Adam Walton is living the absolute dream right now as he heads into first place as the chip leader by a considerable margin. His 143,800,000 chips are good enough for an outrageous 120 big blinds as the final nine players will become four by the end of the day.
Final table seat draw
Seat 1: Steven Jones, United States, 90,300,000
Seat 2: Juan Maceiras, Spain, 68,000,000
Seat 3: Daniel Holzner, Italy, 31,900,000
Seat 4: Adam Walton, United States, 143,800,000
Seat 5: Ruslan Prydryk, Ukraine, 50,700,000
Seat 6: Dean Hutchison, United Kingdom, 41,700,000
Seat 7: Toby Lewis, United Kingdom, 19,800,000
Seat 8: Daniel Weinman, United States, 81,700,000
Seat 9: Jan-Peter Jachtmann, Germany, 74,600,000
Walton's been one of the bigger stacks in the field since Day 3 and admittedly expected to drop off at some point. He didn't.
Every poker player's dream is to make it to the Main Event final table and most people would probably have trouble sleeping or be a little bit frazzled. Walton, on the other hand, is cool as the other side of the pillow.
"I'm feeling pretty good. Honestly, it still feels like a dream. I don't know when it'll sink in that this is real life. It's pretty fun.
"Last night and this morning have actually been the first time I've been able to sleep. Early on in the tournament, I was fine. I had loads of chips but didn't have any real expectations. As you get deeper, it gets a little tougher to sleep but last night I finally got some sleep so now I'm excited to get up and play."
Walton's rail is huge in numbers and was one of the loudest in the room on Day 8. Going into the final table, Walton's rail showed up at least 50 people deep and were the first ones to enter the hall at 12:45pm local time.
However, the Seattle native has warned everyone that something crazy is about to go down.
"You haven't seen anything yet. Everybody's flying in. It's going to be wild."
Walton is also the proud holder of Cody Daniels rock. After Daniels, who is terminally ill, busted the Main Event, he passed the rock on to the player who busted him, requesting that he do the same. Not only did Daniels' wish that the rock would make it to the final table become fulfilled, Walton took the time to speak to him on his day off.
"I got a chance to speak to Cody this morning (Saturday). It was a rock that was really personal to him and poker is something that's his lifelong dream and one of his passions, so he wanted something to get to the final table.
"He was expecting that somebody would put it in their pocket or it would get lost. Luckily, I was fortunate to end up with it.
"I hadn't heard of the story at first. It was passed onto me at the end of Day 6 or 7. But the person who gave it to me explained it and I got an understanding of what it was all about."
Walton has a huge piece of himself, telling Poker.Org that he has a 79.5% stake of himself, though he was in discussions to sell 10% at face ICM value, which would put a guaranteed $579,445.90 in his pocket before final table play begins.
Despite the big money potential, Walton says he doesn't have any future plans yet.
"This is going to be the most boring answer ever: I haven't even considered what I'm going to do with the money because the difference between finishing 9th ($900,000) and finishing 1st ($12,100,000). I'll thing about it whenever I bust/win.
"I've sold 20.5% of myself to friends. I usually sell off half a percent to 1% at face to a bunch of my friends. A couple of my friends have a little bit more from swaps."
For what it's worth, last year's Main Event champion Espen Jorstad had a little over 56% of himself.
Those watching at home can tune into the PokerGO live stream, which is set to begin at about 3pm local time.
