The levels continue their inexorable rise and two more players were feeling the heat and departed in a flurry of cards and chips with Tang Wei Cong (30th) and Le Ngoc Khanh (29th) both hitting the rail.
The clock has been paused for table re-draw and the chipleader is still Korea’s Je Ho Lee and here’s how the other 28 contenders are stacking up:
Michael Soyza’s tournament is now over courtesy of fellow Malaysian Lim Chin Wei. Down to his last eight big blinds Soyza got it in with and found himself racing against of Wei.
The flop was not the one Soyza was looking for and it pretty much gave Wei everything, including all of Soyza’s remaining chips. Soyza headed to the cash desk to collect the HK$58,100 for his 25th place finish while Wei stacked up to 1.6 million.
We saw Je Ho Lee lose a rare pot, which was a good thing for Jeffery Lo as he was the all-in player. It was Lo who opened the action with a raise to 55,000 from under-the-gun plus one and Chung Guang Zhang flat called in middle position before Lee bumped it up to 165,000 from the cutoff.
Lo did not take long to get his 580,000 stack in, Zhang folded out and Lee made the call.
Jeffrey Lo:
Je Ho Lee:
The way Lee has been running recently we half expected a nine to come straight off the top of the deck. However, the runout saw Lo’s hand hold and he climbed to 1.2 million while Lee took a hit and dropped down to 2 million.
A dejected looking Andrew An has just wandered past the media desk on his way to the cage to collect his HK$58,100 for his 24th place finish. According to An he ran two pairs into the flopped set of Lee, who is on fire at the moment and is hitting everything. Lee now has just over 3 million in chips.
Malaysia’s Victor Chong thought it was his lucky day when he looked down to see min-raised from under-the-gun and saw Yuefeng Pan re-raise to 115,000 in total from the blinds.
Chong chose to get sneaky and just flat with his aces and slid in the call and it was off to a flop of , which Pan led for 100,000. Chong called once more and the hit the turn and this is when all the chips went in with Pan pulling the trigger and Chong making the call for his tournament life.
While Chong’s aces were still in front he was the at-risk player and Pan was drawing extremely live with . Unfortunately for Chong, the came in on the river and he’s now out while Pan has around 3 million in chips.
Big pocket pairs are not fairing so well for some of the players. This time the man on the chopping block was Mexico’s JC Alvarado and the man doing the chopping was Zhao Yanchao.
Alvarado was the initial aggressor, making it 55,000 to go from middle position and Zhao Yanchao went straight to all-out Global Thermonuclear War and ripped in his whole 900,000 stack. Alvarado thought it over for a good while but made the call for his tournament life with and Yanchao turned over .
Unfortunately for Alvarado this time the classic race went in the favor of the man holding ace-king and the flop came down king-high and we lose one more, while Yanchao stacked up to 1.9 million.
There have been some more rapid bust outs with Kevin Choi, Jacky Wong, Victor Chong, JC Alvarado and Kuang Zhen Yu all hitting the rail in quick succession.
Play was just minutes old after the players returned after the dinner break and the field was thinned by one more. It was Malaysia’s Wai Kiat Lee who became the latest casualty, getting all the chips in pre-flop with and against the of Taiwan’s Chen An Lin.
Unfortunately for Lee the flop came down queen-high and that was that. Lee headed off to collect the HK$72,600 for 18th place and Chen An Lin stacked up to 1.9 million.