World Series of Poker Main Event Day 4 preview

After an action packed Day 3 that saw hundreds of players hit the rail in the first couple hours of play and shed over half the field by the end of the day, the 2010 World Series of Poker is now down to 1,240 participants, and will likely approach the money bubble by the end of play on Day 4 -the magic number sits at 747.

Despite all the action nobody was able to pull away from the rest of the field on Day 3. The current chip-leader is poker pro James Carroll with 803,000 chips -you may recognize Carroll from his final table in the $5,000 NLHE tournament earlier this year. Trailing Carroll are a number of top poker players, including two-time Main Event Champion Johnny Chan, whose 636,000 chips puts him in 9^th place.

Chan’s status grew to legendary after Rounders, but the 10-time bracelet winner  is rarely seen on televised tournaments, since doesn’t play too many tournaments anymore, choosing instead to pick and choose the ones he plays -a la Gus Hansen-perhaps the 2010 WSOP will be his chance to reintroduce his poker skills to the general public. Johnny “BLANKING” Chan!

Slightly further down the leader-board are Alexander Kostritsyn in 16^th place with 534,100 chips; Eric Baldwin in 25^th place with 485,000 chips; Jesper Hougaard in 26^th place with 480,500 chips; Cole “CTS” South in 27^th place with 478,600 chips; and 2010 Bracelet winner Michael Chow in 32^nd place with 445,000 chips. Lurking further down the leader-board are numerous big names like Jason Mercier, Barry Shulman, David Chiu, Vanessa Selbst, Phil Galfond, Humberto Brenes, Sammy Farha, Patrik Antonius, Matt Savage, Bernard Lee, Dan Harrington, Robert Varkonyi, Annie Duke, Scotty Nguyen, Christian Harder, Brian Rast, Dewey Tomko, Allen Cunningham, David “DocSands” Sands, and Rolf Slotboom to name a few. The WSOP Main Event is very pro heavy this year!

One story to watch for on Day 4 is the progress of the Mizrachi Brothers, all four of them! That’s right, Robert, Michael, Danny, and Eric Mizrachi have all made it through Day 3 at the WSOP Main Event and a couple of them have healthy stacks.

The 2010 World Series of Poker came to a close for a number of notable pros on Day 3: PokerStars pros had a very rough day with Daniel Negreanu, Joe Cada, Chris Moneymaker, Vanessa Rousso, and newly signed David Williams all hit the rail early in the day, as did Full Tilt Poker’s Jennifer Harman and Erik Seidel.

Expect a small number of players to blast through the 2,000,000 chip mark today, and it’s possible a player may push the 3,000,000 chip envelope if they hit a hot run of cards. The tournament is likely to be end Day 4 right around the money bubble-so after four full days of play the remaining players only have 750 or so players to still deal with!