675 Left in 2013 WSOP Main Event
Friday July 12,2013 : 675 PLAYERS LEFT IN WORLD SERIES OF POKER MAIN EVENT (Update)
Day 3 completed in Las Vegas
Day 3 of the World Series of Poker Main Event kicked off Thursday in Las Vegas, with the starting fields combining for the first time as 1,743 survivors from an original field of 6,352 came together.
The action was almost immediately hectic, with 90 players eliminated in the first 90 minutes, and early departures including names like Miami John Cernuto, Robert Mizrachi, Xuan Lieu, Kevin Pollack and David Vamplew.
By the first break the field was down to 1,512 players with Mark Kroon still dominating the leaderboard with a stack that had by that point grown to 650,000.
By the end of the day the 648th place money bubble was in sight, spurring the desire to survive in a very talented field, although the superstitious will be backing away from the interesting statistic that at the end of play in Day 3 there were 666 players left standing!
The chip leader going into Day 4 Friday is Maxx Coleman from Derby, Kansas, who bagged up 1,071,500 in chips.
But it was two former WSOP main event champs that attracted most attention; veteran poker pro Doyle Brunson, who had at one point considered giving this year's main event a miss, and last year's main event winner Greg Merson trying for a back-to-back victory, are still in the field.
Brunson has a healthy stack of 626,000 and could be in the running for a remarkable third WSOP main event win and an eleventh bracelet, whilst Merson is somewhat lower down on the leaderboard with just 390,500.
Attracting attention due to their gender and survival skills were Annette Obrestad, champion of the 2007 WSOP Europe Main Event (564,000), and Melanie Weisner (536,000) who will both be going through to Day 4.
Not so fortunate was Phil Ivey, who was eliminated by Max Steinberg at level 14.
The field still has great depth of talent and experience, with players like Kyle Julius, Vladimir Geshkenbein, Jaime Kaplan, Jon Turner, Luke Schwartz and Chris Johnson still playing strongly.
Top ten chip counts at the end of Day 3 were:
Maxx Coleman US 1,071,500
Joshua Prager US 993,000
Max Steinberg US 987,500
Dick van Luijk BE 940,000
Vladimir Geshkenbein RU 900,000
Matthew Huey US 885,500
Chris Johnson US 862,000
Guilherme Garcia BZ 853,500
Umang Dattani CA 848,000
Kevin Williams GB 808,500
