Jôle Simard

A very well known player here at Playground is in the lead of Event 7, the $550 6-Max. His name is Stuart Taylor, and he doesn’t miss a festival here. Who could blame him, he keeps performing! His table actually harbours our current 2 biggest stacks, as Eric Bienenstock is sitting across the table.

The field just dropped under 100 players, and will play down to a winner tonight. Here is our actual top 5:

Three players went all-in on the flop, creating a monster pot.

Gino Frenette:
Fouad Akli:
Kayvan Payman:

Board:

Frenette looked like a large favourite, but in PLO, there is no such thing. So far he needed to dodge an ace or a spade, but there were a plethora of dangerous turns.

The  was one of them. His opponents’ combined outs were now 1 ace, 9 spades, plus 3 non-spade jacks.

River: 

Clean. Ship the 125K pot, please – must have thought Frenette.

Ljubomir Josipovic had an amazing 2nd stint, but so did our chip leader Piotr Siwiec. Siwiec has been solid chip leader since the very beginning, but now has a serious contender in Josipovic.

We found 4 6-digit stacks in the field, and the final number of entries is 104, just enough to get over the promised 100K prize pool. The payouts will be made available shortly.

Here is our leaderboard:

Other healthy stacked players:

The first break is now passed in the $550 6-Max, and local pillar Sébastien Proulx is in the driver’s seat with 80,000 chips. A regular achiever in the Monday night 6-Max daily tournament here at Playground, he now shows the big league what he’s made of.

Of course, a whole lot of poker is ahead, and the volatile nature of this format denies any stack the comfort zone at this point.

Proulx is followed by Giovanni Massa and Nader Ammar. All players are looking at a truly bloated prize pool, as the guarantee is almost doubled, with another 4 levels of play before this turns into a freezeout!

The 6-Max, as expected, is filling up nicely. In the new hall, short-handed tables almost extend to the stage where the WPT Main Event final table unwinds. After 5 levels of play, the guarantee is already smashed.

A few recognizable faces were spotted in the field, including Miguel Goncalo, the winner of the WPT500 from earlier in the week. He’s back for more!

Players have another hour and a half to jump in the last event of the WPT Montreal 2018, or reload if they hit a wall!

We came across an all-in showdown on the flop that represented a pretty a common occurrence in the game of PLO: monster made hand vs monster draw.

All the chips were in on a flop, and players tabled their hands:

Joel Sheres:
Gino Frenette:

We were looking at a strong set of nines trying to fade 7 straight outs – Sheres had a blocker – but the turn came with a lot of spice:

A monster draw was created… but the on the river might as well have been a piece of scrap paper. Sheres picked up the pot.