We’re down to double digits at the 2012 WSOP Main Event. After starting the day with 282, just 97 players still have their eyes on the $8.5M first prize. They’re all guaranteed $62,000 and every pay jump is at least $10,000 from here on in, so every decision is huge, especially for the amateurs who’ll have half their focus on getting as good a pay day as possible by hanging on at the money jumps which come every 9 places.

Those who fell today included Andrew Lichtenberger in 221st, Freddy Deeb in 211th, JP Kelly in 203rd, Dan Shak in 167th, a despondent Daniel Negreanu in 160th, Sorel Mizzi in 151st, John Phan in 149th, Joseph Cheong in 116th (his worst performance in 3 years!), and Marcel Luske in 102nd.

The remaining players have an average stack of right around 2 million with the blinds set to go to 20,000/40,000 so things are beginning to close in on the remaining players and the shorter stacks will have to hop into action pretty early tomorrow to avoid getting eaten up. The plan tomorrow is to play down to 27 players or 5 full levels of play, whichever comes first.

So how do the remaining players stack up? Well, the man to catch is Kyle Keranen who is just short of 7 million, slightly ahead of Robert Salaburu on 6.2 M. Day 1 chip leader and French professional Gaelle Baumann is also on the leaderboard sitting with just under 4 M. German pro Jan Heitmann is well placed on 3.4 M, with Eric Buchman sitting right on the average of 2 M, as is David Baker and Dung Nguyen. Other well know names remaining include Jason Somerville who has 1.4 M and Erik Cajelais who has 1.2 M. Vanessa Selbst is gaining the most attention, though with 1.16 M she’s pretty short and will have to get a double up in the first couple of levels to come back into contention. As she pointed out on Twitter, she’s not even in the top 3 women remaining. On the same chip stack is Isaac Baron, with Canadian Gavin Smith in big trouble on 675,000. Dave D’Alesandro who was among the chip leaders in the early days is all the way down on 415,000 and will be looking for two good cards to get his chips in the middle with right from the word go tomorrow.

The action resumes tomorrow at 12 pm.

Author Profile: Rob O’Connor+

written by Rob \\ tags: Final Table, Main Event, Poker, Texas Holdem, World Series of Poker, WSOP