Rast went on to win his first WSOP bracelet in that event and now he is on course to add a second piece of poker jewellery to his wrist in another $1,500 tournament, Event #9 the $1,500 No Limit Hold'em Re-Entry tournament.
As far as we know Rast purposely entered this event and it looks like he means business because when play resumes at 13:00 Las Vegas time (21:00 UK time) he will be the overwhelming chip leader with just 33 players remaining. Rast's 1,498,000 stack contains over 400,000 more chips than his nearest rivals Ryan Olisar and Scott Seiver and he is certainly the hot favourite going into Day 3 as he knows how to play a big stack - remember he entered the final table of his first bracelet win holding 30% of the chip in play.
Part of Rast's monster stack was in the hands of former November nine member James Akenhead but the Brit soon lost his chips to Rast's run-good. Rast told the PokerNews Live Reporting team that he had raised to 16,000 from under the gun and then called when Akenhead, on the button, three-bet to 38,000. The pair shared a flop reading 10x-7x-2x, Rast checked, Akenhead bet 40,000 and Rast called. The turn was 8x and Rast checked again but this time, when Akenhead bet 55,000 Rast check-raised all-in. Akenhead called off his last 175,000 and turned over a pair of aces in the process which were in front of Rast's pair of nines. Rast was a 3:1 underdog but when you are running well cards just leap out of the deck at you and when the river was a jack, completing Rast's straight, nobody in the room was surprised.
From that point on Rast never looked back and he managed to add more than 600,000 more chips to his stack by the time play came to an end. Although Rast is the clear favourite you cannot rule out the chances of some of the chasing pack. The aforementioned Seiver is an amazing poker talent and the likes of former WSOP Main Event champion Jonathan Duhamel, Ari "BodogAri" Engel, Paul Wasicka and Britain's Sam Grafton will all have a say in where the bracelet ends up in this event. It should be quite the spectacle.
Each of the 33 surviving players has now locked up a minimum cash of $18,427 but by the time the nine-handed final table has been set this amount will have increased to $59,969.
Event #9 Top 10 Chip Counts
1st: Brian Rast - 1,498,000
2nd: Ryan Olisar - 1,080,000
3rd: Scott Seiver - 1,031,000
4th: Aviraham Lovton - 872,000
5th: Jonathan Duhamel - 840,000
6th: Derrick Huang - 682,000
7th: Duy Ho - 675,000
8th: Barry Hutter - 647,000
9th: Greg Mueller - 615,000
10th: Ashkan Razavi - 614,000