John-Paul Kelly Wins Event 20

Posted by pokerguru on June 12, 2009

The heads up action did not last long as Tschirch got a little aggressive with his A5 and ended up shipping his chips over to Kelly. This table had been playing quickly all night long so it was no surprise at how fast these two got the championship settled. Tschirch will get $120,102 for 3 days work, but that is little comfort for getting to heads up and coming up short at the WSOP.

The final hand had Tschirch on the button and raising to 55,000. Kelly came over the top and made it 150,000 to go. Tschirch made the call to a flop of 8c5d4s. Kelly put out another 155,000 and Tschirch again made the call. Kelly upped the ante when a Qc hit the turn and made it 300,000 to go. Tschirch pushed all in and Kelly could not get his chips in there fast enough. When the cards were turned, we saw the reason why, he was sitting on AQ in the hole. This had to be a heart breaker for Tschirch as he had actually hit the flop holding A5 in his hand. The river was a harmless 2c and that was all she wrote. In addition to the bracelet, Kelly takes home $193,434.

In other tournaments…

Event 21 is still motoring along, but it is going to be quite a while before we have a winner in this one. 8 players are still left and James Van Alsytne has almost half of the chips in play with 1,059,000. While he has never won a bracelet, he does have 11 WSOP cashed under his belt and over $500,000 in earnings. It is unlikely the pressure will make him buckle and he should finally get his first WSOP championship.

Event 22 is only about halfway through this round. The No Limit Hold’em Shootout tournament is a SNG masters dream and at the end of the round we will only have 10 players remaining. At this point, there are still about 50 players seated at the table and play is moving along fairly slowly for this type of tournament.

Event 23, the 2-7 Lowball Draw tournament is the buzz saw of the day. They are already down to just 27 players with a lot of short stacks hanging around. Mike ‘The Mouth’ Matusow still has chips in front of him, but he is way down on the leader board. The name to be feared at this point is John Juanda as he can be absolutely deadly with a stack. He is currently sitting at 181,000 and very close to the overall leader.

Another name that is way up on the board that has not been around for some time is Jean-Robert Bellande. You may remember him from a circuit event in 2005 as he was giving Jennifer Harmon the business at the table and he eventually came away with third. He does have a few cashes since, but the closest he has come to winning anything is last year with a second place finish in the Limit Hold’em Shootout.