Viktor Blom heads $50k Players Championship
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Viktor Blom's first trip to the World Series of Poker has been a quiet one to date with just one cash for $2,706 to his name so far. That could be about to change though as Isildur1 holds the chip lead in the $50k Players Championship with just 26 remaining.
The Swede rocketed to the top of the chip counts just before the close after winning an extraordinary pot against the luckless Joe Cassidy. All of Blom's chips were in the middle during the round of PLO with the youngster in terrible shape holding a set of nines against Cassidy's set of tens with just the river to come. Needing the case nine to survive, Isildur1 spiked the miracle and rocketed to the head of the leader board.
As you'd expect, there's plenty of class on view amongst the 26 survivors with David Oppenheim, Daniel Alaei and David 'ODB' Baker joining Blom in the seven-figure stack club. Former champion Michael Mizrachi is still in the hunt, as is brother Robert. Andy Bloch, who was runner up in the first Players Championship survived as did John Monnette, Phil Ivey, Bill Chen, Jeff Lisandro and Phil Hellmuth who returns as the short stack with just 28,000.
Stephen Chidwick heads the British challenge in seventh place on 874,000 with Luke '_Fullflush_' Schwartz also returning with 500,000.
Notables to hit the rail yesterday included Doyle Brunson, Patrik Antonius, Justin Smith and Michael Binger.
The top 16 finishers will each take home at least $91,549 with the eventual winner set to walk away with a cool $1,451,527.
The chip leaders are as follows:
1. Viktor Blom – 1,262,000
2. David Oppenheim – 1,165,000
3. Daniel Alaei – 1,058,000
4. David “ODB” Baker – 1,025,000
5. John Hennigan – 992,000
6. Bill Chen – 984,000
7. Stephen Chidwick – 874,000
8. Mike Wattel – 870,000
9. Bruno Fitoussi – 861,000
10. Chris Klodnicki – 858,000