PLO is his jam.
Daniel Negreanu has never made a secret of the fact that the game he most enjoys playing these days comes with four hole cards rather than two.
And he went to town in the $100K PLO High Roller at the WSOP today, riding a wave to the top – albeit briefly – of a stacked leaderboard.
As you’d expect from a $100K – the second biggest buy-in of the summer – the field was full of killers.
Jason Koon, Alex Foxen, Nick Schulman, Eelis Pärssinen, Stephen Chidwick… the list goes on.
But there was one player you wouldn’t recognize.
No fairytale ending for Mellon
Phillipp Mellon parlayed a $120 satellite all the way up to his $100K seat today.
We doubt you’ve heard of him before. He doesn’t even have a Hendon Mob page.
But, as is the beauty of poker, he found his buy-in and sat down with the best players in the world.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a fairytale ending. Mellon briefly took the chip lead and was the first player in the event to hit over 1 million chips. Then he ran top two pair into a flopped set held by Spaniard Sergio Martinez Gonzalez and was eliminated midway through Day 1.
Negreanu wasn’t even in the tournament when Mellon hit the rail.
He made his entrance at the dinner break and went to work quickly. Within two hours he had more than tripled his 600K starting stack, thanks to an aces vs. aces hand that saw him eliminate Jeremy Druckman with a turned straight and a rivered nut flush.
When PLO is fun, it’s fun.
Martirosian on a charge
Negreanu couldn’t hold his lead at the top.
Instead, Artur Martirosian found a sun run to end with a stack of over 5.8 million.
Negreanu bagged fifth of 19 from a field of 50. That’s way down from last year when 36 players bagged from a field of 88.
Late reg is getting ever more popular and players have got until 2:15pm on Wednesday to enter. It will take a significant late surge to get close to last year's field of 121 entries, which gave winner Shaun Deeb a prize of nearly $3 million.
$100K PLO High Roller top ten stacks
- Artur Martirosian (Russia): 5,815,000
- Sean Winter (USA): 3,695,000
- Joni Jouhkimainen (Finland): 2,160,000
- Alex Foxen (USA): 2,040,000
- Daniel Negreanu (Canada): 1,990,000
- Philip Sternheimer (UK): 1,820,000
- Lautaro Guerra (Spain): 1,510,000
- Sergio Martinez Gonzalez (Spain): 1,485,000
- Santhosh Suvarna (India): 1,390,000
- Robert Cowen (UK): 1,300,000
