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The Ace of clubs on the flop put Stewart further ahead, but it was accompanied by another club giving Blumstein the draw. The turn was a meaningless diamond, but the 4 of clubs on the river gave Blumstein the nuts and sent the bandana-wearing Stewart out of the event.
13. Scott Stewart $535K
This moved Blumstein right amongst the two Brits as the biggest stacks in the room.
The final table this year is going to take place from three days from 5:30pm Thursday Vegas time (1:30am Friday here) and is being played in the Brasilia room where the featured tables are now. There is no Penn & Teller Theater stage this time around.
12. Richard Dubini $535K
The Argentinian was another victim of the rampant Blumstein. Dubini's pocket queens were in good shape pre-flop but were only 80% favouites against Blumstein's A2, and the 1 in 5 chance hit with an Ace on the flop. There were picture cards on both the last two cards Dubini saw, but one was a King and the other a Jack, neither any help.
Blumstein is now chip leader, with just two more eliminations tonight before the FT is set. Those looking most vulnerable at the moment are Bryan Piccoli (22BB), Ben Lamb (32BB) and Pedro Oliveira (35BB)
Piccoli got a much neeed double up through Antoine Saout when his pocket eights were looked up by the Frenchman's A4. Two aces on the flop gave Saout three of a kind, but after a blank on the turn the third eight (well it would do at some point with so many players wearing 888 branding) sealed the double up.
Pedro Oliviera and John Hesp played a hand that didn't look too impactful to start with after a 1.5m raise and a call pre-flop, Hesp flopped a flush and for once, played it slow and it went check-check, but it all happened on the turn when Oliviera found an ace to give him 2 pair. Hesp checked again, Oliviera bet 2m then Hesp check-raised to 5m and the Portuguese came back over the top all-in for about 15m, which Hesp called. The river was yet another club and so it was
11. Pedro Oliveria $675K.
He left Portugal when restrictions on online poker came in and moved to Brazil, but maybe able to return home soon as there is talk of a merged liquidity pool for Portugal, France, Italy & Spain being build under joint regulation soon.
This brought the players all together to one big unofficial Final Table. Hesp (71m), Blumstein (66m) and Sinclair (58m) were the big stacks, with a large gap, with fourth to tenth all clustered between 16 and 30m.
Last year, 10-handed play was more or less over as soon as it started, but it took 20 hands this time. Hesp started as if it was his local £10 rebuy in Hull, moving his stack up another 10m mostly at the expense of Sinclair, and within another 5 hands another 10m after forcing first Ruane and then Ott to lay down pots they'd invested in.
Hand 178 was a huge hand. Hesp raised (why not, it's been working all event), Blumstein called and Sinclair 3-bet at which point Hesp found a fold but Blumstein called. Sinclair bet and Blumstein called both flop and turn by which time the pot was getting rather large. The Brit put in another 13m on the river, which caused Blumstein thought a long time about before finally calling. Sinclair mucked, obviously on a bluff and Blumstein's pocket 10s (which hadn't improved) saw him shoved a mountain of chips and the chip lead, with Sinclair dropping down into the pack.
More to come in a minute...
Hand 179 Hesp raised, Pollak re-raised to 4m and Hesp called, checked all the way to the river when a 4.5m Pollak bet saw Hesp fold and drop a few million from his monster stack
Hand 180 Sinclair's button raise saw everyone else fold for an easy pick up of a few chips
Hand 181 Blumstein's mid-position raise saw everyone else fold.
Hand 182 Sinclair raised from the Hijack, Lamb shoved shoved for almost 15m from the small blind which was enough to get Sinclair to fold
Hand 183 It was Hesp's turn to raise and induce a chain of folds.
Hand 184 The pivotal hand. Ruane moved all in from mid position with that turned out to be AK. With the stakes as high as they were, it was no surprise that Piccioli went into the tank for a couple of minutes with pocket tens but he eventually called and we were off to the races for 34 million chips. Neither player came close to improving and in a huge swing of chips Piccioli was more or less safe and Ruane was down to 2BB and needing a miracle or some proper barnacle play.
