Hellmuth Among 75 Survivors; Eyes Second Razz Title in Three Years and 101st WSOP Cash
The 2014 World Series of Poker continued at 4 p.m. on Friday with Day 1 of Event #7 $1,500 Seven-Card Razz. The tournament attracted 352 runners (which was up from last year’s 301 players, though that was for a $2,500 buy-in), and created a prize pool of $475,200. That will be distributed to the top 40 players with $121,196 reserved for the winner.
After ten one-hour levels of play, which have stretched into the early morning hours of Saturday, just 75 players remained with Fabio De Francesco and his stack of 66,700 leading the way. Not far behind is Jordan Siegel, who bagged up 61,100; while Matt Waxman (42,300), Jared Koppel (41,700), and Phil Hellmuth (39,700) all finished the night with healthy stacks.
Of course not everyone was so fortunate on Day 1. Among those to fall were 2010 WSOP Main Event champ Jonathan Duhamel; last year’s Millionaire Maker winner Brian Yoon; the all-time leading razz winner Frank Kassela; Daniel Negreanu, who is now 0-5 at the 2014 WSOP; Brandon Shack-Harris, who jumped into the tournament immediately after winning his first bracelet in Event #3 $1,000 Pot-Limit Omaha for $205,634; and nine-time bracelet winner Phil Ivey.
Ivey late registered for the tournament and got off to a bad start. He managed a double against Ron “Schifty” Schiffman, but then fell a short time later in Level 7 at the hands of Phil "Unabomber" Laak. We missed the hand so we decided to ask Laak if he could recall any details.
"I don't remember, but it was lower than his," Laak explained when asked what his hand had been. Another player at the table offered help and reminded Laak that Ivey had made two pair to bust and that Laak actually had trips (oftentimes a worse hand in razz when combined with the other board cards). Laak, who went on to bag up 20,100, then launched into numerous tangents as he is prone to do.
While hundreds fell there were plenty of notables that punched their ticket to Day 2 including Huck Seed (28,000), Randy Ohel (22,600), Ali Eslami (19,200), Dan Kelly (17,900), Berry Johnston (17,500), Brandon Cantu (9,100), and the defending champ Bryan Campanello (7,000).
Day 2 will get underway at 2 p.m. local time on Saturday, and the plan is to play through the money bubble on the way to the final table, or at least as close as we can get in ten more levels. Join the PokerNews Live Reporting Team then for all the actions and eliminations. In the meantime, find out what Andrew “luckychewy” Lichtenberger’s plans are for the summer.