Cash bubble pops
What a majority of players at the 43rd World Series of Poker set as one of their goals – falling into the cash bubble – happened over the weekend, when the bubble burst, guaranteeing a minimum pay-out of $19,227 for the 666 survivors.
An unusual situation accompanied the burst, as it happened with four bubble boys following four all-ins with 667 players remaining, so it resulted in a split pay day for bust-outs David Kelley, Dane Lomas, Desmond Portano and Steve Rosen, who according to tournament Director Jack Effel will share the 666th-place money and take home $4,806.75 each.
However, this wasn’t the only unusual happening about the day – there was also a player who accidentally triggered a personal protection pepper spray disguised as a pen, which made everyone nearby cough and disrupted the game for a while.
As for the action itself, some of the casualties of the four levels of Day 4 include previous main event champs Huck Seed and Johnny Chan, Erik Lundgren and Rob Perlman, Phil Collins, Vivek Rajkumar, Chris Moorman, Mike McDonald, Christina Lindley, Kyle Julius, Dag Mikkelsen, Lee Childs, Ali Elsami, Justin Young, Shawn Buchanan and Terrance Chan.
Also, leaving the competition were Liv Boeree, along with Brock Parker, J.C. Tran, Ronnie Bardah, Mark Teltscher, Christian Harder, Big One for One Drop winner Antonio Esfandiari (501st), Bernard Lee, Katie Dozier, Jamie Kerstetter, Jason Mercier, Marvin Rettenmaier and Canadian ice hockey star Roberto Luongo.
Things were much better than that for Paul Volpe, who was the first to reach the 3 million chip milestone; he is still the chip leader going into Day 5 on Saturday. Also, it all went well for celebrity player and actor Kevin Pollack, who boasted significant talent and currently has a stack of around 530,000.
These two are among the 282 players lucky and skillful enough to make it through Day 4 – others with such an edge include Daniel Negreanu, Vanessa Selbst, Sorel Mizzi, Eric Buchman and John Juanda, as well as Joseph Cheong, Sam Holden, Jamie Robbins, Andrew Lichtenberger, David Baker, Kyle Bowker and JP Kelly.
The top ten chip stacks at the end of the day were:
1 Paul Volpe 2,750,000
2 Erik Hellman 2,216,000
3 Dave D’Alesandro 2,093,000
4 Kyle Bowker 2,081,000
5 Eric Buchman 2,076,000
6 Elisabeth Hille 2,014,000
7 Andras Koroknai 1,971,000
8 Amit Zulkowitz 1,961,000
9 Eric Legoff 1,947,000
10 Nicco Maag 1,899,000