Home / Poker News October 2011 / 2011 WSOPE Kicks Off
2011 WSOPE Kicks Off
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2011-10-09 10:58
The first event of the
2011 WSOP-E, the €2,500 NL Holdem 6-handed tournament got underway, having attracted a starting field of 360 players. The number of registrants eclipsed last year’s 244 players who bellied up to the tables at the start of the same event. Phil Laak won it then.
8 levels of play were squeezed into day 1, and it turned out to be an extremely productive day indeed: when the action was called, around two thirds of the field was gone.
French players, the home crowd, were present in great numbers. Even though the identity of the eventual chip leader wasn’t known till the last couple of hands of the day, eventually it was one of the home boys who rose to the top. Flavien Guenan overtook Benjamin Pollack over the home stretch, to clinch the provisional chip lead.
Pollack looked like he had this one in the bag as the end of the day approached. He had eliminated Nicolas Levi, picking up a massive pot and seemingly locking up the chip lead.
In the said hand, Levi kicked off the preflop action, and Pollack was keen to jump in, holding a Q,J. The flop fell Q,J,4 and Pollack checked to spring the trap. The turn fell the 7c and Pollack yet again checked patiently. The As fell on the river and Levi checked yet again. Pollack had to get something moving so he fired out a bet which got re-raised by Levi. In response, Pollack shoved all-in and Levi made the call. He never showed his hand.
Flavien Guenan still had a word to say in the matter of the provisional chip leader though. He was involved in a hand with Alessandro Speranza, and that hand ended up in an all-in from both players. Guenan’s Ah, Jh triumphed, and by that time no one else was playing. That very pot gave Guenan the chip lead, albeit by only 2,375 chips.
