Bellagio Recap

After two weeks off successful preliminary tournaments with above average turnout the main event of the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic kicked off at the Bellagio.  The World Poker Tour event drew an impressively large field of 664 entrants into the $15,000 buy in tournament.

The numbers in the preliminary events had been high from the get go with the first $1,500 event bringing in just under 500 players and all of the prelims getting big numbers.  The 664 players in the main event made it one of the largest prizepool tournaments to date, with the exceptions being the WSOP Main Events and the $25,000 buy in World Poker Tour Championship Events held at the Bellagio each April.

The top 100 players in the field made the money and when the field had been cut to 24 players left it looked like it could be a star studded final table.  Huck Seed (24^th), Gus Hansen (22^nd), Todd Brunson (15^th), Daniel Negreanu (14^th), Erick Lindgren (10^th), Jimmy Tran (8^th), Ray Davis (7^th), and David “Devilfish” Ulliott (3^rd) were among the remaining players and all were in a good position to make a run at the final table. 

Devilfish ended up being the only player out of that list to make it to the televised table of 6 players, joined by previous WPT Champion Ryan Daut who won a title at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure just under one year ago.

The final table was all Eugene Katchalov.  Eugene came on strong late in the tournament after being shortstacked for much of day 5 and at the final 10 handed table.  At one point he was all in against Daut’s pocket jacks with A5, but the ace hit saving Eugene from a 7^th place exit and from there on he never looked back.

Jordan Rich was the dominant force for much of the playdown day where the field went from 18 to 6. He did more than his share of the dirty work on day 5, eliminating many of the 12 players that had to be busted.  With only 7 players left though Rich lost a large pot to a hot handed Katchalov and ended up going into the final table 2^nd in chips.

Ryan Daut had been sitting comfortably behind Rich for most of day 5 after getting an early double up off of Daniel Negreanu with pocket aces against Daniel’s pocket kings.  Negreanu never got back on track and ended up finishing 14^th while Daut looked strong right up till the end of day 5 where he lost 3 all in hands in a row to crash from over 3 million chips to only 330k going into the final table.

Daut was eliminated on the first hand of televised table play when he moved in with AJ and was called by Ted Kearly with pocket eights.  Ted hit a set on the flop and quads on the turn to finish Ryan’s tough run of luck that saw him lose 4 all in hands in a row between the end of day 5 and the first hand of final table play.  Kearly went into a bit of a shell after eliminating Daut in 6^th place ($192,715) and sat back as Katchalov did the rest of the work.

Eugene was able to knock off his only real immediate threat in chips by eliminating Rich in 5^th place ($289,070) with pocket aces to Jordan’s pocket jacks.  After that Katchalov proceeded to make short work of Ken Rosen in 4^th place ($433,675) Devilfish in 3rd place ($674,500), and then finished off Kearly (2^nd - $1,252,640) in a lopsided heads up match to take the title in one of the quickest WPT final tables that anyone could remember.  It took Katchalov only 53 hands under the lights and cameras to claim the title, meaning a player was eliminated about every 10 hands on average.

Katchalov’s dominating final table performance was worth a payout of $2,482,605 bringing him a payday on par with the $2.5 million Chris Moneymaker earned for winning the 2003 WSOP Main Event.