One of the premier tournaments at the World Series of Poker over the past seven years has been the $50,000 buy-in Poker Players Championship, where players are tested in a variety of different poker formats in order to win not only a WSOP bracelet but also the Chip Reese Memorial Trophy. This year the Poker Players Championship has lost a little of its luster as the event will not be shown on ESPN, causing the field size to shrink. Even with the smaller field the tournament still attracted 108 of the best poker players in the game; competing for a first-place prize of over $1.4 million.

With so much on the line emotions are always running high, and the stress and tension involved with this tournament was seen on one particular hand Monday night; a hand that took over 30 minutes to sort out according to PokerNews live reporting here is how it went down:

After several limps during a hand of PLO Nicolai Yakovenko potted the action and was called by Viktor Blom and Abe Mosseri with several players still to act. When it got back to Shaun Deeb he re-potted it, putting himself all-in. Everything was fine so far, until Yakovenko announced he was all-in which caused Abe Mossseri to tank for over 15 minutes, while several issues came to bear.

First Mosseri was talking about his hand (which would be fine if all the action had been closed, which it actually hadn’t), and Yakovenko feeling he was polling the rail on what he should do. Second, Yakovenko told Mosseri he wasn’t actually all-in as he had raised more than the pot, with Mosseri saying it doesn’t matter.

Mosseri finally announced he was calling after having the clock called on him, and lost the Main Pot to Shaun Deeb who made a flush, but saw his Aces hold up against the KK33 of Yakovenko… Which is when all hell broke loose.

According to PokerNews’ Donnie Peters, Yakovenko then said “Wait a minute, he only said call.” The first floor person to arrive ruled that the Turn and River would need to be re-run since both players had chips behind what was in the pot (determined to be about 260k from each player leaving both with nearly 150,000 more behind) which sent Mosseri and Deeb into a tizzy. The head floorperson was then called in, and eventually ruled that the hand would stand as it played out with all players all-in.

This hand is likely to be discussed and debated for years to come, and realistically there is no good ruling based on the incredible amount of gaffes and errors that were made throughout –Mosseri discussing his hand, inaccurate bets, Viktor Blom folded out of turn at one point…

It also seems that Mosseri and Yakovenko had some history before this due to Mosseri needling Yakovenko and the latter subsequently slowrolling Abe to get a little revenge, which caused Mosseri to throw his chips at Yakovenko.

As far as the tournament itself, Day 2 ended with 62 of the original 108 players still in the hunt.

Tags: 15 Minutes, Abe Mosseri, Aces, Blom, Emotions, ESPN, Floor Person, Luster, Memorial Trophy, Monday Night, Nicolai, Players Championship, Plo, Poker Game, poker players, PokerNews, Reese, Seven Years, world series, World Series of Poker

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 9:20 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.