Hand 185 Pollak raised to 2.5m and with Ruane so short, no one wanted to take him on
Hand 186 Ruane found a suited ace and understandably shoved his last 1.9m in. Salas re-shoved and the action folded to Saout in the big blind who open folded A9. Salas had pocket Jacks, so Ruane needed to find an ace or lots of clubs. One club came on the flop but it was not enough and when the turn was a heart, he needed to hit a two-outer on the river to continue his amazing quest to "do a Newhouse" and make 2 consecutive ME FTs. The dealer paused, waited for the signal to continue, burned a card and then turned over the Queen of spades.
10. Michael Ruane $825001. I'm sure that extra $1 will come in handy.
Lamb and Saout's November Nine winnings make then the top two money winners of the group, with the second Frenchman, Ben Pollak third and Piccioli fourth.
Pollak is the highest placed player in the GPI rankings at 116, with Saout second and Piccioli third (Lamb rarely plays live MTTs these days so he's down at number 16828
That leaves five players. Jack Sinclair is a major presence online but a comparitive rookie live, not ratching his first recorded cash until this April at DTD and other than that only has two small cashes from this years WSOP
Damien Salas has cashed in the ME twice before, 606th in 2013 and 418th last year. His lifetime cashes come to just over $900K which of course he'll more than double with the minimum of a cool million just for making the FT.
Dan Ott (whose brother also played the ME and was on the rail yesterday) had no recorded live cashes anywhere at the start of the WSOP. The brothers teamed up in the $1K tag team event to pick up $990 each, and Dan had a decent run in the Monster Stack where he cashed for $2666. He's in a completely different league now.
Chip leader Scott Baumstein has $312K of live cashes according to the WSOP report, but $1.6m according to Hendon Mob. Whether there's two players that have been combined or someone's got their wires croses, who knows? What is beyond dispute is that he has 2 cashes from this year's WSOP, both in huge field events (Marathon & Millionaire Maker). He cashed the Main in 2015, 2010 & 2009.
Who am I missing, John Hesp of course. His story has become well known now, of course Tikay will put it down to him borrowing the now famous jacket a few days ago. All his cashes, and I do mean ALL his cashes, have come on in weekly £10 rebuys at Napoleon's in Hull. He doesn't even have a picture on Hendon Mob, well that will change shortly. His best cash is £785 ($1000) for winning the 11/6/17 running.
Stacks
Blumstein 97m 122BB
Hesp 86m 107BB
Pollak 35m 44BB
Piccioli 34m 42BB
Ott 26m 33BB
Salas 22m 28BB
Saout 21m 27BB
Sinclair 20m 25BB
Lamb 18m 23BB
Those BB counts won't remain for very long, as there is only 8 minutes 30 seconds of Level 37 left (400K/800K with 100K ante) and the structure sheet shows Level 38 as being 500K/1m with a 150K ante)
Play will resume at 5:30pm Las Vegas time on Thursday (1:30am Friday here) and continue until 3 players have been eliminated and the remaining 6 players will move on to Day 9.
I would have thought Sky Bet would have some odds on this but it appears they don't so I've had to look elsewhere and the best prices available are
Baumstein 2-1
Hesp 4-1
Pollak 5-1
Piccioli 9-1
Saout 10-1
Lamb 12-1
Salas 16-1
Sinclair 25-1
Ott 33-1
Morning Barny.
Excuse the temporary thread derail, but I gather the weather down there in Cornwall was pretty dreadful yesterday - the scenes of folk being rescued from flash floods in Coverack were quite frightening.
Fingers crossed you & your family are all safe, well & dry.
Hi Tikay, woke up this morning to see these terrible pictures. Reminds me instantly of the Boscastle floods from back in 2004 which were even worse. Hope everyone down there on the Lizard is safe and well.
