Bob T

With 26 players remaining, we are now down to three 9-handed tables.  Players are guaranteed a minimum payout of $660 at this point, but everyone in the room is still looking at making a deep run and cashing the top prize of $19,949.

Notables still left in the field include Rami Hammoud, Adam Cader, Dave Bonneau, John Araujo, Griffin Mason, Bill Kontatratos, David Bolduc Hamel, and Matthew Lakins, to name a few.  Recent bustouts include Ivan Driard, Anderson F., Tyler Lee, and Brigitte Metivier.

Our last break of the night is coming up, and we will be updating the leaderboard shortly.

John Araujo has been crushing all tournament long, due to a combination of good skill mixed with some run good.  His Ace-7 hand vs. AA and AK on a K77 flop was definitely a run good! He remains on top of the leaderboard and is currently our only millionaire.  There are however many skilled players left in the field who are all nursing stacks in the 600K+ range, and, with a timely double up, any of them can jump to the top of the field.

We are playing ten 40 minute levels today so we still have a lot of action to follow.   Check back soon for more updates.

We have seen many bustouts since the bubble burst just over one hour ago.  The shorter stacks keep waiting until picking up either a pocket pair, or perhaps a strong Ace, and then we are hearing those players announce, “all in!”.

On table 19, the player who was utg+1, Alexandre Ruest, open shoved his stack, which looked like it was around 10 bb’s.  Jean Lafleur, in the lowjack seat, asked the dealer for a count.  Once the dealer confirmed that it was indeed around 10 bb’s (99K), Jean announced “call”.  All other players got out of the way and the hands were opened.

Alexandre had shoved with
Jean smooth called with:

The flop gave Jean the king that he wanted to see, but there was the usual all in sweat as Alexandre had flopped a gutty! The on the turn didn’t change anything, and the on the river was also a brick, and, Alexandre’s day came to an end.

We will have our next break in a few moments and will once again be updating our leaderboard.

Although there are many large stacks in play, only two players have surpassed the 500K mark; John Arauja, one of the top stacks from Day 1C, leads the field with a whopping 599,000.  Followed closely behind him is David Bonneau, a Playground regular tournament grinder, holding 528,000.  There are another 11 stacks in excess of 300,000, so we expect to see a larger leaderboard at the next break.

The TD has just announced that we are “hand for hand” as we are now on the money bubble.  Stay tuned as we watch and report the action on the bubble!

Action was opened in early position by Hugues Fontaine, raising it up 4x (16,000).  He found three callers, and, there was now over 75K in the pot pre-flop.  The dealer flopped: , and, Fontaine decided to keep the pedal to the metal and lead out for 100,000. All three other players in the hand threw away their cards, and Fontaine opened his hand to show the table: .  Although he had flopped top set (AAA), it was a scary board since he wasn’t holding the , and, could have easily been beaten on the turn or river, had any club hit the board.

Arriving at table 21 on the river, two players were all in. Yan Gohier in seat 1 had pocket Ace’s, and was all in against Eric Guindon in seat 7 with a pair of Ten’s.  As fate would have it, as pretty as those Ace’s always look, Guindon had flopped a set of Ten’s and proceeded to eliminate Gohier.  Doyle Brunson would always say, “with Ace’s, win a little, or lose a lot”.

We are approaching the bubble and will be following the action as players will soon be in the money.