What to look for on Day 3 of the World Series of Poker Main Event

It’s a bit misleading to call today’s action Day 3 considering there have been six days of poker played at the 2010 WSOP Main Event so far, but this will be the third day of play for each of the remaining players. The field has been cut down from 7,319 entrants to 2,560, all of whom will be trying to be amongst the 747 players who will make the money.

Day 3 will be a moving-day where you will see the big names attempt to position themselves for the win, while the casual players try to hold on and make the money. Typically players start pulling away from the pack on Day 3, and we will likely see a small group jump out to a commanding chip lead.

A number of top pros are doing quite well at the moment including two women who have already had strong 2010 WSOP: Vanessa Selbst, with 265,000 chips, and JJ Liu, with 240,000. They join Poker Pros Cole “CTS” South, Jesper Houaagrd, Johnny Chan, Patrik Antonius, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Sammy Farha, Mike “The Grinder” Mizrachi, Robert Mizrachi, Amanda Baker, Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond, and David “DocSands” Sands, at the top of the leader-board -all the mentioned players have over 200,000 chips.

Lurking a little further down the leader-board, between 100,000 and 200,000 chips, are even more well-known Poker Pros like Amit Makhija, Karina Jett, Jason Mercier, David Benyamine, Robert Varkonyi, Bruce Buffer, Allen Cunninham, Eric Buchman, Vanessa Rousso, Kenny Tran Blair Rodman, Zachery Clark, Humberto Brenes, Bernard Lee, Frank Kasella, Hank Azaria, Chris Bell, Ross Boatman, Praz Bansi, Matt Matros, Corwin Cole, Will Failla, Adam Junglen, Barney Boatman, Annie Duke, Vince Van Patten, Barry Shulman, Padraig Parkinson, Sandra Naujoks, Steve Sung,  Vitaly Lunkin, Adam Levy, Pieter De Korver, Hoyt Corkins, Joe Cada, Brian Hastings, Hassan Habib, Jason Senti, and Chris Moneymaker.

And then there are the big names that will be looking to chip-up early and often on Day 3 who are nursing short-stacks.

Yesterday’s play was marred by a World Cup-like failure from tournament officials. According to the WSOP.com event updates a hand developed between Prahlad Friedman -no stranger to WSOP controversy after his run-in with Jeffrey Lisandro in what was dubbed “Ante-Gate”-and Ted Bort where Bort had moved all-in, and subsequently called “Clock” on Friedman. As officials counted down, the table heard Friedman call at “ONE”, but neither the dealer or the floor heard him and at zero declared his hand dead. Despite the tables’ protests that “SpiritRock” had called, especially Bort who had the best hand, the ruling was that the hand was dead.