2010 WSOP, Day 49: Intense

Helluva day at the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event yesterday. It was an intense and stressful nine hours of poker for the players as the field whittled from 205 down to 78. They’re getting to bigger paydays now, with the next few to go out now getting $94,942. Pay jumps come every nine spots currently, with the jumps getting bigger as they go along, and a lot of players are becoming ever more mindful of that fact.

Lost Johnny Chan relatively early on Day 6, as he was eliminated in 156th. He ran kings into aces to lose most of his stack, then was finished off soon thereafter with jacks versus aces. Some of the other eliminations included Dragan Galic (183rd), Bryan Pellegrino (143rd), Phil Galfond (141st), Robert Mizrachi (116th), J.P. Kelly (111st), Jesper Hougaard (108th), and Andrew “Foucault” Brokos (87th).

Of course, all of us juveniles on media row were especially saddened to see Fokke Beukers go out (in 94th). Though I did report one hand involving Beukers earlier in which he knocked out a player, the headline for which wrote itself.

Was kind of a stressful day on the reporting side, too, for various reasons. One was that the PokerNews site had a few hiccups during the middle of the afternoon, lasting maybe 45 minutes or so. Not really sure what the deal was there, but the ship righted itself soon enough.

There was another kind of interesting, sort-of-stressful situation early on involving the Mizrachi brothers, Michael and Robert, and our reporting on them.

Robert was short-stacked to start the day, and would remain so pretty much until his elimination. Michael, meanwhile, began the day with almost 1.8 million, putting him in 30th with 205 left, and from the start he added to that total, eventually ending the day in 2nd place overall with a little more than 7.5 million.

Anyhow, while we were covering pretty much everything yesterday, we were focusing on a few stories in particular, including Johnny Chan, the last woman player Breeze Zuckerman, Gualter Salles (who had been down to one yellow 1,000 chip on Day 5), and the Mizrachi brothers. So we were constantly reporting on both Mizrachis’ hands and keeping their counts updated from the beginning.

Early on, we had reported on Michael a couple of times, including seeing him win a pot to move to 1.93 million, then win another to get to 2.3 million. (Reported here.) That was right about the time -- 1:30 p.m. or so -- that Michael’s brother, Eric, who also cashed in the Main Event (finishing 718th), sent out a Twitter message saying Michael had doubled to 4 million.

It didn’t take long for Eric’s message to get forwarded around the web. I know ESPN’s Andrew Feldman passed it along, as did many others. We heard about the message, too, and so made a quick check back at Michael Mizrachi’s table.

Yep, still 2.3 million.

Of course, the forwarding of the message soon was supplemented by editorial comments about how PokerNews had failed to report the big double up. But we couldn’t report it. It didn’t happen!

Adding to the fun, about 40 minutes after Eric’s message, the Grinder did in fact win a big hand (not exactly a double-up) that put him at about 3.9 million. It was a great hand, actually, requiring a huge call from Mizrachi on the river. (Report here.) And the surge would continue for the Grinder, pretty much throughout the day.

Anyhow, the timing of all that perhaps made it seem like we were 40 minutes late with some news, but in fact that wasn’t the case. Kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it seemed a bit weird (and hard to explain).

Will be back over there for Day 7 today, where the plan will be to play down to 27. Should be exciting. Still some big names left -- Mizrachi, Alexander Kostritsyn, Eric Baldwin, Johnny Lodden, David Benyamine, and Jean-Robert Bellande among them.

Of course the biggest name is Meenakshi Subramaniam. I mean, really, that is one big name! Be cool if he went deep and developed a big following of Subramaniacs.

This’ll actually be my last day this summer over on PokerNews, and in fact I’ll finally be heading home on Saturday and so won’t be there at the very end when they get down to the November Nine. I’d like to see it, of course -- last year that final day was probably one of the most exciting days of poker I’ve ever been around -- but I’m also very glad to get on home and be with Vera. Too, too long, it’s been.

See you over at PokerNews later today. Also, be sure to check out my interview with B.J. Nemeth over at Betfair Poker which went up today. Nemeth talks about his WSOP photography, and the interview includes a couple of especially cool pictures Nemeth took at last year’s WSOP accompanied by his explanations of how he took them. Cool stuff.