bomb policy at the WSOPE so Hellmuth avoided a ten minute penalty for his Hellmuthian tirade.
Mark McCluskey told Snoopy that he had been waiting a decade to get back Hellmuth. In 1996, Hellmuth slow rolled him in a hand. McCluskey never forgot and savored every minute of the Hellmuthian Meltdown.
Hellmuth eventually managed to calm down and he didn't make any mistakes with a short stack. He managed to double up and although he was among the shortstacks, he advanced to Day 3.
Bouncin Round the Room...
It was another long day in the trenches. The internet connection is piss poor and we've been having issues over the past week. There's also a serious lack of space for us to work which means I'm sitting in high traveled public areas. It was not uncommon to come back from the tables and find someone using my laptop or any of my co-workers laptops! One guy had the balls to ask me to wait while he finished up writing an email. I had to install a password protection to keep those peasants away.
There's a media room across Leicester Square in the basement of a hotel. But that's not safe. Two guys from Betfair got their iBooks stolen. As one member of the European media pointed out, "This is supposed to be the WSOP. They are treating us like shit."
I got smacked in the head with a TV camera as they rushed to get an all-in. I'm used to working with the surly ESPN camera guys and know the spots to stand around the table where I can see the action, stay out of their shot, and avoid getting tangled up with the sound guys or cameramen. However, the film crew working this event has never done poker before. Virgins. Ugh. There were moments when I had to tell the camera guys that they were focused in on the wrong player. DaveShoelace had similar experiences. We've been frequently helping direct the cameras. One instance, I got into position behind the dealer and whack! I got banged up pretty good on my noggin. I was in the right place and the camera dude wasn't and rushed over without seeing me.
I also got two beers spilled on me covering Phil Hellmuth's table. The rail was super tight and everyone in the Empire wanted to catch a glimpse of Hellmuthian greatness. After the second beer and feeling the bump on my head, I had one of those dreaded moments... I can't wait until the day is over so I can drink myself silly. Yes, sometimes I drink to escape my reality.
There was a Liz Lieu sighting at The Empire. She played Day 1 at the Fifty and busted out. I had not seen her since EPT Barcelona. There was a lot of wrong information written about her in Barcelona, particularly by Card Player. Here's what happened two weeks ago. Liz was at the same table with Isabelle Mercier. I wandered over and Isabelle was all in. I wrote down Isabelle's bustout and during the hand, Liz got a phone call. I was focused on getting down all the information in the hand and when I looked up, Liz was in tears. She told me that her father had passed away. My heart sank. I was 3,000 miles away from home when my grandmother died and it's the most helpless feeling in the world. I pulled her aside and sat her down at an empty table as crocodile-sized tears poured out of her eyes. It was one of those moments where poker didn't matter and life was more important. Luckily, Alex her business partner was there to help take her back to her hotel and arrange travel to Vietnam. I respected Liz's privacy on a post at Poker News and wrote that she had to leave the table due to a personal family emergency. I left out that her father died and Liz appreciated my use of discretion. I have no idea how CP fabricated a story about Liz left the table in tears after an argument with Isabelle Mercier. I wanted to clear up all of that mess with a mention in this post.
Anyway, Liz left Barcelona in the middle of the tournament in order to fly to Vietnam to attend her father's funeral. Last week, she emailed me to say that she'd be in London to play in the WSOPE. We finally had the opportunity to catch up and spoke about the importance of family and the catch-22 situation of trying to earn a living on the road and the sacrifice that a lot of us make in this industry. Liz is a good friend with a big heart and told me about more charity work she is going to be doing back home. As always, I wished her the best.
Come back at the Tao of Poker for daily recaps and head over at PokerNews for live coverage and updates including chip counts, photos, and videos.
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Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.
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