The WPT Legends of Poker event at The Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles started with 593 players looking to have their name etched on the WPT Champions Cup as the next WPT Champion and is now down to just 16 players with only 10 eliminations remaining before the WPT televised final table is set.
Yesterday’s busy day began with 67 players all looking to survive the 54-player money bubble. Within a level, the bubble burst with Layne Flack, Brandon Crawford, Erica Jiles and others exiting without a payday. The player who burst the bubble was Ali Eslami, who entered via the quantum reload option and came close to a payday, but exited in 55th place at the hands of Champions Club member Keven Stammen instead.
Stammen and Season IX Legends of Poker winner Andy Frankenberger are the two Champions Club members still in the running for a second title, but other past winners who cashed in the event include David Williams (52nd), Freddy Deeb (43rd), Lee Markholt (36th), Matt Salsberg (27th), and David Chiu (20th). Other notables who cashed include Nipun Java (51st), Allyn Shulman (47th), Ryan Riess (35th), Daniel Strelitz (33rd), and Chris DeMaci (24th).
The two players who finished Day 3 on top will be seated side-by-side tomorrow; tablemates Tyler Kenney and Jeremy Kottler ended with 2,955,000 and 2,570,000 respectively. Taylor McFarland rounds out the top three as the only other player with more than 2 million chips, bagging up 2,211,000.
Kottler spent most of the day near the top of the counts after flopping a set of kings against Amit Makhija’s aces early in the day to vault into the chip lead. Kenney, on the other hand, was as low as 100,000 today, but rallied and rallied to end the day on top. McFarland also surged up the counts late, coming out of nowhere to jump to the top.
Notables Tyler Cornell, Owen Crowe, and Dylan Wilkerson will all be back in action later today as well with the final 16 playing down to the final six who will make the televised table.
Action gets underway at 1pm PT and can be followed via WPT Live Updates or via the WPT Live Twitter stream.
Chip counts for the final 16 are below:
Tyler Kenney – 2,955,000(147 bb)
Jeremy Kottler – 2,570,000(128 bb)
Taylor McFarland – 2,211,000(110 bb)
Tyler Cornell – 1,512,000(75 bb)
Owen Crowe – 1,450,000(72 bb)
Andy Frankenberger – 1,321,000(66 bb)
Harut Arutyunyan – 1,145,000(57 bb)
Gene OLeary – 1,079,000(53 bb)
Anthony Tao – 916,000(45 bb)
Massoud Eskandari – 771,000(38 bb)
Dylan Wilkerson – 749,000(37 bb)
Richard Munro – 595,000(29 bb)
Keven Stammen – 567,000(28 bb)
Joe Szegedy – 461,000(23 bb)
Huy Lam – 399,000(19 bb)
Jimmy Lee – 317,000(15 bb)