Starting with today\’s lone tournament starting, one with a very worthy cause:
Ante Up for Africa
The big charity event of the WSOP is this afternoon\’s Ante Up for Africa, a star-studded affair with a $5,000 buy-in, with a request that those who make the money donate 50% of their proceeds to Refugees International and The Enough Project to attempt to end the crisis in Darfur. It\’s also the shortest tournament of the WSOP, with it\’s 20-minute blind levels in the first hour followed by increases every 15 minutes, the tournament is projected to finish in just five hours. ESPN\’s cameras will be following the action as it\’s scheduled to dedicate two hours of their WSOP coverage to this event.
Finishing up the Wednesday night tournaments:
Veckey Victorius in $1,500 NL
Tony Veckey makes his first career cash a WSOP bracelet in the $1,500 NL Holdem, good for $673,276 defeating Jason Wheeler heads-up. Nolan Dalla\’s tournament report notes that Veckey is a software engineer with Motorola and a graduate of the DeVry Institute. He was hoping to play in Saturday\’s $1,500 NL Holdem event, but it was sold out, leaving him to make this his first WSOP tournament. He\’s returning back to work and has decided not to parlay this success into this year\’s Main Event, choosing to wait until 2010\’s Main Event.
Abe\’s Awesome in Triple Draw
As noted in the post below, Julie Schneider finished 3rd in the $2,500 2-7 Triple Draw Lowball with high stakes veteran Abe Mosseri picking up his first career WSOP bracelet, along with $165,513. Masayoshi Tanaka finished in second, denied Japan\’s first WSOP bracelet, picking up $102,313.
Sweet Sixteen Survive in Six-Max
Sixteen players remain in the final preliminary event of the WSOP $5,000 NL Holdem 6-Handed . They resume this afternoon at 1pm to play down to a winner and this is how they will be seated when play resumes:
(Table 58)
Seat 1: Peter Feldman – 1328000
Seat 2: Aurelien Guiglini – 549000
Seat 3: Josh Brikis – 294000
Seat 4: Thorsten Schaefer – 1094000
Seat 5: Matthew Waxman – 1132000
Seat 6: Alex Venovski – 684000
(Table 59)
Seat 1: James St Hilaire – 876000
Seat 2: John Conkright – 749000
Seat 4: Rory Mathews – 1358000
Seat 5: Jonas Wexler – 848000
Seat 6: Eugene Katchalov – 356000
(Table 60)
Seat 1: Robert Kay – 1213000
Seat 3: Frank Calo – 569000
Seat 4: Sean Keeton – 641000
Seat 5: Matt Hawrilenko – 1327000
Seat 6: Faraz Jaka – 778000
Phil Hellmuth finished in 24th place, if he remained it probably would have given ESPN\’s production team quite the difficulty in covering his run for bracelet number twelve and the Ante Up for Africa event.
Follow the updates of today\’s activity at www.wsop.com and Pokerati will surely be there covering all the high-profile celebrities in action.
