Martin Leblanc has fallen, the second player in a row to lose to Amir’s AQ.

5th place: Martin Leblanc, $102,251.00

Poker is a game of thousands of unique situations and a million not-so-unique situations. The challenge for most of the players now is not terribly unique – how to play when one of the players is a massive chip leader – but it is a big challenge.

Amir currently has just a shade under half of the total chips in play (over 11M), and although Barry is reasonably healthy at around 5.4M the other three players are pretty short at the moment. The challenge for one of the short stacks is that although you may feel that Amir is playing a pretty wide range of starting hands and using his stack to his benefit – there’s not necessarily a lot you can do about it. Any pot you play with the big stack becomes an existential battle.

There’s not a lot of comfort playing with the smaller stacks though, because their range (especially considering the relative experience of the players) is likely to be pretty snug – and they, like you, are always looking for a double up no matter where it comes from.

All of this comes together to make for a fascinating Final Table.

The players are back from break and play is resuming with blinds at 60K/120K/a20K.

Jonathan Bardier has finished in 6th place in the second-to-last hand before the first break of the evening. Jonathan shoved with AJ but was snap called by Amir (to his left) holding AQ. The Q on the flop pretty much ended the suspense and Amir picks up Jonathan’s 1.8M+ in chips.

6th place: Jonathan Bardier, $81,767

Barry Kruger entered the day with the 2nd best chip count of the final 6 but through the early action had lost around half of his stack. In the past half hour though he has re-built it, however, and is now firmly in 2nd place behind Amir, who has continued to grow throughout the evening.

Bobby Liang lost a huge pot to Jason earlier in the night and found himself a little short-stacked, and eventually he shoved holding . Jason called without thinking too long about it and showed . The on the flop was great for Jason, but the club on the river completed Bobby’s nut flush and he won the hand and doubled up.

Before the action got started tonight we got a few candid shots of the set and some of the people involved in today’s action.

The early action has been a little tentative, but Jonathan Bardier, who started the day with just over 1.4M in chips can’t afford to take his time. He has been trying to drive a lot of action so far but unfortunately for him he doubled up Martin Leblanc – the short stack to start today – who came from behind with to beat Jonathan’s .

See the WPT Live Updates account of the hand.

You can follow the chip counts at WPT Live in addition to hand-by-hand commentary.

There’s also a live stream on a 30-minute delay if you prefer!

The the final table has begun…