The Run to the Ring
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Welcome back to Harrah's New Orleans for the culmination of the $1,600 Main Event. Ten players survived Day 2 -- one more than expected -- when the stalemate poker game was suspended around 2:00 A.M.
Courtesy of a few monster pots, Todd Wood will wield the big stack today with about 54 big blinds in the bag. He's a local boy, a 42-year-old lexicographer (yep, he edits and evaluates dictionaries for a living) who finished as the runner-up in his only other Circuit event he's ever played.
Here's how the rest of the table stacks up:
| Seat | Player | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lance Craig | 694,000 |
| 2 | Josh Evans | 1,159,000 |
| 3 | Matt Waxman | 460,000 |
| 4 | Bobby Toye | 882,000 |
| 5 | Jonathan Poche | 656,000 |
| 6 | Jake Bazeley | 983,000 |
| 7 | Todd Wood | 1,619,000 |
| 8 | Billie Payne | 307,000 |
| 9 | Scott Zakheim | 491,000 |
| 10 | James McBride | 395,000 |
A couple of those names are familiar to those who've been following the Circuit this season. Matt Waxman won a Main Event gold ring in Atlantic City, and there are a few players on the points bubble rooting for him to repeat here today. A win in this event would put Waxman very close to $1 million in career tournament earnings.
A couple seats to Waxman's left will sit Jake Bazeley, a young pro who has been best known as "Bazeman" crushing the online tables. He's won more than $2.5 million online, and he's cashed in about half of the WSOP-C events he's played in his short career. He's also got a few decent live scores, but he's yet to taste tournament victory in a brick-and-mortar. He begins the day in third place with just shy of a million chips.
Apart from those guys, we have a 42-year-old "man of leisure" from Texas (Lance Craig), the 76th-place finisher in the 2007 Main Event (Josh Evans), another former ring winner and the hometown favorite (Bobby Toye), a first-time final tablist (Jonathan Poche), a plumber also from Texas (Billie Payne), a New-York-turned-Florida attorney (Scott Zakheim), and a retiree from Slidell (Jim McBride). It's gonna be a good one.
Play begins in just a few minutes, so don't wander away. The table for ten is set!