CORRECTION
Joe Hachem, along with Peter Eastgate, are the only remaining Main Event winners still alive in the field.
And when talking about which Big Name Players are still in it, PokerNews.com could only compile the following short list:
Phil Ivey
Ludovic Lacay
Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier
Tom Schneider
James Akenhead
Joe Hachem
What about all these guys?
[ul]
[li]Jeff Shulman[/li][li]Dennis Phillips[/li][li]Antonio Esfandiari[/li][li]Joe Sebok[/li][li]David Benyamine[/li][li]Kenny Tran[/li][li]JC Tran[/ul][/li]
The Trans and Benyamine are pretty well known names right? Phillips has a ME final table under his belt also. Sebok is the son of a legend and Antonio has been on TV tournaments a lot, not recently that I know of, but still.
Ahh yes, the Trans most certainly should have been listed. Not too sure about Dennis Phillips… other than being a November Niner last year, has he done much else?
Esfandiari and Benyamine should have still got mentions as well.
In my defence, I was just reposting the list that was put up on pokernews.com…
Some of the hand histories coming out of news sites are ridiculous. Like the guy who was the first to hit 4m chips, both players were in on a ragged flop with a weak overpair and overcards/fd when they were both like 150-200 bets deep. It’s retarded. Everyone seems to be playing like they have an M of 6 and it’s an online turbo S&G.
I want to contest the notion, by the way, that “pros” rarely make the final table anymore. Over recent years, the idea of “poker pro” and “poker player I’ve seen on ESPN” a lot have merged into one thing. But most of the players who make it deep are pros - of the last 2 years, IIRC, 16 of 19 players at the final tables were pros.
I’ve started to use the term “poker celebrity” to refer to “name” players to avoid that sort of thing.
Nice, tournament life on the line in the most important spot you’ll ever be in, and you can’t be bothered to cover your cards. Smooth. She should’ve been ejected for all star dumbness.
Well thanks for coming to my defense when it first got brought up!
Sorry, I don’t remember noticing any dispute about the subject, but I may have just been skimming through the thread.
My number should be X out of 18, since the FT is 9 players. I think it was 16 - may have been 15.
Incidentally, out of the 2 remaining former champs, Ivey, or Benyamine, guess how many made the two feature tables? None. They picked some table full of unknowns. Weird.
Blinds are 10/20k at this point:
Wtf is this, a $10 s&g? I would’ve never guessed there was such terrible play at this stage of the WSOP.
This is “someone stake me for 10k, because if this is the level of competition with 100 left in the WSOP, I’m ++++++++EV” bad.
sigh I am such a noob, that I can’t even tell good from bad play.
Mr. Beef, could I trouble you to explain in gross detail the inner intricacies of the two hands you posted? I want to learn and learning from other’s mistakes is a good way to do so, right?
Hand One: The bad play is from two people right? Buchman going all-in preflop when the blinds, in relation to his chips, doesn’t mandate he do so and the second mistake was Balmigere calling a raise and call with a mere paif of 9s.
Right?
Hand Two: Cook made the mistake of calling a raise and call with mere 5s. Right? He also should have bet the river correct? He’s got a fucking full house and he “can’t do it”? Right?
I am leaving for a while, so go ahead and take your time crafting a response. 
Aces and Threes? or
[nitpick]
Kings and threes?
[/nitpick]
Seems unwise to be calling with top pair and top kicker with a player behind you, twice. Having a bet and a call probably scared COOK into only calling after flop and the turn.
Yeah - PokerNews’ error, not mine, but I should’ve pointed this out.
Sure. Any analysis will be incomplete because I’m not aware of everyone’s stack sizes, their play in previous hands/image, any tell information other players may have, etc. But in these cases there are such huge gaping fundamental errors.
In the first hand, Buchman has 30 big blinds. The final pot turns out to be 85 BB, so I’m estimating the other 2 stacks to be roughly equal.
Open-shoving anything with 30BB is not a good idea, unless you’re trying to play some metagame with another player, ie you have aces and they’re 100% sure you’d never massively overbet with aces, so they call. It’s pointless - you’re risking 30 bets to win a little under 2 bets (including antes). You’ve tightened up the ranges of potential callers - good players will require a better hand to get involved here because the odds you’re laying them are so poor. So you’re likely beat if called, or at best, against a coin flip. For your tournament life. So you can attempt to steal about 1/20th the amount you’re risking.
If you open up for some reasonable amount, you’re far more likely to get calls from hands you dominate, and you’ll have a chance to see a flop and play intelligently from there, increasing your options.
Now, onto the guy who called with tens. With a guy open shoving, is this really a good spot for you? How often is he doing this with a pair you beat? Often you’re either dominated to two outs yourself here, or at best a coin flip - given that the pot is only laying you something like 1.1-1, and there are very few situations in which you are ahead, why get involved at all?
The worst play is the 99 overcall. The same logic applies about the original raiser - but now you have a player who, having had the same concerns, decided to call anyway - presumably with a good hand. So the odds that your 99 here is beating anything are significantly lower than it was for the previous caller. What are you hoping for here, the relatively rare situation of AK vs AK before you? You’ve got 30 bets and there’s no need for desperation, you’ve got all day to pick your spots. To put most or all of your chips on the line in a situation where you’re very very rarely ahead, against two people where at least one of them is extremely likely to have you drawing to 2 outs, is staggeringly bad play.
Essentially - everyone has 25+ bets here - that’s plenty of play - there’s no need for desperation. And yet everyone is playing like they have 8 bets.
“A huge pot just went down on Blue #30. It was raised preflop from early position by Fernando Gordo to 56,000. Bertrand Grospellier, Scott Cook and Don Tran all called the raise, creating a 4-way pot with more than 225,000 chips in it before a single community card came down.”
