Iaron Lightbourne Leads 2015 partypoker UK Main Event Final Table
Eighteen players returned to their seats at the Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham on Saturday to play the penultimate day of the 2015 partypoker WPT UK Main Event. Those 18 players have been reduced to only six, and they will be led back into battle on Sunday afternoon by Iaron Lightbourne.
Lightbourne goes into the official six-handed WPT final table with 2.9 million in chips in his arsenal and is going to take some stopping. The Londoner's previous two live tournament cashes were a victory in the Unibet Open London Main Event for £70,000 and a runner-up finish in Event 12 of the 2015 World Series of Poker for $283,063. He is now guaranteed at least sixth place in this tournament and would be a worthy champion should he go all the way and claim the title.
Trailing Lightbourne by 245,000 in chips was Sheffield’s Fraser Bellamy, a wily player who tops the all-time money list for tournaments held at Dusk Till Dawn. Bellamy is now set to extend his lead on that list as he is guaranteed at least £40,000 for his efforts here. Ultimately, he could walk away with a cool £200,000 should he become the tournament’s champion.
Neither Lightbourne or Bellamy are going to have it their own way at the final table because they’re joined by a group of four other talented individuals.
Chi Zhang has proven that he can mix it up with the best of them, while Andrew Seden has played a patient, solid game from the moment he entered this £1 million guaranteed event.
Craig McCorkell is vastly experienced and has a WSOP bracelet to his name, while Russell Betts didn’t put a foot wrong all day.
All in all, the final table, which is to be streamed on a 30-minute delay, looks set to be an exciting one.
As mentioned, Day 4 started with 18 players, but the early eliminations of Andrew Hulme, Ben Vinson, and Lukas Dimsa left only two tables of players. They were joined on the rail by Mitchell Johnson, Fuad Serhan, Breixo Gonzalez, Joseph Townsend, Adam Daniel, and Philip Hepburn, with the latter’s exit seeing the remaining nine players sit at the unofficial final table.
From there, Dominic Cullen fell first, and he was followed by Robert Davies in eighth. Davies needs a special mention because he ran horribly throughout the day, running a full house into McCorkell’s bigger full house, splitting a pot when his got his 
in versus McCorkell’s 
when the board ran out with a wheel, and then pushed into 
for another big pot before an ace flopped. It was quite fitting then that his exit saw him commit his stack with the 
and run into the 
.
The final elimination of the day was that of Billy Chattaway, who ran into some tough spots during Day 4. His exit came when Bellamy raised, Chattaway called on the button, and Lightbourne called in the big blind. The flop fell 
, everyone checked to Chattaway, he pushed all in, and Bellamy called. Chattaway showed the 
, Bellamy the 
, and when the 
on the turn was followed by the 
on the river, it was game over for him.
Play will resume at 2 p.m. GMT on Sunday and will continue until one man has all of the 13.5 million chips in play. Stay tuned to the PokerNews’ Live Reporting pages throughout Sunday to discover who that winner is, as we'll have all of the updates throughout.