Moments after 3-betting all-in from the small blind (and winning the pot uncontested), Jimmy Setna open-shoved from late position, and found action from Pierre Paul Paulin in the small blind.

Jimmy:
Pierre Paul:

Jimmy locked the hand in when he turned a set on the board, and took 137K from his opponent, bringing him near the 300K mark.

Rami Hammoud was eliminated in 18th place, falling in a two-part process.

On the first hand, he looked up Samuel Louis Gagnon’s second open-shove in a row. Rami tabled and failed to improve versus the of his opponent. With under 25K left after the hand, Rami took advantage of an unopened pot to move in from the cutoff, and was looked up by chip-leader Daune Fernandez. Rami tabled and was outmatched by the of Daune.

Moments later Samuel Ka-Fai Ngai open-shoved his final 49K from middle position, finding isolation from Mounzer Awada. Samuel’s was bested by , bringing the field down to 16 runners.

Hand-for-hand play is now underway as we are one elimination from in-the-money.

We caught up to the action on the turn in a hand between Ruben Perceval (cutoff) and Daune Fernandez (button). With showing, and already nearly 60K in the pot, Ruben checked over to Daune, who fired 29K. After a brief moment of silence, Ruben announced all-in for just about 120K, and was met with a call from his opponent.

Daune tabled for a made flush, and a disappointed Ruben showed down – a hand that was drawing dead. The river was dealt as formality, and Ruben bid farewell to his table-mates before walking away from the table.

Daune now holds over 500K and is in the driver seat as the field is down to the 2 final tables.

Final two tables

Carter Swidler has taken over the chip-lead deep in this 50/50 Bounty, part of the Playground Poker Winter Festival. With 24 players remaining, we are but 9 eliminations from being in-the-money – although many players have already locked in cash prizes thanks to the $500 bounty chips in play.

Below is a full list of chip counts of the final 24 players:

After 12 full levels of play, there remain approximately 1/3 of the players who started the tournament, and the pace of play continues to move rapidly. The players have just returned from a break and during the break we found that the player from the top of the first leaderboard early this afternoon – Mounzer Awada – had re-claimed the lead in the tournament and is already playing a very solid 250K+ stack. Jimmy Setna also continues to do well, as does David M.

The new entry on the leaderboard is very interesting – Carter Swidler has rocketed up to 186K in chips. Carter’s an extremely experienced and skilled player, so it’s probably not ideal for the rest of the field that he has chips!

Here is an update of the leaderboard followed by a few photos of the recent action.

The players in Event 7 have taken another break and the leaderboard compiled this time shows a complete turnover in top stacks in the tournament. This isn’t a big surprise considering it’s so early in the event – it’s only around this point that a more stable group of leaders is starting to emerge. And with 4 players currently very near or over 100K, this group is in a good position going forward in the event.

Meanwhile, the green T25 chips have been removed from play.