Kevin Saul
Photo: Foxwoods / WhoJedi

Today’s Boxscore

Kevin Saul $194,178 – WSOP-C Foxwoods Main Event
Bryan Piccioli $211,575 – WSOP APAC Event #1
Jim Collopy $69,662 – WSOP APAC Event #2

The World Series of Poker brand had themselves a fine time over the last few days on different sides of the globe. Big names, new tournaments, and interesting results. The WSOP APAC is underway in Australia while the WSOP-Circuit at Foxwoods wrapped up their Main Event.

Professional player Brian Piccioli captured the first ever WSOP APAC bracelet in a brand new event, something called the “Accumulator” at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. The tournament took reentry events to the next level, where players could not only enter each of the three starting days but could also play even if they had chips at the end of previous days. Whatever part of their stacks remained after Day 1A/B/C were combined and play continued on Day 2. Piccioli won they event with only his Day C stack after busting both A and B but worked it will for the $211,575 prize and gold bracelet.

Long time professional and former online master Kevin Saul is the latest WSOP Circuit Main Event Champion. There were 615 entrees into the inaugural Foxwoods WSOP-C tournament and Saul made quick work of the final table to pick up his shiny new ring, the near $200k payday, and his entry into the WSOP National Championship coming up in New Orleans.

History could be made later today when the WSOP APAC Mixed Event is played to a winner. Phil Ivey leads the final table with Daniel Negreanu right behind him. Ivey will be trying to capture his 9th WSOP bracelet while Negreanu is looking to break his 5 year bracelet slump to pick up his 5th.

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Link Dump

Tweet of the Day – Just because Hellmuth is halfway around the world in Australia, that doesn’t mean the internets can’t get their little taste of his wrath. Things don’t seem to be going well down under for the 13-time WSOP champion.

Busted 24th: I SO wish I wasn’t completely ANGRY now! Feeling unlucky, and running EVERY SINGLE HAND in my mind over-and-over-and-over…

— phil_hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth) April 9, 2013

Full Tilt Poker Ex-Chief to Plead Guilty – Ray Bitar, poster boy for Black Friday, reached an agreement with the US Attorney General’s office where he’ll pony up $40million but avoid any jail time as he’s in desperate need of a heart transplant. This naturally generated its own share of twitter jokes, mostly in bad taste.

WSOP.com Real Money Poker Beta – Feel like test driving the first legal poker site in the States. Things aren’t quite to the point of the real deal but WSOP is offering up the chance to beta test their software and shake out the bugs. Closer and closer.

East Falmouth man wins $10m in ‘poker’ game – The word poker is encased in well-deserved quotation marks but the headline still caught my eye. The Mass lottery created some bizarre luck of the draw, fake poker game that awarded a $10,000,000 check. You can’t win that kind of money in your local no-skill-to-win 2/4 limit game.

Bet Raise Fold: The Story of Poker – The documentary previously known as BOOM from the minds of Jay Rosenkrantz, Taylor Caby and Ryan Firpo has been renamed and the new trailer is out.

Edit: Here’s the official chip counts:

Sunday brought another three-level day to the WSOP, with just 185 players remaining when play resumes Monday afternoon at 12pm. The current unofficial leader is Warren Zackey, who’s listed from Honeydew, South Africa with 4,977,000 in chips. The most notable name at the top of the leaderboard is 2007 WSOP POY and member of Team Pokerati Tom Schneider at 3,168,000, good for 4th place. More notables, with their unofficial chip counts: Noah Boeken (2,4000,000), Eugene Katchalov (2,1000,000), Ludovic Lacay (1,685,000), Fabrice Soulier (1,450,000), Bertrand Grospellier (1,400,000), Blair Hinkle (1,100,000), Joe Sebok (1,100,000), Joe Hachem (1,000,000), Peter Eastgate (927,000), Blair Rodman (890,000), Joe Serock and Prahlad Friedman (760,000) and Kenny Tran (700,000).

Notable eliminations: Kevin O’Donnell, Mickey Mills, Cornel Cimpan, Kara Scott, Dan Shak, Nick Binger, Bobby Baldwin, Kevin Saul, William Robertie and Can Kim Hua.

Hopefully the official chip counts will be coming shortly, and Pokerati will be the 5th place to find them. Follow Pokerati also for Dream Team Poker updates, when they return from dinner break.

In an effort to spread the Pokerati name as far across the interwebs as possible, Tom Schneider has soared into the chip lead or close enough for our unofficial chip counting tastes in Day 5 of the Main Event.

According to Aaron of PokerWorks, Tom opened the pot to find a raiser in Kevin Saul. Tom reraised, at which point Kevin shipped for just over 1 million. Tom called and was covered by about 50K, but he flipped over pocket aces. Kevin showed A-K, and the board blanked to knock cripple Kevin and catapult Tom to somewhere near the 2.1 million-chip range. That puts him in the chip lead and one of only three players to have made it above the 2-million mark.

At the first break: @DonkeyBomber 2.2 million. 315 left

Funny (or not) that Tom’s all-in wasn’t covered at all by the ESPN cameras, and the official media of the WSOP is stretched awfully thin today and missed it.

UPDATE: Tom ended the day with 3.16 million. According to @Karridy, that’s 5th out of the 185 remaining players.

(Table Blue 34)
Seat 1: Zhehao Zhang – 309000
Seat 2: Keith Burt – 237000
Seat 3: Alessandro Longobardi – 183000
Seat 4: Jose Rosenkrantz – 456000
Seat 5: @DonkeyBomber – 797000
Seat 6: Kevin ‘BeL0WaB0Ve’ Saul – 396000
Seat 7: Taher Alisheik – 745000
Seat 8: Josh Mancuso – 548000
Seat 9: Antonio ‘Bagels’ Cavezza – 824000

Let’s hope we’re not softballed the hedline: Rosenkrantz and DonkeyBomber Are Dead!

click to enlarge

Well whaddya know … Pokerati fave [name deleted] still plays poker … and last night he (“luvgamble”) won WCOOP event #24: $530 NL 2-7 Single Draw. (Which really is the best psychology-based poker game of all.)

308 runners, 49 in the money. First Place paid a nice $42k … glad to see [name deleted] finally book a noticeable win in 2008, which will make me feel better taking a chunk of it in our presidential election wager.

The one unfortunate thing … [name deleted] always liked to play anonymously, and wouldn’t even tell me his PokerStars screen name for fear that I’d publicize it. But now, as it goes in poker because I have no conscience he actually won a semi-public event, I get to out him, and the “Shmonkey Shmomber” is stuck playing a Googleable screen name into perpetuity. Ha ha, er, I mean congrats!

Other notable money finishers with trackable screen names:

newhizzle – Mark Newhouse
Bill Chen – Bill Chen
GavinGriffin – Gavin Griffin
KidPoker – Daniel Negreanu
BeL0WaB0Ve – Kevin Saul

Meanwhile, here’s a moment of Zen from 10th-place finisher Bill Chen, speaking on “The Power of Acceptance”, and even the necessity of embracing plausible death: