Seat 5: David Paredes
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David Paredes currently sits as the 10th highest earner in terms of live tournament winnings from his native Massachusetts, with $864,661 in winnings over his seven-year career.
He can essentially double that total with a win here today, and if he does take the whole thing down, he'll climb to 4th on that list to put himself high on the list of top-notch players to emerge from the East Coast.
Paredes enters the final table as the slight chip leader over Anthony Maio, but both men are about 3 million clear of their next competitor, so we expect Paredes to ramp his usual aggressive style up a notch. Although he knows how to wield a big stack well, yesterday Paredes proved himself to be a tricky player capable of changing gears when the need arises, as he felted Bryan Choi by expertly slow-playing pocket queens and trapping the amateur for his entire stack.
Using the momentum from that massive win, Paredes cruised to the televised final table, as he looks to continue a terrific run in WPT events. Paredes finished in 12th place for $38,135 at WPT Montreal's Main Event in November of last year, and he followed that up with a 28th place run for $26,039 at the WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic in December.
Today, Paredes is already guaranteed to exceed those scores by a mile, and if he can translate his chip lead into a dominant final table performance, the first major win of his long poker career is well within his grasp. He will need to tread lightly though, with the hyper-aggressive Farid Jattin seated to his left, but a 3 million chip advantage over Jattin should allow Paredes to mitigate his foe's propensity for entering the pot light and playing post-flop poker.