News / Matthew Pitt / 30 June 2009 / Leave a comment

After four full days of play, 95 hopefuls have been whittled down to the final table of eight in Event#49 the $50,000 World Championship H.O.R.S.E. Whilst there were 53 fewer entrants than last year, the Chip Reese Memorial Trophy is still one of the most prestigious awards in poker and as it stand the original online superstar, Erik 'Erik123' Sagstrom leads the way going into the final eight.

Triple-sized starting stacks

With a starting stack of 150,000 and 90 minute blinds starting at 400/800, it seemed unlikely that anyone would be eliminated during Day 1. However, by the end of a gruelling day of poker there were four casualties heading for the rail. Steve Zolotow was the first to go halfway through level five during the Stud-8 rotation and he was eventually followed by David Singer, Dan Shak and Alexander Kostritsyn.

Day 2 saw another 38 players lose their stacks including Daniel Negreanu and ten-time bracelet winner Johnny Chan but 53 still remained and they were lead into Day 3 by 'The Great Dane' Gus Hansen who had managed to turn his 150,000 starting stack into an impressive 680,000 chips.

The remaining 53 players returned to the felt for Day 3 and played down until just 19 of them still had chips at their disposal, meaning that three of them would exit the tournament on Day 4 without reaching the money. It was Russian Vitaly Lunkin, winner of the opening $40,000 tournament, who sat at the top of the leader boards as some of the great players made the walk of shame. Of those not returning for Day 4 included Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein and 2008 H.O.R.S.E winner Scotty Ngyuen, the latter being quoted as saying he will quit poker if he does not win $4,500,000 at the 2009 World Series of Poker.

Frank Kassela is the bubble-boy

Todd Brunson was the first to be eliminated in Day 4, just ten minutes after play got under way and it would take a further two and a half hours until the money bubble finally burst. Frank Kassela was the unfortunate soul to earn the tag 'bubble-boy' when he clashed with Ray Dehkarghani during the Razz rotation and could only make 8-6-5-4-3 which was not enough to beat his opponents 7-6-5-3-A

Not long after British bracelet winner John Kabbaj was eliminated in 16th place, earning him an extra $72,914 to add to his already impressive 2009 WSOP winnings of $680,073. Slowly but surely the field thinned out and when Gus Hansen exited in 9th spot when he lost a big multi-way pot during the Omaha-8 rotation, the final table was set and each of the surviving players would be guaranteed at least $162,382.

The final table resumes at 1400 Las Vegas time (2200 UK Time) where play will continue until the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E World Champion is crowned, earning them $1,276,802.

The seating and chip counts are as follows:

Seat 1 - Ville Wahlbeck - 645,000
Seat 2 - Erik Sagstrom - 3,675,000
Seat 3 - John Hanson - 1,700,000
Seat 4 - Huck Seed - 1,380,000
Seat 5 - Vitaly Lunkin - 2,490,000
Seat 6 - David Bach - 2,345,000
Seat 7 - Erik Seidel - 965,000
Seat 8 - Chau Giang - 1,075,000