Yorky Pud

The World Poker Tour Bay 101 event is one of the most eagerly anticipated stops on the WPT circuit thanks to the unique format that is played out. At the start of each of the Day 1's there is a “Shooting Star” placed on each table, which is a well-known professional poker player who has a $5,000 bounty on their head, making for an interesting dynamic to the tournament.

Both Day 1's were also played to 60 minute blinds in order to help reduce the field size to a more manageable level but on subsequent days the blinds levels increase to 90 minutes to give a little more room to manoeuvre for the players. Day 1a saw 142 players take to the felt, including 19 Shooting Stars and 57 of them survived the day with chip stacks intact, of which nine were shooting stars. Day 1b saw a bigger crowd of 273 entrants take their seats, with 26 of those being Shooting Stars, and by the time play drew to a close for the day only 117 players (nine bounties) managed to make it through to Day 2.

This meant 170 players returned to the San Jose based casino with a chance of winning one of eighteen $5,000 bounties and the $1,039,000 first place prize. Of the 170 hopefuls only 45 of them were due to be paid meaning the dreaded 46th place was the official money bubble. Nobody wants to be the one to burst the bubble so please spare a thought for Layne Flack who was the man to op it and the last man to go home empty handed. In his final hand he saw the player under the gun raise to 10,500 with blinds at 2,000/4,000/500a and Matthew Berkey call from the small blind. Looking down at JdJs, Flack decided to move all in for a total of 33,500 chips, which was enough to fold out the initial raise by Berkey called holding AcKd. The final board ran out Qc-Ts-2s-4h-Kh eliminating Flack and awarding everyone else at least $15,000. Although Flack will not receive any prize money he did collect three bounties during his time at the felt so does not exactly go home empty handed.

As is usually the case once the bubble has burst there was a flurry of eliminations and within three hours the 45 remaining players were reduced to the final 24, at which point the tournament was paused until 1200 noon Los Angeles time today. Sat atop of the chip counts is Joris Springael who has almost three times the average stack with 1,477,000 chips at his disposal. He is joined in the top three by Alan Sternberg and Vivek Rajkumar, the latter finishing as runner-up at the recent WPT LA Poker Classic.

Each player is now guaranteed $25,800 and there are still three $5,000 bounties on the heads of Kathy Liebert, Mike Sexton and Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, but by the time the final table of six is reached later today they will all be walking away with at least $148,000 and a realistic shot at the $1,039,000 winner's prize.