I'm less than 30 miles as the crow flies from Coverack, but we never had any rain at all. I'd heard there might be some thunderstorms around in the Channel last evening but never really thought much more about it.
Presume you're safely back from Vegas, hopefully brought a good few dollars back home with you. I've got a couple more posts for this thread over the next two rest days and before we know it, it'll be the final table and the WSOP 2017 will be over. Yes, I know there's the WSOP Europe but it's not the same, is it?
Someone earlier asked about why the November Nine idea had been canned? Probably for a number of reasons, but of course the big one is money. American TV rules, and the change is what ESPN wanted. With coverage live on the networtk every day (apart from one) for the first time this year, to now wait four months for the last three days would have lost all the momentum they've built up with their viewers. Other reasons also come into play, for instance when the November Nine started, there were two major poker brands who would negotiate silly deals for any player who was happy to wear their patch on TV. That market has now slimmed right down. Also, any loose cannons (think Neil Blumenfield two years ago) were getting coached to become theory-playing robots and no longer providing much entertainment.
^^^
A plethora of reasons (why November Nine is no more) but mainly ESPN. ESPN seem to dictate almost everything WSOP related these days.
It was an idea whose time had passed, & I'm very pleased it has gone in the muck.
One way & another, the 2017 WSOP has been the most successful for many years, as you will see when my latest Blog is published.
And if John Hesp were to manage top three, we'll see a whole now "Moneymaker effect". We will.
It's great for poker, this Final, IMO. So much better than the likes of StealthMonk, Dan Colman & Co. IMO of course....
And, personally, I'd much rather the world viewed John Hesp as a typical British poker player than Mr Kassouf. I get along OK with Will, but he definitely overdoes the trash talk at the table.
It's been the biggest and the best in terms of numbers, but then it was always going to be with an extra 7 events thrown in, including the Giant with its six Day 1s being played on successive Friday nights.
Numbers in some of the early events were down, but as the summer progressed, things began to improve and past the halfway point increases were beginning to show and by the end some of the differences were very healthy indeed. Headlined, of couse, by the Main Event with the third largest field ever and the largest since 2010 (the last WSOP before online poker became illegal in the US, significant because major poker sites satellited loads of players into WSOP Main Events before then)
Most years we get a double bracelet winner, this time around we've had two - David Bach (both in Mixed Game, events 11 & 30) and Nipun Java (tag team event 10 and online event 71). The tag team event was also significant because it was the first bracelet officially credited to India.
It was a great series for the Brits. Liv Boeree got the ball rolling very early when she sharead a tag team bracelet event with her partner Igor Kurganov, and then after a little gap, they just kept coming, to players who any would have thought would have bracelets already. Chris Moorman (event 27), Chris Brammer (45), Max Silver (53) and Elior Sion in the $50K Poker Players Championship. Near misses to for Benny Glaser & Deborah Worley-Roberts.
Doug Polk won the $111K Big One For One Drop, Frank Kaseela, John Monnette, Joe McKeehen added to their number of bracelets, John Racener & Chris Klodnicki finally got their first. No 15th for Phil Hellmuth but he did have some deep runs and extended his lead in the number of limetime cashes/Final Tables etc. Daniel Negreanu came close but lost the heads up match in the $10K PLO8.
The Main Event is, as always, wonderfully set up. Scott Baumstein and John Hesp have huge stacks and the others are all clustered together, so laddering considerations may well come into play relatlively early. Two Brits are in the final 9 (is this a first?), the first time we've had representation since Sam Holden came 9th in 2011. Jack Sinclair is an online player, and was persuaded to give live poker a go by well-known big stakes players Philip Gruissem and Anton Morgenstern, and was looking in great shape until he dusted off a large proportion of his stack (his choice of words) in a bluff to Blumstein. John Hesp on the other hand is a semi-retired businessman from Humberside who is a complete amateur, only plays £10 rebuys in Hull and has brought a wave of fresh air to the WSOP, in terms of his play, his demeanour at the tables, and of course his jacket. Sorry Tikay, the burgundy jacket is no longer the most iconic in British Poker.
