At Long Last
![[user75032]](/img/avatars/avatar.svg){kind=avatar}
If you wanted drama today, the place to be was in the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio. We had more drama than ESPN can possibly fit into one two-hour broadcast. Kings into aces? Yeah we had that. Twice. Coin-flip situations? Sure. Ask Phil Ivey and Jeff Shulman. Under-pairs making sets against over-pairs? Not a problem. Joe Cada was the master of that.
In the end it seemed like it was going to come down to who ran best. There was no doubt that Joe Cada and Darvin Moon were the two players who accomplished that task. They are the last two standing after a grueling day that saw the players eliminated in the following order:
9th - James Akenhead
8th - Kevin Schaffel
7th - Phil Ivey
6th - Steve Begleiter
5th - Jeff Shulman
4th - Eric Buchman
3rd - Antoine Saout
We'd be remiss if we didn't give some attention to Ivey. He came into the final table with a short stack, and despite his best efforts to grind up a stack couldn't get much going. He seemed to be card-dead and lost a key flip against Cada when his ace-eight couldn't run down Cada's pocket fours. If Ivey had won that hand, he would have had about 24 million and Cada would have been out. Instead Cada doubled up and Ivey went out a short time later.
Cada, by the way, was down less than 3.0 million chips in the early-going. He had to survive double-up after double-up after double-up -- not exactly the least stressful way to make it to heads-up play!
Moon had his own up-and-down day. He baffled his opponents with the lines he took in hands, including a very strange line against Begleiter in which Moon check-raised from 5.0 million to 15.0 million on the flop and then folded for 6.0 million more, getting about 7.5-to-1 on a call. He started with almost 60.0 million in chips and fell all the way to 30.0 million at one point. But it worked out for Moon; he's still standing at the end of the night with 58,850,000 chips. Seven other players have none.
Everyone will take Sunday to rest up. We'll be back here in the Penn & Teller Theater at 10pm local time on Monday night to determine who will be the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event champion. That's when Joe Cada, with the remaining 135,950,000 chips, will try to take Moon out and claim the last bracelet of the 2009 WSOP. See you then!