The Money Bubble Looms
At Noon local time the remaining 189 players will start their quest for the money. With 135 players getting paid here in Austria's capital, just 54 unlucky ones will depart without extra money in their pockets.
The absolute short stack is Ernst Stoller, who has about 6.5 big blinds with his 19,400-chip stack. Kitty Kuo is also on the short stack after suffering a big bad beat late on day 2.
And then there are the big stacks, the players who won't be eying the money bubble per se, but will be more focussed on gathering even more chips to make a really deep run. A prime example of someone in this group would be chip leader Sebastian Trisch, who amassed 568,000 in chips yesterday. He took center stage playing his hands at the feature table.
The organization didn't necessarily picked their table to broadcast Trisch's skills though, as the player in seat nine got all the attention. Viktor "Isildur1" Blom was seated at the table and the EPT live stream viewers loved it. Blom, who we had a brief talk with in the second break, ended the day with 93,400 in chips.
Blom's Full Tilt Poker colleague Gus Hansen did much better than that. With 221,000 in chips he has plenty of chips to work with today. Yesterday, he more than once proved he still had it, and with 'it' we mean play creative holdings to crush big hands.
The Festsaal of the Hofburg Palace here in Vienna will again fill with poker players from all over the world at 12:00 Noon local time. In the meantime, check out Kristy Arnett's talk with Team PokerStars Pro Liv Boeree: