World Poker Tour World Championship Day 3: El Sayed, Medic and Kelly at the Top
Another day of play has come and gone at the World Poker Tour World Championship. When the day began on Monday, 116 players took their seats, but at the end of the day 52 remained. Leading them all is WPT Amnéville champion Sam El Sayed with 1.107 million in chips. He’s followed closely by Nenad Medic and then Steven Kelly, who seems to be at the top of every WPT leaderboard lately.
El Sayed won a big pot towards the end of the night off Andrew Lichtenberger to take the chip lead, according to the WPT Live Update Team. For most of the day though, the top spot was a battle between Kelly and Medic. Medic took his stack over one million in Level 15 when his pocket eights held up against Randall Yasny’s A♠K♠ after all of the money went in preflop. Kelly climbed over a million shortly before that against Jon Turner. Kelly bet 118,000 on the river of the board of Q♠Q♥J♥9♠8♣ and Turner gave it up.
While El Sayed, Medic and Kelly thrived, others struggled to survive. Shawn Buchanan, Davidi Kitai, Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy, Chris Moorman, Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu were a handful of the casualties on Day 3. Negreanu was eliminated by Ashton Griffin after his top pair was out-kicked when he called all in on the river.
Now, one of the most talked about players still left in the tournament is Ali Tekintamgac, winner of the WPT Spanish Championship in Barcelona. If you remember, Tekintamgac was the famed player who was disqualified from the final table of the Patrouche Poker Tour for alleged cheating, which you can read about here. On the first two days of this event, Tekintamgac caused quite the stir in the tournament room at Bellagio while exchanging words with a few of the players. Well, much to the players’ dislike that played this event, Tekintamgac is still in, albeit short with just 155,000 in chips.
Other notables still remaining include Galen Hall, Sam Trickett, Abe Mosseri, Joseph Cheong, Justin Smith and WPT Player of Year front-runner Andy Frankenberger. Also still remaining is last year’s champion David Williams. Williams wrapped up the day with 480,000, which is slightly above average.
Top 10 Chip Counts
| Place | Player | Chips |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sam El Sayed | 1,107,000 |
| 2 | Nenad Medic | 1,098,500 |
| 3 | Steven Kelly | 1,000,500 |
| 4 | Christian Harder | 887,000 |
| 5 | Roger Teska | 846,000 |
| 6 | Shannon Shorr | 819,500 |
| 7 | David Chiu | 772,000 |
| 8 | Justin Young | 688,000 |
| 9 | Alan Sternberg | 676,500 |
| 10 | Galen Hall | 659,000 |
The remaining players will return to the felt on Tuesday at 1200 PDT (1900 GMT) to continue play. The plan will be to work down to the money, which is set at 27 players. Who’s going to make it to the cash and who will be the bubble boy? Be sure to stay tuned to PokerNews for the recap of the action after play is complete.
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