The ME was also about repeats. When Mark Newhouse made back-to-back November Nines, no one ever expected that to be done again. Well they're still right, but only just as not one but two players came very very close to repeating that fact. Kenny Hallaert got to 64th spot before running into the Hesp buzzsaw, and Michael Ruane, 4th last year played through all 7 Days and even made the unofficial final table before uncomfortably busting out in 10th. We do have some familiar faces among the last 9 though, two of the have been here before. Antoine Saout finished 3rd in 2009 and Ben Lamb finished in the same position two years later.
Mention of the November Nine is now in the past tense. The FT will play out over the next three days starting tonight (1am our time I believe) rather than wait 4 months. Although the term "November Niner" is a nice way of referring to those who've made the FT, the changing of the format seems generally to have been well received. And when most poker players are happy with a change, any change, somebody must have done something right.
Finally, well done once again to the Sky Qualifiers. From those who had a good but ultimately unfruitful run in the Main, to those who played the Little One for One Drop and cashed, or in three cases had a very deep run indeed, it's been great following you from thousands of miles away and I hope you had one of the great weeks of your lives.
The John Hesp show is on a roll, and it kept on rolling straight out of the traps. He won the first three hands, first on a 3-bet bluff against Antoine Saout (which of course he showed) and the second with a pair of Queens (which he also showed). This moved him into the chip lead. He also won hand 3
When he folded on Hand 4, the rail gave an audible groan, but the hand developed without him as Jack Sinclair raised from the button with AQ. Ben Lamb was sitting in the BB with A9, shoved over the top of the aggressive Londoner and was snap called. The flop was 6-5-4 and the turn a 3 giving a whole lot of outs to a chopped pot, but the river was a blank and we lost...
9. Ben Lamb ($1m)
This also virtually doubled up Sinclair to become the third biggest stack
When I left it, about four hour ago, Blumstein and Hesp were the big stacks, Sinclair third and everyone ore or less clustered together.
Since then, it's not been a great day for the UK players. Hesp is down to 12m chip and is the second smallest stack, and :
8. Jack Sinclair ($1.2m)
I've no details of the bustouts yet, and I don't want to go trawling through the WSOP updates in case there's action I will see in the next 30 minutes. Blumstein still has the big stack with Benamin Pollok second and Daniel Ott third.
It sounds like there was as massive confrontation between Blumstein and Hesp which ended in a cooler for the American to take a large proportion of Hesp's stack. I'll do a full roundup if I get a chance to read through the update, hopefully at lunchtime
The Ben Lamb exit has already ben covered and the only other elimination was Jack Sinclair. His agression had been noted on Day 7 when he lost a large proportion of his stack trying to bluff Blumfield, but with him being down to about 12 BB the shove with KJ from middle position was pretty standard. Salas asked for a count before folding, but then the very thing Sinclair didn't want to see, a reshove came at him from Bryan Piccioli who had the aces. A King on the flop gave Sinclair some outs, but all those outs stayed in and he was a goner.
So to the big hand of the night and the whole Main Event so far. Hand 47. Blumstein raised UTG, with Hesp calling from the BB. A flop of A75 seemed to the liking of both players, but they both checked. The turn card was a ten. Hesp checked again, Blumstein bet 3million. Hesp check-raised to 7m. Blumstein re-raised to 17m and Hesp shoved, which Blumstein quickly called.
Card were turned over, Hesp had what would normally be a very nice top two pair, but Blumstein had the other two aces to leave Hesp drawing dead. The pot was for 156m chips, giving Blumstein a double up and leaving Hesp down among the pack.
