Wu Wins From Badziakouski, O’Dwyer Busts Cheng

It looks like all change at the top as we near the last level of the day. While Xuan Tan has been the chip leader for the majority of play so far that is no longer the case and he has shipped some chips the way of Deven Tang, dropping down to 118,000 while Tang has climbed to 118,000.

This has opened the door for Benjamin Wu to sneak into pole position after winning a few pots from Belarusian Mikita Badziakouski and while we missed the first sizable one of these, we did catch the second.

Wu and Badziakouski have been tangling quite a bit recently but it is Wu who seems to have had the best of it and this trend continued when the US player made it 2,500 to go from the button and Badziakouski made the call from the big blind.

The flop is one for a raiser if ever we saw one, and Badziakouski must have thought so too, checking the action over to Wu, who decided to fire out a continuation bet of 1,800, which after thinking it over for a few seconds the Belarusian player elected to call.

The turn paired the board and brought in a possible club flush draw in addition to the possible flopped straight and two pair/full house combos and now Badziakouski chose to lead out for 2,000.

Wu looked puzzled by this turn of events and thought things over for a good minute before deciding to test the waters with a raise to 8,500 in total. It was Badziakouski’s turn to tank, though he did not take long to find the fold leaving Wu to rake in a decent sized pot and climb to 157,000 while the Belarusian dropped to 46,000.

However, this is still more than Tony Cheng has as the Hong Kong player busted at the hands of Steve O’Dwyer shortly after the above hand between Badziakouski and Wu.

We caught the action on the turn in a heads-up pot between Cheng and O’Dwyer with the board reading with over 20,000 already in the pot.

Sitting in the big blind O’Dwyer had just dumped a huge tower of red 5k chips into the middle of the table, putting Cheng all-in for his last 25,000 or so. The Hong Kong player tanked long and hard as Winfred Yu and John Juanda exchanged some playful banter about how fast Winfred could lose all of his chips and how many buy-ins he could afford before the end of the day in a little under an hours time.

Eventually Cheng made the call for his tournament life but could only dejectedly slide his cards face down into the muck when O’Dwyer turned over for the turned diamond flush.

The turn paired the board but evidently did not help Cheng who got up and headed for the rail without showing down his hand while O’Dwyer climbed to 125,000.