Rubber Match Set for 6 p.m. Sunday

Three days wasn't enough to crown a champion in Event #4. The £10,000 High Roller Heads-Up event blew away expectations, drawing an overflow crowd of 103 players and generating a million-pound prize pool in the process. The action was proceeding smoothly enough until semifinal Day 3 when a couple of brutally long matches ate up all the hours on the clock. Gus Hansen and Jim Collopy eventually dispatched of Andrew Feldman and Ram Vaswani respectively, but they could not overcome each other so easily. They split the first two of the best-of-three final at one apiece, playing on into the early morning hours. That left the result up in the air, as both players wanted to come back and play Day 1b of the Main Event after a power nap. That ruled out a Saturday finish, and Collopy made it relatively deep into Day 2 today as well, so we still have a score left to settle.

Because of the difficulty in finding a vacant spot on the calendar this week, there was even some brief chatter about a change of scenery for the two players. The tournament staff considered bringing Hansen and Collopy out to Vegas in November to play out the Final as a sort of undercard to the Main Event final table. Obviously, there were a boatload of logistical hurdles to overcome, and the idea never fully got off the ground.

In the end, this stage is a much more fitting and logical place to play it out, anyway. Collopy lives right here in London, and he's in school this semester in an NYU exchange program. That means he has 11 hours of class on Monday, and it also makes the task of getting to Vegas and back without flunking out a little bit challenging. Hansen, a resident of Monaco, tends to stay away from Vegas unless he has to be there, and it's likely that wants to get home and get on with his life in the Nosebleeds come Monday.

So then, we have a fight card, and the date is inked. It's Gus Hansen vs. Jim Collopy in a one match, one-on-one battle for the greenbacks and the gold bracelet. Both of them are looking for their first WSOP title, and, if the previous two matches are any indication, the finale is going to be a good one. The ESPN cameras will be set up in the casino's center court to capture the action on film, but PokerNews is the only place where you can follow along with the action live!

We'll see you here on Sunday at 6:00 p.m. London time as we crown our penultimate bracelet winner of the 2010 WSOPE!

Tags: Gus Hansen Jim Collopy