Pollak did pick up a number of medium sized pots to end the day in a decent second place, but to honest, most of the other play was fairly pedestrian by comparison, with the stated intention of playing down to 6 not achieved so they will come back today and try and eliminate 4 players to get back on track.
Blumstein 178.3m
Pollak 77.5m
Piccioli 35.7m
Hesp 22.5m
Ott 16.3m
Salas 15.6m
Saout 14.5m
Everybody left is now quaranteed a payout of $1.45m
Both Ott and Saout shoved within the first few hands but were uncalled
Piccioli made a profit of several million when he got quad queens, which in the spirit of Hesp he asked the table if they wanted to see and of course they said yes.
The first time someone was at risk was when Saout called a big bet from Blumstein pre-flop. Blumstein was trying to get a move through with 87 but the Frenchman happily looked him up with KQ and two more Queens on the flop saw the double up.
A few hands later it was Hesp's turn to double up. Pollok raised pre-flop from the button with AK, Hesp picked up Aces from the Big Blind and shoved which was called, and the board came all low cards for Hesp to survive.
Further jams from Ott and Salas saw then pick up blinds and antes
25 hands in, Blumstein has about half the chips in play, with Pollak still in second but with only about two thirds of the chips he had at the start of play.
Ott raised with pocket fours, Salas called with A10 after a long pause. A flop of A23 gave him top pair, and checked to Ott who (with a wheel draw) put Salas all in and was quickly called. A safe 6 on the turn was good for the Argentinian but a 5 on the river saw him crushed.
6 Damian Salas ($1.425m)
First break of the Day
Baumstein 191.1m
Pollak 42.7m
Ott 42.0m
Piccioli 34.0m
Saout 25.9m
Hesp 24.8m
Next payout will be $1.675m
Two years ago, Joe McKeehen had half the chips in play 6-handed, last year Qui Nguyen had a similar position. Can Baumstein go on to emulate those two by using his big stack to bully the other five players?
They've also just announced the newest Poker Hall of Fame members. No surprise that in his first year of eligibilty Phil Ivey was the first inductee, while the second name is a wonderful choice, that of Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott. A well deserved honour.
Piccioli made a nice profit on hand 110 when he board ran out Q-J-10-7-A and his King made Broadway, but he still was relatively short and his tournament ended on hand 122. He moved all in for his last 15 million or so with A7, and was understandably called by Daniel Ott with pocket Kings. There was no ace nor any other help from the board and we were down to 5. Blumstein 172m, Ott closing in on 100m, Saout 39m Pollak 29m Hesp 22m.
Pollak shoved and got it through on hand 124, but two hands later his fellow Frenchman wasn't so lucky. Blumstein opened from the button and Saout called from the Big Blind. A flop of J-6-7 saw it go check-check, Saout checked again after a 4 came on the turn but that card inticed Blumstein to bet which Saout called. The river was a second Jack. Saout checked again and this time Blumstein went all in. Saout needed plenty of time to think about it and called. He showed trip jacks, which was good, but not good enough as Blumstein held 5-3 for a turned straight putting him over 200m in chips.
Hesp was getting very short now, he shoved once and got it through with Pollak reluctanly folding from the BB, but it all came crashing to an end when he shoved his last 11m (< 6BB) from the cutoff with the far from premium 97 suited. The button folded, but Pollak re-shoved from the Small Blind and from then on Hesp knew he was in trouble. Ott got out of the way in the BB and the cards were shown, Pollak's AJ meaning at least that both Hesp's cards were live. He picked up four more out on a flop of K-10-6, but both the last two cards of the night were fours and that was that.
6. Bryan Piccioli ($1.675m)
5. Antoine Saout ($2m)
4. John Hesp ($2.6m)
The three stacks going in to the final day are
Scott Blumstein 226m
Daniel Ott 88m
Benjamin Pollak 46m.
With the Big Blind being 2m, I'm sure anyone can work out how many BB each player has!