Things are going fairly swiftly -- we're down to 84 runners with a little over one level to go before we have to stop.
There is some danger that if we complete level 15 and have come very close to the bubble rather than actually bursting it, play will continue until we're in the money -- but with a bit of luck the short stacks will get busy and we'll hit the money soon.
Reaction to this from an anonymous player:
"84 left! 12 to go! We can smoke! The whole night!"
A hit to the stack of Laurence Houghton, after he check-called a chunky bet on the turn of a board. Both he and his opponent checked the river and Houghton flipped , but his opponent tabled an that had got there on the turn, and Houghton is down to 105,000.
Samer Rahman just won another pot worth a little under 200,000. He hald pocket nines and called an opponent's all-in bet preflop. The player held . Samer's nines held and he scooped in the pot. Despite building up to 370,000 a little while ago, Samer dropped a few pots since. He is back up to 340,000 though.
He also just got moved to the table containing Lex Veldhuis, Marc Goodwin and Noah Boeken. That should be fun.
Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier has taking his big stack and used it to abuse his table the closer we get to the money. If this were online and PokerTracker stats were available, his VPIP would figure to be a 75 with a PFR of 65 -- it's pretty nuts. If you look at ElkY's stack, you'll see the majority of the black T100 chips are towering in front of me. That could only mean one thing: the players at his table are letting him steal over and over to pick up the blinds and antes.
Just recently, one opponent defended, but after ElkY fired 11,100 on the flop and 25,000 on the turn with the board reading , the player gave up and folded his hand. ElkY showed pocket queens and let the table know that even he has a hand sometimes.