Weak open raise that, with antes, practically compels at least the BB to call, but not a big mistake.
“The flop was {3-Hearts} {5-Diamonds} {K-Spades}. Gordo, the preflop raiser, had to act first. He bet 155,000 and got calls from Grospellier and Cook both. Only Tran folded.”
Pretty standard continuation bet here. I don’t know if Grospellier is going for a trap here, but the standard play is to raise. For Cook, it’s a pretty safe flop against the hands his opponents would call a raise with, and being in position, he can trap. It is suprising, between three players with very strong hands that more money didn’t go into the flop. But no huge gaping mistakes yet.
“The turn {3-Diamonds} paired the board. Gordo fired another 250,000 into the middle. Again Grospellier and Cook both called, creating a gigantic pot of almost 1.5 million chips heading into the river {8-Diamonds}.”
It’s hard to say here whether mistakes are made without knowing the stack sizes - if either of the players with AK are short here, it would be very passive to play this way. Cook has practically a dead lock on this hand.
“Gordo, perhaps sensing something amiss, finally slowed down. He checked. Grospellier also checkd, bringing the action to Cook.”
Betting it down and getting called by two players twice will make you see monsters under the bed. But checking is weak - what hands could your opponents have that now beat you? 88 is unlikely to have made 2 calls post flop (especially with 3 players). A hand with a 3 is unlikely to have called preflop and on the flop. K8 is very unlikely to call twice with an overcaller. So what are the plausible hands that have you beat? 33 (unlikely quads), 55, KK (unlikely for the same reason - all kings would be out there). Runner diamonds? Small chance of something like KQd calling you down.
This is another spot where the stack sizes are very relevant. If the stack sizes are such that you’re committed to making a call, then you may as well bet - most of the few hands that have you beat here already had you beat. Unless you’re confident you can get a weaker hand to bluff the river, you may as well try to extract value.
Grosspellier checking here is pretty weak for the same reason - his hand figures to be very likely best and he has even less of a chance at inducing a bluff, with only one player behind him.
Cook has trapped perfectly. Everything has gone his way. If he rattles off a 500k bet here, a huge range of hands from either or both players would be forced to call. A large portion of the hand ranges they can hold will also call off a million bet, especially since it looks like it may be a positional steal. The possibility that he’s beat here is extremely slim. Neither player has 88 here - they’re not calling down with that. So the only hand that can beat you here is KK. The fact that Grosspellier called even with an overcaller, twice, suggests there’s a good chance he has a king, making Buchman’s chances of having kings even slimmer. And unless he (Buchman) has a solid read that he can induce a bluff, he’s not going to check the river when he beats anything but quad threes. Given the way the hand has transpired to this point, it’s likely a bet would get a caller - which reduces his chances of trying to induce a bluff two fold - both in that if he bets, he’s likely to get a call, and if he doesn’t bet, the other players will be too scared to bluff against two players - and given the probable amount of chips involved, neither can bet a significant enough fraction of the pot to scare off a call.
So the odds of Cook not having the best hand here are probably less than 2%. So there’s a 98% chance he has them by the balls, and one or both have a strong enough hand to call - it’s not as if there was a draw friendly board that didn’t get there that was inducing them to call. So he has a dream spot - huge pot, almost guaranteed best hand, and a good position of looking like a position steal - and he… checks.
Astoundingly bad play.
Cool, thanks for the analysis with the given info. 
Also, I leave for three hours and look at these huge bust outs I miss!
Hachem, Benyamine, ELKY, and JC Tran!
Am I missing something obvious in the Pokernews LiveReporting. If I want to catch up on the reports, in sequential order, I got to go to the last page, and go backwards, and then bottom to top of the page.
It just seems as though it is back-ass backwards.
Start at page 19, and then go to page 18, at the bottom of the page and work myself upwards.
You are doing it correctly. The newest event on a page is at the top and it “pushes” down the second most recent.
So yeah, Ivey is 4th in chips with five million even. Antonio Esfandiari (!!!) is one place above Phil.
Lacay is above both of them, unlike ELKY who couldn’t hold on to his lead and busted out earlier. Other big name bust outs being Eastgate and Kenny Tran.
So yeah, the aforementioned Ivey, Lacay and Esfandiari are still in. Phillips, Sebok (just barely) and Schneider are still in as big names.
Am I missing any other “big name” still left?
Prahlad Friedman busted. He was the guy I was rooting for. I used to watch him destroy 25-50 and 50-100 NL games.
I’d like to see Esfandiari go deep. He’s shown flashes of really good skill at time - but on HSP he’s always playing scared money, playing off a small shared bankroll and he’s too risk averse. If he builds his own legit roll here, he could be interesting in the future.
I really hate watching Esfandiari play, on TV at least. His chatterbox style annoys me to no end and I cannot figure why. It perplexes me because I enjoy Negreanu’s chatterbox play, though I dislike the stream-of-conscious style in general. Esfandiari just manages to do it more annoyingly than everyone else.
Or it’s just me. shrugs
More importantly though, Phil Ivey. With his chip lead and so few players left in the field, how does this tournament not belog to him? I know he’s gone very deep in the past only to be completely wrecked by the eventual winner. Happened with Moneymaker and Raymer at the very least. I think Raymer wrecked Ivey on the way to his win. Memory fuzzy.
Ivey was 2nd in chips one year going into the final 27 and busted 27th. The structure this year is pretty good - not as good as it used to be, but better than the last few years - which allows the best players to get an edge. But any single tournament is very much the short term and things can change fast. Lots of change happens at this stage of the tournament. He’s still maybe a 12-1 shot to win it.