2008 Partouche Poker Tour - Cannes

Occasionally, when a player moves all in, we'll hear a quick two-second drumroll blasted loudly over the speaker system. The stage itself also becomes animated with flashing white and red lights to signify the all in.

Jean Philippe Rohr moved all in from the cutoff seat, and action passed around to Stephane Bazin in the big blind. He asked for a count, and learned that it was a total of 760,000 that he would have to call. After several minutes in the tank, he finally surrendered his hand, and Rohr could breathe a sigh of relief.

No translation necessary. Even our French interpreter picked up on the fact that the French players seem to take longer than average to make their decisions when compared to players from other parts of the world.

For the past three minutes, we've been waiting for Jean Philippe Rohr to act in a heads-up hand against Claudio Rinaldi. Perhaps some of you in the shout box who are watching the live feed could let us know what he had that made his decision so difficult... we're dying to know!

[Removed:133] has just managed to double up through the tournament chip leader, Stephane Bazin.

Action folded around to Cournut in the cutoff who open-shoved all in for about ~460,000. Bazin then insta-called from the button, tabling and found himself slightly ahead of Cournut's .

Cournut was able to spike a four on the flop to take the lead and he never looked back as the board filled out .

The hand left Bazin with approximately 2,327,000 while Cournut improved to just under one million.

Early on, the players were playing a somewhat loose-aggressive style, seeing multi-way flops with several hands being raised and reraised before the river. Over the past few orbits, however, there have been relatively few flops. Most of the pots are being taken down with a single preflop raise, as the big stacks seem to be putting the pressure on those short in chips.

The players have returned from break and the cards are back in the air.

Stephane Bazin - 2,750,000
Alain Roy - 2,143,000
Antonin Tesseire - 1,406,000
Philippe Narboni - 1,363,000
Claudio Rinaldi - 800,000
Jean Philippe Rohr - 793,000
[Removed:133] - 477,000

The tournament clock has been paused while the remaining seven players take their first 15-minute break of the evening.

Thus far we've relied on our extremely subpar knowledge of the French language to try and understand Jean Jacques Ichai's commentating at the final table. Needless to say, we're all but useless in that regard.

To solve the problem, we've enlisted the services of one of the PPT's official translators, Julie Mourchidi, who is going to help us figure out what the heck's going on.

Merci, Julie! Merci, beaucoup!