Tuesday, July 8, 2008
When an ace fell on the partypoker stars turn, Cole had the full house and Matros was drawing dead. A party poker short-stacked Jamie Gold left the field after running his small-blind K-Q into Pat Pezzin's big-blind party poker pocket queens. The evening also saw the departure of J.J. Tommy Hang took nearly a 2:1 chip lead into heads-up play, but over the next 60 hands James Schaaf chipped away and finally took the chip lead. In one of the first party poker hands of the day, Dwan's aces were cracked by Dale Pinchot's A-8. David Daneshgar is the winner of Event #52, and will take $625,443 and his first gold bracelet home to Westlake Village, California. Bellande showed the (A-Hearts)(9-Hearts) for the nut flush draw and the same open-ended straight draw. The party poker match was now dead even.
The river blanked out for Bloch and Medic won his first bracelet. Bellande drew first blood, when his 10-7 was good for two pair on a board of 10-8-3-A-A. The shortest stack, Tony "The Party Poker Lizard" Bloom, shoved in one of the first hands of Day 2, losing to Fred Berger's ace high and becoming the first elimination of the day. The freeroll will run as scheduled on Thursday July 31 at 19:00 GMT. Close to 800 players have taken the challenge at this series and now we're giving the rest of you one final chance at a piece of this tasty pie. Runner-up Tommy Hang settled for a $158,933 payday, while Hellmuth's third-place run was worth $93,168. Ram Vaswani was eliminated when his flush draw failed to materialize against Steve Wise's flopped trip aces.
In seat order, the six chairs will be occupied by online-turned-live-play phenom, 21-year-old Tom "durrrr" Dwan; 11-time WSOP bracelet winner Phil Hellmuth; high-stakes, part-time cash-gamer Mike Baxter; five-time WSOP bracelet winner Allen Cunningham; Cirque de Soleil CEO Guy Laliberte; and cash game veteran David "Viffer" Peat. Two other London LCI properies, Golden Nugget and Rendezvous, may also be part of the mix when the preliminary schedule is confimed. Not content to just pick on the other players, they bumped heads several times. Daneshgar was then the short stack, but he later doubled up through Corwin Cole when Cole tried to bully while holding just (8-Spades)(6-Spades).
The last of Brandon Wong's chips went in preflop with Joe De Niro and Matt Graham along for the ride. Once qualified, you must manually register for the tournament after 12:00 GMT, Wednesday July 30. In the blink of an eye, Maureen Feduniak's aces were cracked by Ryan Jones' pocket fives. Some of them were also interviewed for TV.PokerNews.com and their videos were seen all over the world. Highlights in the upcoming FTOPS IX series include the return of the two-day $2,500 "deep stack" NL, event, beginning on Saturday, August 16th and carrying a $2 million guarantee, and the FTOPS IX Main Event itself, which runs on Sunday, August 17th and features a minimum of $2.5 million in prize money.
