Two of the three scheduled WSOP Grudge Matches took place yesterday with one player proving his win wasn’t a fluke, while another poker great got some redemption over 20 years later.

The first match of the day was a rematch of the 1989 World Series of Poker Main Event, pitting the two-time defending champion Johnny Chan against a baby-faced kid named Phil Hellmuth. In 1989 it was Hellmuth who would stop Chan’s run, preventing the Orient Express from 3-peating, not to mention unleashing the Poker Brat on the poker world.

The two Grudge Match competitors decided to play a single match with equal chips –instead of the best of three format originally planned—and it was Chan who dominated the action, with Hellmuth taking the chip-lead for only a brief period of time.

In the second Grudge Match it was Chris Moneymaker vs. Sammy Farha in a rematch of the 2003 WSOP Main Event. This time around the two decided to utilize the best-of-three format: Match 1 is played just as the 2003 heads-up battle began: Match 2 sees the two players reverse chip-stacks: and Match 3 (if necessary) starts each player on equal footing.

Both players would win the match where they had the chip advantage, bringing about a winner take all rubber-match. It looked as if Farha would follow Chan’s lead and exact revenge for his WSOP defeat when the two players found themselves all-in on a J-T-2 board; Moneymaker with J-2 and Farha with the dominant J-T. But Moneymaker saved a little bit of that magic from the 2003 WSOP and spiked a Deuce on the river to take a commanding lead, and finished off Farha a few hands later.

Tags: 2003 Wsop, 2011 WSOP, Champion Johnny, Chris Moneymaker, Commanding Lead, Deuce, Exact Revenge, Grudge Match, Johnny Chan, Match 2, Match Of The Day, Orient Express, phil hellmuth, Poker Main Event, Poker World, Sammy Farha, Single Match, Time Defending Champion, World Series of Poker, World Series of Poker Main Event, WSOP Main Event

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 11:34 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.