Day 6 of the 2011 World Series of Poker Main Event has been a nail-biter, offering up more excitement than any of the previous days during this event. We went from 142 players to 57 on this most recent day of action, and with these eliminations came several levels of increases in payouts– while the players who went home today may be disappointed that they didn’t nab the bracelet, most will be poud that they managed to make a substantial money finish in the world’s largest poker competition.
Ryan Lenaghan is now the chip leader (where did he come from?) with 12,865,000 chips, a healthy lead over the rest of the competition, although he wasn’t the first player to break 10 million during this event– that distinction goes to Phil Collins (again, not the frontman for Genesis), who dominated the action today and sent multiple players to the rail. His first victim was Giuseppe Pastura, who didn’t make his flush draw and gave Collins another 2.1 million. After defeating Matthew Mantman, Collins had almost 7 million and was ready to take down Joseph Cheong, who vaulted Collins to 8.5 million. Thirty minutes later (you would think that players would keep away from Collins at this point, but apparently not), Collins bested Lance Steinberg with a straight and hit the 10 million chip mark. At the end of the day, Collins settled into fifth place with 7,240,000 chips and a good chance to be one of the eight players who cashes at over a million dollars today.
Behind Lenaghan in the race for first is Ben Lamb with 9,980,000. Ben Lamb has captured first place in another race today– he’s officially overtaken Phil Hellmuth’s lead for the 2011 World Series of Poker Player of the Year race. The Poker Brat will have to head to WSOP Europe for the seven events held there later this year if he wants a shot at PoY this year– but no doubt Ben Lamb will be there, too, fighting just as hard. After Lamb are Matt Giannetti (7,940,000), Andrey Pateychuk (7,255,000), Phil Collins, who is surely tired of every media source commenting on his name for the last two days, Hilton Laborda (7,160,000), Nelson Robinson (6,420,000), Tri Hunyh (6,295,000), and Aleksandr Mozhnyakov, who once held a chip lead and is still holding out to round off the top nine with 6,070,000. If you’ve been following the WSOP action, you know that there have been a lot of changes to the chip leaders from day to day– only three of the players currently in the top ten were there yesterday.
After the dinner break, both Erick Lindgren and Ben Lamb came back to find that WSOP and ESPN had moved them to the featured table– when they counted their chips, both players believed that they were short. WSOP officials report watching the video to make sure that all the chips transferred correctly, but Lindgren was less than happy about the situation and tweeted that they shouldn’t move someone’s chips without the individual present.
Some impressive players hit the rail today, including two of the three remaining female players: Amanda Musumeci left with $130,997, and Claudia Crawford took home $76,146. Erika Moutinho is the one remaining female player with around 2.1 million chips, and she will head off against her boyfriend, David Sands, who holds 2.7 million chips at the end of Day 6. Other notables no longer in play are Jean-Robert Bellande and Allen Cunningham, who both left with $108,412, Sorel Mizzi ($64,531), and Eli Elezra, with $54,851.