Until now, the Series had been moving at a nice light pace, but with our first final table and the introduction of two more events, the action moved to full throttle. ESPN was filming event 1 for their broadcast, and they lucked into a doozy; four pros hi-lighted the beginning of the day; by the end, a new record had been broken.
At twenty-one years, eleven days, Steven “Mr. Smokey” Billinakis became the youngest player in history to win a bracelet. It was the fourth year in a row the record had been broken, with Gavin Griffin, Eric Froehlich and Jeff Madsen setting the record in 2004, ’05 and ’06 respectively. Obviously the biggest story of the day, the Billinakis victory was just one of many goings on;
- Event 3, $1,500 NL Hold’em, saw its field reduced to nine players. The runaway leader is last year’s USPC champion Alex Jacob, who has almost twice as many chips as anyone else, and three times more than all but the second place Paul Evans.
- Event 4, $1,500 pot-limit Hold’em, started with 781 players, working its way down to 48 before the day was done. Amongst the chip-leaders is Jean-Robert Bellande, who is rumored to be on the next season of Survivor.
- Event 5, #2,500 Omaha/7-Stud hi/lo got under way. A strong field whose top ten includes Cyndy Violette, Mike Matusow, Mel Judah, Andrew Black, Jen Harman, Josh Arieh and David Benyamine will be working its way down to nine on the event’s second day.
The Billinakis-Mueller final was a see saw battle that took over two hours to complete. Three times, Mueller had the kid on the ropes only to have Billinakis fight his way back with key pots as key moments. Finally, Billinakis took the lead and kept it.
Playing limit on the 157th hand of final table play, Mueller raised his button to T200,000. Billirakis reraised and Mueller moved all-in for T325,000. Billirakis made the call, showing Ks-2d. Mueller showed 5d-4d. The flop came Qh-Jd-2s, pairing Billirakis’ deuce. The turn card was 8h, the river Qs. The win and the record belonged to Billirakis.
Gary Wise
gary@wisehandpoker.com
