There’s lots of emotions a player can run through during the course of a poker tournament. Satisfaction at knocking out a tough opponent. Elation at a critical double-up. Boredom through long stretches of inactivity. And of course, disappointment and resignation when the moment of your elimination seems all but assured.

Sasa Zorc has some fresh experience with that last emotion. He opened all in for about 350,000 with K♥ Q♥ and got snap-called by big blind Moritz Ortmann with the aces. No help on the flop or turn for Zorc, leaving him drawing dead before the river even came down.

Zorc had a quiet final table. He started as the second-place stack but never seemed to get much going, and was often played back at by the two Americans on his left, Andrew Kim and Vincent Rubianes. He took his elimination just as quietly and stoically, resigned as soon as he saw Ortmann’s black aces hit the felt. He shook everyone’s hand and departed to collect his cash.

The remaining four players, meanwhile, have asked for a short break so they can negotiate some kind of four-way deal. I can’t recall the last time a four-way deal happened in a live tournament, but this discussion was pre-ordained when there were seven players left. At that time, the remaining seven players all agreed to discuss a deal when the tournament went four-handed.

These types of multi-way deals are tricky to accomplish. In addition to the usual wrangling over whether the players will chop by chip equity, ICM, or some other metric, there are tax implications to consider. A further wrinkle is that some players will want Korean Won and some will want money added to their PokerStars accounts (not an option for the two remaining Americans, obviously).

There’s no guarantee our final four players will reach a deal. We could just be burning a little time on break here before they resume trying to knock each other out and trying to move up the pay ladder.

For Zorc, though, the tournament ends here in 5th place.

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