Damian Salas leads the field going into the final table of the World Poker Tour World Online Championship Main Event.
The Argentinian pro has already got $2,687,964 in live cashes under his money belt. Half of that comes from a deep run to 7th place in the 2017 WSOP Main Event. If he takes down first place tomorrow it will be his biggest live win ever at $1,715,667.
Salas also has another $5.5 million in recorded online earnings.
Having come so close to a bracelet so recently, he will no doubt be eyeing up that WPT title with more title-lust than any other player at the table.
Day 3 begins
Day 3 was a much brusquer affair than Day 2 or the initial flights that led into it.
Days 1a and 1b pruned the players down from 1,011 entries to just 156. Day 2 brought that down to 24. Day 3 had the comparatively easy task of getting 24 down to a final 9.
Salas started the day without much in the way of chips. But he found himself in a few good spots and soon rose up through the ranks.
Ole Shemion was the first out on Day 3. He made $59k for his 24th place finish.
Georgios Zisimopoulos (19th for $58,638) and Claas Segebrecht (11th for $103,122) were some of the bigger names to follow Shemion out over the course of the day.
The day's play ended when the final table bubble broke. Artur Martirosian was the last person to hit the bricks — 10th place for $103,122.
State of play
Salas is well poised to make hay when the sun comes up on tomorrow’s final table.
However, the remaining nine players are not a soft field. Although very few of them have the same consistent results as Salas, plenty of them have shown the ability to run deep in large field tourneys.
Bert Stevens from the UK is the small stack, followed by Hungarian pro László Molnár (another deep ME finisher with 41st at the 2019 WSOP). Above them with a jump in stack size is Dzmitry Urbanovich who is a partypoker sponsored pro.
Teun Mulder wants to believe that his sixth place chip stack will be enough to get him to that $1.7 million. And Blaž Žerjav and Akseli Paalanen both have a handful of WSOP Online cashes and some past form on the European circuits.
Salas won’t be able to be too complacent when play kicks off later today.
All of the players who made this final table are guaranteed at least $127,386, and the table will play down to 1st later today. We will have coverage of the event for you then.
Final table chip counts
1st - Damian Salas - TT37,041,854 (74 big blinds)
2nd - Phillip Mighall - T34,700,063 (69 big blinds)
3rd - Akseli Paalanen - T26,271,276 (53 big blinds)
4th - Blaž Žerjav - T24,168,634 (48 big blinds)
5th - Victor Simionato - T20,057,907(40 big blinds)
6th - Teun Mulder - T19,652,002 (39 big blinds)
7th - Dzmitry Urbanovich - T18,333,036 (37 big blinds)
8th - László Molnár - T11,542,750 (23 big blinds)
9th - Bert Stevens - T10,432,478 (21 big blinds)
