Over the weekend there will inevitably be a lot of focus on the WSOP-APAC Main Event which is scheduled to finish on Monday the 15th of April. As the working population in the UK were getting set up for what would hopefully be a fun-filled Friday, Day 2 of the Main Event was already well underway down under. The number of players still left in the tournament, as you would expect, was huge, making it impossible to predict how it will pan out. However, any UK poker fan having a fly check of the updates before 9.30am would have seen a familiar poker name up to his usual antics.
Charles Chua was being bounced out of the event and Sam Trickett was the main who bounced him to the rail. This success moved Trickett on to a level of around 55,000 chips. This is way short of the top of the leader board but with plenty of poker left to play, this is not a state that should be causing any alarm or panic at this moment in time!
Trickett has a long way to go
While Trickett is playing around with about 50,000 chips the top players have got a lot more to shout about. At around 9.30am UK time, the chip leader was Rupert Elder who carried 204,000 chips. Behind him was Erik Seidel who had 175,000 chips and then Victor Teng who carried 161,000 chips. In fourth place was Feroz Khan who had 160,000 chips and in fifth place was Phil Ivey. Ivey held 155,000 chips and was looking strong to continue in the Main Event. It is fair to say that Ivey has been having a whale of a time in the past week or so and he must be brimming with confidence at the moment.
There are plenty of observers that will say that Ivey is the best poker player around at the moment but on Wednesday down under, he managed to win the WSOP-APAC $2,200 Mixed Event. The man wins poker tournaments, that is no real surprise or shock and some would say that it is hardly news but there was a bigger element to come out of this victory. This win earned Ivey his ninth WSOP bracelet, pushing him closer to the top. If Ivey can pick up another poker bracelet, and not many people would bet against this, he will move to ten WSOP bracelets, the same level as Johnny Chan and Doyle Brunson. This would see Ivey sitting in joint second place in all-time career bracelet wins and he would move closer to the overall leader.
Could Ivey become the bracelet leader?
Phil Hellmuth may be sitting rather pretty on 13 bracelets but the way things are going for Ivey, he may well be in the running to bag some more bracelets in the near future. He has also had some success in his private life of late with the Supreme Court of Nevada stating that ruling of Ivey’s court case will stand. This has hung over Ivey for a year and a half and the positive resolution for the poker player may have helped to put him in a more positive frame of mind for the WSOP-APAC event. It is not as if Ivey needs any further assistance when it comes to poker tournaments but to use the old saying, he may have won a watch and in turn, this helped him to bag another bracelet!
It’s good news for Phil but with Sam Trickett hanging on in there, there is still good news for UK poker fans looking for an interest in the WSOP-APAC Main Event. There are a couple of high profile poker events taking place in Manchester and London this weekend so if you want to get out and about, you can. We’ve looked at them on site in the past few days, so all the information you need is here and of course, there will be plenty of online poker events to look forward to too. UK players did rather well on PokerStars last Sunday and you can bet there will be plenty of players keen to emulate that success this weekend.