For most of us a Top 10 finish in one of poker’s most prestigious tournaments would be a career highlight, but when your resume is as extensive as Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu’s a 7th place finish in one of the biggest tournaments of the year is likely to be seen as a disappointment. And so it was for the red-hot Negreanu, who was the official final table bubble-boy, after being eliminated by his good friend Erick Lindgren.

Lindgren will now start the final table of the World Poker Tour $25k Championship second in chips, as both he and another polarizing figure in the poker world, Chino Rheem, are in control of most of the chips in play. Both Lindgren and Rheem’s troubles are well-known in the poker world, with both having the stigma of slow-paying their debts revealed when the poker economy tanked after Black Friday.

Between the two of them, Rheem (with nearly 5.5 million chips) and Lindgren (with 3.3 million chips) are in control of roughly 60% of the chips in play heading into Friday’s final table –the WPT Championship will have a day off on Thursday as the tournament has played-out faster than organizers anticipated.

Here is a look at the final table chip counts in the Season XI WPT $25k Championship:

1. Chino Rheem – 5,495,000

2. Erick Lindgren – 3,355,000

3. Jonathan Roy – 1,900,000

4. Matt Hyman – 1,560,000

5. Brandon Steven – 1,210,000

6. David Peters – 1,085,000

Rheem and Lindgren are former WPT Champions (Lindgren has two WPT titles on his resume) as is Jonathan Roy, who will enter Friday’s final table tilt in third place.

Meanwhile, across the room the $100,000 buy-in Super-High-Roller tournament was also in progress, and with registration still open the tally went from 15 on Day 1 to 21 entries on Day 2. Even before the payout structure has been announced the tournament has already played-down to the final table of nine players, and a strong final nine it turned out to be, with names like Joe Cheong, Erik Seidel, Andrew Robl, Steve Silverman, and Doc Sands looking for a big payday. Here is a look at the seating assignments for the final nine players in the tournament:

* Seat 1: Joseph Cheong

* Seat 2: Yevgeniy Timoshenko

* Seat 3: Erik Seidel

* Seat 4: Jean-Noel Thorel

* Seat 5: Andrew Robl

* Seat 6: James Courtney

* Seat 7: Steven Silverman

* Seat 8: Daniel Perper

* Seat 9: David Sands

 *Resources: www.worldpokertour.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2013 at 7:55 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.