Eliminations were slow to come by so we were stuck at 7 players for some time. That didn’t mean there was no action at the felt, actually, quite the contrary with lots of chips shuffling around to different sections.
In one hand, Filipino player Jesse Leonarez found himself losing over half a million of his chips to big-stacked Canadian Thomas Lee when he snap-called a river bet on a board of 9â™ 10♣ 9♣ 8♣ 3â™ . Leonarez showed J♣ 5♣ but was only second best to Lee’s A♣ K♣ .
On a subsequent hand, Leonarez found a way to reload some of those lost chips after he connected with a flush on the river that beat Hayato Kitajima’s top pair. Leonarez regained around 400K chips on that hand.
Then Aaron Lim doubled up through chip leader Thomas Lee with pocket kings staying on top against Lee’s pocket nines. Though that hurt Lee’s stack, he still has over 2M chips.
After that, there were two eliminations almost back-to-back. The first one was German player Iona Christopher Finkenrath who was hardly in any of the action at the final table. When he joined the party, it was a three-bet all in on top of Douglas Olsson’s raise of 100K. Olsson called and it was a showdown with Finkenrath holding Aâ™ K♥ against Olsson’s Q♥ 9♥ . Though ahead, the board would change that as it ran 10â™ 10♦ 4♦ J♦ 8♦ giving Olsson a straight. Finkenrath exited in 7th place and earned PHP710,900 for his finish.
The next to crash and burn was Hayato Kitajima. Despite entering the final table as the chip leader, Kitajima couldn’t improve his stack any further especially with Leonarez seemingly out for his head. Eventually Kitajima shoved with black eights and was called by Leonarez with red kings. The board was no help to Kitajima and he ended his run in 6th place. Kitajima earned himself PHP873,000.
We are now down to 5 players. No matter who falls next, he will take home a cool million.
Currently, Terry Fan is the chip leader with 2,905,000.
In other news, the KO Bounty is coming along quite swiftly with the field going from 195 down to 24. The High Roller is also speeding along with 11 out of the 33 players remaining.
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