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PokerStars APPT Grand Final – Day 3 report
Posted by: James Carter. - Mon, 2009-12-07 08:28
The third day of the 2009 PokerStars APPT’s Grand Final saw the final table reached. The remaining field was moved from the Star City Casino poker room to the Sports Theatre of the casino, where the 66 players who returned to day 3 action jumped at one another’s throats as soon as the action kicked off.
With a throng of railbirds eating up every morsel of action, Ernst Hermans sailed to the top of the final table leader board. His ride was anything but smooth though. For a while in the beginning, his presence was barely noticeable at the tables. At one moment, near the final table bubble, he was among the short-stacks, looking well on his way out of contention. He then suddenly exploded onto the scene, hitting Jarred Graham for a huge pot that thrust his stack to 1.3 million and eventually put him into the chip lead.
That hand had Hermans’ pocket 10s going up against Graham’s K,Qo, on a board which didn’t improve either of the hands involved. The 1.3 million chips he suddenly found in his stack set Hermans on fire, and he added another 800,000 chips before the day was called.
Tom Grigg, who’d led the
poker tournament on day 2, hung in there nicely too and eventually made it to the final table.
The two were joined by Leo Boxell, Andrew Hiscox, Barry Forrester, Aaron Benton, David Formosa, Wayne Carlson and Thomas Stifka. The final table bubble boy was Jarred Graham, who was eliminated by Forrester. It took the 66 player field 14 hours to work down to the final 9.
Team PokerStars was still present in the game at the start of the day, through Grant Levy and Eric Assadourian. The two representatives of the world’s biggest online poker room were both bounced before the final table bubble.
Assadourian himself was the one who pushed Levy to the brink of elimination. He took a huge pot from him, then failed to put his chips to good use and dropped most of them to Carlson.
Assadourian did make it to the dinner break, but shortly after that Carlson came back to finish him off for good.
