Williams: tangling with the big stacks
Like a cat feigning disinterest before pouncing after a while, David Williams extracted three full bets from Niccolo Caramatti, before check-raising the river and taking the pot. Caramatti bet 16k on the flop (a third player who got this far but no further took up five minutes at this point before folding after time was called on him). Then came 25k on the turn, and finally 50k on the river. Williams calmly called the first two bets and then moved all in after Caramatti bet the river. He got an instant fold, and an instant 100k plus boost to his stack.
For the first ten minutes Level 10, Table 15 has been playing with a slightly different structure than every other table. While they've been using blinds of 600 and 1,200, each player has been anteing 200 -- even though the structure calls for an ante of only 100. One of the players finally noticed that the tournament clock shows an ante of 100, and a floor was called to the table. He said there was nothing that could be done about the pots already played; each player would just ante 100 from here on out.
Joseph Ebanks appears to have more than doubled his already-comfortable 100k stack, shooting up to 250,000. The cool quarter mil means that he's right up there with erstwhile chip leader Lee Nelson after just one level.
Richard 'Chufty' Ashby may get the cake online, but he wasn't too pleased about the slice dealt to him in this tournament. There were ups and downs yesterday, but today saw the last of his chips go in a dramatic hand. Holding , he saw a fourway flop of . They checked around. The turn brought a , and now the betting kicked off properly, Ashby's straight eventually herding his stack in against one opponent's pocket deuces for the turned set. "The river paired," sighed Ashby. "Sick."
Last hand before the break, Jason Mercier raised from the cutoff only to be confronted with a reraise to 9,200 from the gent in the big blind. Mercier quietly made it 48,600 to cover the big blind, who proceeded to dwell up long enough that everyone else had gone out on break before he'd made a decision. He folded.
Players have been given a 15-minute break. It seems rather soon for that sort of thing, after just one 75-minute level, but what do we know? A break sounds good to us!
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flop (a third player who got this far but no further took up five minutes at this point before folding after time was called on him). Then came 25k on the 
turn, and finally 50k on the 
river. Williams calmly called the first two bets and then moved all in after Caramatti bet the river. He got an instant fold, and an instant 100k plus boost to his stack.
, he saw a fourway flop of 
. They checked around. The turn brought a 
, and now the betting kicked off properly, Ashby's straight eventually herding his stack in against one opponent's pocket deuces for the turned set. "The river paired," sighed Ashby. "Sick."
