Daniel Negreanu is well known as one of the nicest players to his fans on the rail. Whenever he's not in a hand, he's always willing to talk with fans, signs autographs, and pose for pictures, and we just saw a perfect example of that. Negreanu noticed a solo female fan watching his table, and asked her how she was doing. She said she was "having the best honeymoon of her life." When Negreanu asked her where her husband was, she said "he's playing but you're here so I'm watching you!" Negreanu was flattered, and when she asked for a hug, he said "Sure! A quick honeymoon hug!" He ran over, gave her a hug, and talked for a few moments before his next hand. Just another fan Negreanu has made happy!
Earlier in the day, we talked about a couple tables that were quite stacked. Well as the night winds down, another table has emerged that has quite the impressive lineup. There are five players at the eight handed table that have over a million in live tournament earnings, and the five players combined have won over $14.2 million! Here's how that table looks, along with the players current chip counts.
Seat 2: Adam Friedman
Seat 4: David "ODB" Baker
Seat 5: Brian Rast
Seat 6: Jeremy Ausmus
Seat 8: Moshin Charania
Oleskii Kovalchuk was riding a short stack for much of the second half of the day, and he lost the rest of his small stack in one of the last hands of the night. The final hand happened in Stud-8, when Kovalchuk was unable to beat the two pair that his opponent made on 6th street. There will be a new champion in this event!
Well it was an exciting day for many of the most well known poker players in the world, as it marked the start of the Mixed Game tournaments here at the 2013 World Series of Poker. We are talking about Event 5, the $2,500 Omaha/Seven Card Stud Hi-Low 8-or-better, which just completed Day 1 after eight levels of play. The player at the top of the mountain with 178 left is Matthew Ashton, who bagged up 57,800 chips. By our counts, the only other player who cracked the 50k barrier was bracelet winner Allyn Shulman, who bagged up 51,500.
Play kicked off at 5 PM local time, and it wasn’t until we got near the first break that we had our first elimination. From there, we lost a few notables, including David Bach, Jason Mercier, Vanessa Selbst, Scotty Nguyen, and Phil Ivey. We also lost defending champion Oleskii Kovalchuk, who busted in one of the last hands of the night.
Despite losing these players, we have a laundry list of notables who will be moving onto day 2. This list includes Eli Elezra (38,700), Mike Matusow (29,200), Cyndy Violette (21,200), Todd Brunson (20,900), Robert Mizrachi (20,700), and Justin “Boosted J” Smith (18,900), amongst countless other notables.
The players have bagged and tagged for the night, and are off to get some much needed rest. They will return at 2 PM tomorrow to continue play. As always, the goal is to get down to a final table, but if that doesn’t happen, we will stop after ten levels of play, and come back the next day for the third and final day. Pokernews.com will of course have all the coverage of this event, and with all of the notables who are still left, it should make for an exciting, action packed day. Thanks for tuning in, and goodnight from the Rio!
