Bob T

Play has continued to move very fast as most of the players have been sitting on average or below average stacks, with two players in control of most of the chips.  Patrick Boisvert and Peter Maltais, with their stacks hovering around 1 million chips, have been taking advantage of the opportunities and one by one, players have been eliminated.

In the last hand, Hicham Hammoud, playing a 660K stack (11 bb’s), raised UTG to 300k. Action folded to Patrick Boisvert on the button, who looked at him and said out loud “why would you make that bet and not shove?”.  After a few more seconds of reflection, and knowing that his stack was big enough that he could afford a hit if he lost the hand, he decided to make the call.  The flop came down , and Hammoud shoved the remaining 360k. Boisvert made the call.

Hammoud: 
Boisvert:

Hammoud was clearly ahead, but as fate would have it, a 10 came out and that ended Hammoud’s tournament life.

The bustouts have been happening one after the other and we are now down to the final table. Here are the chip counts and seating arrangements:

Final table chip leader Patrick Boisvert

Over the last 20 minutes action has been non-stop and players have been dropping like flies.  In an unbelievable turn of events, our chip leader from the last break is now out, however, we missed the action on his table.  Costa Psallidas is also now out. Patrick Boisvert is chipping up, so is Shawn S., both seated on table 31.

With Shawn in the small and Costa in the big, Martin Boies raised it up and had a call from Boisvert. Both Shawn and Costa got out of the way in the blinds.

Flop: and Martin checked. Boisvert fired 75k and Boies tank-called. The turn brought the and action went check-check. When the hit the river again it went check-check.

Martin opened a pair of pocket 8’s and Patrick had pocket Ten’s and increased his stack one more time.

The stacks keep moving back and forth. Our chip leaders from the earlier levels are still in, but a few others have moved ahead. The new chip leader, Ricardo Teves, has 150k more than Andre Faucher who is in 2nd place.

There is now a lot of pressure on not only the short stacks, but players with average stacks are still only sitting on about 16 bigs, so, there will be a lot more all ins from now until the end of the tournament.

Also still in the game are Donald Somers, Marc Lebel, Alexandre Menard, Makan Salimi, Laurent Dube, Patrick Boisvert.

Recent bustouts include Vera G., Nyron Jagoo, David Cadoch, Michael McKinnon, and Tanvir Ahmed.

With the average stack sitting around 14-15 big blinds, we are seeing a lot of all-ins taking place across the 4 tables still in play.

There was a 3 way all-in on table 31, Playground regular Mike Pateneude, Alan Shields, and Costa Psallidas all had there chips in the middle when we arrived at the table.

Mike:
Alan:
Costa:

When no Ace or 5 hit the board, Costa scooped the pot with a big smile on his face and nice increase to his stack.

On Table 34, Shawn S. open shoved UTG for about 10 bb’s and was called by Tam Ho in late position.

Before the two hands were tabled, Shawn announced “let the fish who open shoved win the hand”. The hands were then tabled:

Shawn:
Tam:

Flop: , and Shawn was ahead, Tam needed to hit now for that to change.
Turn: , River: and Shawn scooped the pot. As the pot was being sent his way, he was heard saying “and the fish wins!”.

Players have just had their 2nd break of the day and the field has thinned out somewhat, and stacks are continuing to grow.

Patrick Boisvert has jumped ahead of the pack and is the only player north of 200k as he is currently nursing a stack of 218,400, followed by James Maxwell who is still running good and is now in 2nd place with 163,500.