Home / Poker News December 2009 / PokerStars WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic – Darryll Fish leads
PokerStars WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic – Darryll Fish leads
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2009-12-16 06:47
The high stakes poker community has convened for a last 2009 reunion at the Bellagio where the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic is currently underway. The last event of the
PokerStars World Poker Tour’s 2009 calendar, the tournament once again attracted a field full of illustrious names.
So many of the big name pros were present in fact, that he high stakes tables at PokerStars
and
Full Tilt poker saw almost no action due to the WPT tourney’s kick-off. 292 players showed up for the event, truly the cream of the crop of the poker world. The buy-in was a steep $15,000 which means the prize-pool will reach a respectable size too.
Phil Laak, Doyle Brunson, Jennifer Tilly, Matt Stout, Antoine Saout and Cornel Andrei Cimpan were all there, not to mention defending champion David Rheem.
Darryll Fish was the one most successful players in the early going, racking up a nice chip stack and clinching the provisional chip lead too.
The Magician, Antonio Esfandiari did pretty well too. He took his 60,000 chip starting hand and ran it right up to around 200k, together with Carlos Mortensen and Jon Turner.
Another player to do well was Billy Kopp. Kopp took out none other than Daniel Negreanu to build up a top 10 worthy stack. In a three way hand, he had pocket Js going up against Negreanu’s pocket 10s and another guy’s pocket Ks. Lady Luck was with him this time though as he hit a set on the flop to send Negreanu packing and to take up position among the top 10 players of the
poker tournament.
Cory Caroll made the top 10 too, having amassed a stack of 184,025 chips, enough for 7th place. Justin Tazelaar hovered around in 8th with 169,200, followed by Nashaat Antonius, with 164,100 and David Peat, with 160,000.
David “Chino” Rheem’s title defense didn’t last long. The reigning champion ran into problems on the third level of play. He got bounced by chip leader Fish after he flopped a set of threes and shoved all-in on them. Fish had the nut straight though and Rheem’s run in the PokerStars WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic was over before it effectively began.
