Jason Mercier Dominant Chip Leader Heading into World Series of Poker Europe Final Table
Published on October 1st, 2009 3:43 am ESTDay 4 of the WSOPE (World Series of Poker Europe) main event is now in the books, with Jason Mercier emerging as the dominant chip leader heading into Thursday's final table.
Jason Mercier will take nearly 3.2 million chips with him into the WSOPE main event final table on Thursday, which is nearly two million chips more than his closest competitor (James Akenhead, 1.4 million chips).
The final table will look like this when action gets underway on Thursday afternoon (local time):
Jason Mercier - 3.198 million chips
James Akenhead - 1.398 million chips
Praz Bansi - 1.16 million chips
Barry Shulman - 1.09 million chips
Markus Ristola - 784k chips
Antoine Saout - 701k chips
Matt Hawrilenko - 674k chips
Chris Bjorin - 518k chips
Daniel Negreanu - 438k chips
All nine of the remaining players are guaranteed at least 66k pounds for making it to the final table, with the eventual winner of the event taking home over 800k pounds (plus the World Series of Poker bracelet).
A few notes about some of the final table participants:
James Akenhead and Antoine Saout, who are both members of the "November Nine", also ended up making the final table of this event as well. Either player could potentially end up winning both the WSOP and WSOPE main events in the same year.
Matt Hawrilenko could potentially win his second WSOP bracelet of the year (he also took down the 5k 6-Max event at the 2009 WSOP for over a million dollars).
Daniel Negreanu would move into first place on the all-time tournament money list with a second place finish or better in this event, leapfrogging both Phil Ivey and Jamie Gold. It should also be noted that this is the second straight year that Negreanu has final tabled this event, which is a pretty sick accomplishment.
Jason Mercier has a wealth of final table experience and will be very tough to beat on Thursday. Mercier has a number of big tournament victories under his belt already, and the mass of chips that he has accumulated will make him even tougher to play against at the final table.
--
Names such as Doyle Brunson, Ram Vaswani and Yevgeniy Timoshenko all made deep runs in this event, but all were unable to make it to the final table.
The final table will get underway at noon local time on Thursday afternoon.
--
Filed Under: The World Series of Poker
