WPT Championship Continues, Super High Roller Already Settled

The WPT Championship’s final table competition began just before 5pm today. It took approximately 4 ½ hours to reach the heads-up portion of the event, and those final two Championship hopefuls were still duking it out at the time this article was written. One other important WPT event was already settled in Las Vegas tonight when Erik Seidel took down yet another Super High Roller.

The WPT Super High Roller event featured a hefty $100,000 buy in, but that didn’t deter 29 players from ponying up the necessary pile of cash. Among those competing for the $1,092,000 top prize were previous high roller winners like Erick Lindgren, Daniel Negreanu, Vivek Rajkumar, Erik Seidel and Sam Trickett. Any of these players could have reasonably been expected to win, but the action between Negreanu and Seidel was especially tense since a Seidel win would mean that the longtime pro and recent Hall of Famer would displace the Canadian Kid Poker in the top spot on the lifetime earnings list.

After two days of play, the field was finally narrowed to five, officially hitting the bubble with a stacked field of the following pros remaining: Justin Bonomo, Erick Lindgren, Daniel Negreanu, Vivek Rajkumar and Erik Seidel. Bonomo was out first, but his fifth place finish was good enough to double his money. Rajkumar went next leaving the very tense trio of Seidel, Lindgren and Negreanu. Negreanu did his best to thwart Seidel’s seemingly inevitable victory, but he still hit the rail in third. That finish was good for a $448,320 payout, but the check wasn’t enough to keep Seidel from soaring to the top of the lifetime earnings leaderboard with his eventual Super High Roller win. Lindgren, for his part, earned $700,500.

Many of the Super High Roller competitors stayed at the Bellagio to watch the WPT Championship, but the number of spectators dwindled as the battle continued on late into the night. The players that have already lost their final table seats, in order of elimination, are: Justin Young, Tony Gargano, Roger Teska and Galen Hall. Despite starting the day with the second smallest stack – and even dropping into the bottom position more than once – Bonyadi had one of the most incredible short stack sessions in the history of the game, staging a true coup to beat early favorite Galen Hall for a spot in the heads-up portion of the event. We’ll be back tomorrow to reveal the 2011 WPT Championship winner.

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