Poker Blog and Poker Gossip

Paul Lee, the winner of the $2,000 buy-in 2007 5th Annual Five Star World Poker Classic just a few weeks ago on April 8th, now currently leads the pack at the WPT Championship.  Lee took home over $206,000 just a few weeks ago and is currently in good position for another huge cash.

Yesterdays leader, Raymond Davis is now on the brink of elimination as he is second to last in chips.

Ultimate Bet‘s Star, Phil Hellmuth also took a massive hit in his stack and now sits in 19th place.  Hellmuth explains what he calls his personal “train wreck” in his blog.

Patrik Antonius was eliminated in 52nd place after entering the day very short in chips.  He made about $40K, which is equivelant to one of his raises on Full Tilt Poker.

So it is now down to the final day with 27 players remaining.  Here is the current leaderboard:

1st – Paul Lee – $3,601,000
2nd – Kirk Morrison – $2,980,000
3rd – Carlos Mortensen – $2,429,000 (Full Tilt Poker Pro)
4th – Sorel Mizzi – $2,256,000
5th – Thomas Wahlroos – $1,847,000

The payouts for the tournament winners are as follows:

1    $ 3,970,415
2    $ 2,011,135
3    $ 1,082,920
4    $ 696,220
5    $ 464,110
6    $ 309,405

Raymond Davis (seen here from the Poker News Blog) is the current leader at the end of Day 3 of the 2007 WPT Championship.
Davis eliminated Barny Boatman, Eric Kesselman, Steve Wong and Chip Reese to build his stack up to $1,710,000 and take the lead at the Bellagio in Las Vegas today.

Some other notable eliminations included Anna Wroblewski (the recent winner of the 5-Star Bellagio World Poker Open) who went out in 70th place, Full Tilt Poker Pro Ram Vaswani was eliminated in 71st place, 2004 WPT 2nd place finished Humberto Brenes was eliminated in 62nd position, and the always entertaining Sammy Farha was eliminated in 83rd position.

The current leader board at the end of Day 3 stands as follows (unofficially):

Place Name                     Chip Count
1 Raymond Davis              1,710,000
2 Loi Phan                        1,440,000
3 Kirk Morrison                 1,282,000
4 Roland De Wolf              1,230,000
5 Thomas Wahlroos          1,225,000
6 Phil Hellmuth                  1,180,000
7 Grant Lang                    1,095,000
8 Carlos Mortensen           950,000
9 Tom Pniak                     750,000
10 Praz Bansi                   740,000

Day 2 of the 2007 WPT Championship (Bellagio Five Star) has come to an end with Roland De Wolf as the current tournament leader. De Wolf managed to take the lead of the tournament after eliminating Juan Carlos (J.C.) Alvarado shortly before the day came to a close.
De Wolf finished 3rd in this same tournament last year and has accumulated over $3.1 Million in tournament winnings according to his PokerPages profile.

Some other notable events include Joe Hachem losing to pocket 2′s with his A6. Doyle Brunson was eliminated by David Singer. Gus Hansen was eliminated by John Myung when Myung hit a set of 3′s and Gus hit top pair (Queens) with an Ace kicker (Flop Q 4 3). Johnny Chan was busted on the last hand before the last break.

According to PokerNews.com, the unofficial chip counts at the end of Day 2 were as follows:

Place Name                 Chip Count
1 Roland De Wolf          505,000
2 Patrik Antonius          475,000
3 Steve Wong              473,000
4 Phil Hellmuth             466,000
5 James Lee                 459,000
6 Sammy Farha            398,000
7 Sorel Mizzi                390,000
8 Lee Markholt             370,000
9 Stan Fulton               369,000
10 Anna Wroblewski     356,000