Money Bubble Bursts At 2014 World Series of Poker Main Event

Card Player’s 2014 WSOP coverage is sponsored by CarbonPoker.

For the majority of the field remaining in the 2014 World Series of Poker main event, Friday was payday at the Rio, as 693 players guaranteed themselves at least $18,406. But for 53 unfortunate players, their hopes of making the money were dashed on the bubble.

This year’s bubble was particularly exciting, with five all-in situations occurring at the same time. Three players actually busted on the hand, all receiving a share of the 693rd-place prize. As is the custom, one lucky bubble player would receive a seat into next year’s WSOP main event and after a high card drawing, that seat went to Zhen Cai of Melbourne, Florida.

While the rest of the field was sweating the bubble, others were busy adding to their massive piles of chips. Fresh off his $2,044,000 win in the Bellagio $100,000 Super High Roller event, high-stakes tournament regular Dan Smith proved he could still do it at a lower price point by climbing to the top of the leaderboard.

Smith scored a lot of his stack in a big confrontation with Stephen Graner that is sure to make the ESPN broadcast later this summer. Smith moved all in on the river on a board reading 10426J and after several minutes in the tank, Graner opted to fold. ESPN wanted to film his cards and Graner lost his cool, battling it out with a member of the production crew over his hole cards. Smith, to his credit, sided with Graner and mucked his own cards to make the hand moot.

Later on in the day, Smith scored a double knockout holding pocket aces against Ryan Hall’s pocket kings and Fredric Stockfield’s pocket queens. He ultimately finished the day in sixth place overall, with 2,229,000.

In total, there were 12 players who crossed the 2 million mark, including overnight chip leader Matthew Haugen, who has 2,808,000 going into Saturday’s action. The Chicago, Illinois resident has previous final table appearances at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event, as well as the WPT Borgata Winter Poker Open main event.

Other notables advancing with big stacks include Griffin Benger (2,329,000), Brian Hastings (2,079,000), Martin Jacobson (1,594,000), Simon Charette (1,525,000), Andrey Zaichenko (1,484,000), Matt Waxman (1,453,000), Mark Newhouse (1,301,000), Isaac Baron (1,275,000), John Kabbaj (1,200,000) and Eddy Sabat (1,045,000).

Those with a bit more work to do include David Tuthill (896,000), Ola Amundsgard (847,000), Mukul Pahuja (827,000), Kevin MacPhee (748,000), Brian Townsend (730,000), Bryan Devonshire (667,000), Jonathan Aguiar (599,000), Maria Ho (544,000), Ali Eslami (473,000), Jeff Madsen (419,000), Mike Sowers (216,000), John Monnette (163,000) and Amnon Filippi (98,000).

The remaining 291 players will return to the Rio Saturday at noon and continue their march towards the final table.

Take a look at the top ten chip counts below. Click here for a look at the entire list.

For more coverage from the 2014 summer series, visit our WSOP landing page.

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