The November Nine are Set and Phil Ivey is Still in the Mix

Posted by pokerguru on July 17, 2009

After almost 2 full weeks of poker, the Final Table for the 2009 WSOP has been set. Darvin Moon as jumped out to a massive chip lead, but he now has about 4 months to start to think about how he can avoid blowing it. There is still plenty of talent left on the table, most notably Phil Ivey, and he is going to have to keep his head and not let the down time affect how he approached the last session.

The last elimination was a heartbreaker as Jordan Smith was positive he had the best and got slapped right in the teeth when the cards were flipped. Buchman opened for 650,000 and Moon made a smooth call from the button. The next to act was Jordan Smith on the small blind and he fired out a huge raise to make it 2,600,000 to go. Buchman immediately folded and Moon once again made the call. The flop came out all babies, 8c4d2d. Smith probably put Moon and a mid pair and checked to set up a check-raise. Moon bit and fired out 4,000,000 at which point Smith moved all in. The read was right, but unfortunately the mid pair that Moon has was 88 and he had flopped a set.

The turn card made things interesting as a 5h hit and now gave Smith 4 additional outs as he could hit an inside straight. 7 cards stood in the way of the final table being named. The river cards fell harmlessly as a 10h was turned and Smith was shown to the rail. He has $896,730 to console him, but even that may not be enough as he has the dubious pleasure of being bubbled on the final table of a WSOP Main Event.

The pace of play was actually a rather large surprise. 27 players started the day and with what was at stake, you would have thought that the players would have slowed things down a bit. That was hardly the case as it took only 20 minutes to get the first casualty of the day. One of the disappointments for the fans was when Anotonio Esfandiari went out early. He has a rather large television fan base and is great for the table when he is playing. At this point, the only true super star remaining was Phil Ivey.

Ivey never seemed to get going on the day, in fact he dropped about 2,000,000 from his starting total, but he did manage to avoid elimination and we all know anything can happen on a final table. You can bet he will try and find out everything he can about his 8 opponents before they all sit down for a friendly SNG tournament from November 7th – 10th.

Here are the final table chip counts for the November Nine:

Darvin Moon – 58,930,000