Wakey Wakey... 2009 WSOP Main Event Final Table Continues

Vera’s mother visited this weekend, and she brought us some snacks and this big ol’ bag of coffee. Good thing, too, ’cos they are still goin’ over at the Rio. Time to drink up.

Spoilers here, y’all. But I imagine anyone landing here should know that.

At the moment, four players remain -- Antoine Saout, Eric Buchman, Darvin Moon, and Joe Cada -- all of whom are just above or below the 50-million chip mark. (Average with four players left is a little under 49 mil.) Has been 16 hours or so since the first hand of the final table was dealt, and with the blinds currently 400,000/800,000 (with a 100,000 ante), it might be a while longer before they get down to the final two.

Some time ago, Ivey got short and in Hand No. 175 pushed his last 6.5 million or so with A-K and was called by Darvin Moon who held A-Q. A queen flopped, no king came for Ivey, and the player with seven WSOP bracelets was out in seventh. A dozen hands later, Steve Begleiter hit the rail in sixth, again victimized by Moon. “Begs” was all in with pocket queens, Moon again had A-Q, and they made it to the river before the ace popped out. Then in Hand No. 236, a short-stacked Jeff Shulman lost a race with pocket sevens against Saout’s A-Q to go out in fifth.

F-Train and FerricRamsium still continue to trade off the reporting of hands over at PokerNews, and they’re killin’ it. As B.J. Nemeth once noted with regard to poker tourney reporting, these guys are writing the “first draft of history,” and they’re doing a helluva a job.

Oh, and Phil Hellmuth is still talking about how great of a player he is over on the Bluff Magazine audio broadcast. Actually I like Hellmuth’s commentary for the most part, and have enjoyed what I’ve heard over there when I’ve been tuning in.

Sounds like what they are experiencing at the Penn & Teller Theater is a lot like what we thought would happen back in July on Day 8 -- when the last 27 players returned to those deep, deep stacks and everyone said it’d be the morning before play was concluded. Chips went a-flyin’, though, and the final nine were determined before 11 p.m.

So these nine returned to even deeper stacks. And day moved into night. And now night into day.

Okay, got a fresh cup here. Let’s all head back over to PokerNews’ live reporting page to see which two from these four make it through to Monday night. And we should remember also to trip over to Dr. Pauly’s live blog of the proceedings, too.