A high buy-in pot limit omaha tournament has enough swings and controversies at the best of times, but day two of the WSOP $10,000 PLO gave an unexpected dramatic twist.
As the players came back from their dinner break, one or two quickly noticed something was odd: their stacks looked the wrong size. One player, who was languishing towards of the bottom of the chip counts, even admitted he had too many.
Those murmerings quickly escalated as it became clear there had been some sort of error in the color-up process during the break. Official word is that there were two errors: firstly, there were mistakes in the color-up of the grey 100 chips, and secondly there were some errors in the buying up of the orange 1,000 chips, with some players being given the wrong number of 5,000 pink chips in return.
It is a situation that could have got out of hand, but the tournament staff kept things calm as they checked then re-checked the security cameras to make sure any mistakes were rectified.
To their credit, the players took the restart delay in good spirits, sitting around at their tables chatting, having massages, etc. They realised, perhaps, that the tournament staff here at the WSOP normally do an excellent job and, well, mistakes can happen. It was also in their interest, of course, that things were put right.
After a delay of around an hour, the tournament got going again, with staff confirming they had corrected all errors.
Day two had started with 116 players remaining, all pushing to squeeze into the 27 cash spots and ultimately the $679,379 first prize. Among them were Team PokerStars Pros William Thorson, Tom McEvoy and Humberto Brenes. All fell, although Thorson put in a strong performace that at one point saw him as high as second in chips.
That left Barry Greenstein, who comes back to day three today with 467,000 in chips after giving a professional performance throughout the day. He was up, down, and then right back up again as he picked off spots and dodged the bulllets… literally.
In one hand he dodged them twice, folding K♥ K♣ Qâ™ J♦ pre-flop after calling a Van Marcus raise and seeing Chau Giang come all-in over the top, called by Van Marcus. Greenstein saw both players turn over pocket aces, revealing he had folded kings – much to Van Marcus’ dismay. Greenstein revealed he may have called if he had suited cards.
So 25 return today, already guaranteed $25,817, lead by Noah Schwartz on a hefty 1,220,000, nearly twice as much as second-placed man Marcus Golser on 621,000.
Chip counts:
Noah Schwartz, 1,220,000
Marcus Golser, 621,000
Robin Keston, 606,000
Matt Graham, 586,000
Nathan Doudney, 585,000
Ferit Gabriellson, 547,000
Stefan Mattsson, 484,000
Barry Greenstein, Team PokerStars Pro, 467,000
Matt Vengrin, 389,000
Josh Arieh, 356,000
Richard Austin, 331,000
Howard Lederer, 326,000
David Podgurski, 261,000
Padraig Parkinson, 259,000
James Taylor, 254,000
Van Marcus, 246,000
Vitaly Lunkin, 220,000
Rodrigo dos Santos, 204,000
David Williams, 198,000
Nate Lindsay, 171,000
Chau Giang, 129,000
Nenad Medic, 128,000
Henri Kettunen, 100,000
Tony Cousineau, 100,000
Todd Barlow, 97,000
