When what was thought was the final day of Event #4 of the 2010 World Series of Poker Europe began today, only 4 players were left of an initial 103, including Gus Hansen going for his first ever WSOP bracelet.  As Event #4 is a high roller heads-up event, that meant only three more matches needed to be played, the semi-finals- featuring Hansen versus Andrew Feldman, and Ram Vaswani versus Jim Collopy- and then the best-of-three finals.

Those initial semi-final matches went down fairly quickly, and left Vaswani and Feldman watching from the rail after collecting their third place payouts worth £96,212- about $150,000 USD- however, the final match-up between Gus and Jim was a horse of a different color.

For over eight hours Hansen battled the lesser known 21-year old Collopy, and though the first match reasonably took less time than it takes to watch the first movie in the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, the second was significantly slower, taking longer than the entirety of The Lord Of The Rings Return of the King- including all its false endings. 

At first, the second match with Collopy appeared as if it wouldn’t be that much of a trench war, with Hansen jumping to an early lead and seemingly dominating, but after an unexpected double-up when Collopy was all-in with Ace-Queen against Hansen’s pocket Kings, it became apparent that the day was still far from being won by “The Great Dane.”  In fact, eventually Collopy claimed the second match as his own, after an equally disturbing hand for Hansen that found him all in with pocket Queens against pocket nines, only to see a nine hit the flop. 

With the match now tied 1-1, and the local time close to 4:00 a.m., organizers had little choice but to pause the third and final match until tomorrow- leaving Gus bracelet-less and fans without closure, for at least one more tournament day.

To find out more about Event #4 of the 2010 WSOP Europe, or to read the updates when the event reconvenes- at the moment tentatively scheduled for tomorrow around the dinner break of Day 1b of the main event- visit www.wsop.com- powered by PokerNews.