With only 29 players remaining in the $50,000 WSOP Player´s Championship (Event 55), Josh Arieh leads a formidable pack in the quest for one of the most prestigious WSOP Bracelets in the series plus a first place prize of $1,720,328. Arieh, who already has two WSOP bracelets to his name and finished 3rd in the Main Event in 2004, has an almost 200,000 chip advantage over second placed Brian Rast and half a million chips more than third positioned George Lind, after capturing a monster three-way pot mid-way through the day.
Phil Hellmuth Shooting for Bracelet Number 12
In the strong field that remains, a total of fourteen have already won WSOP bracelets and a further five have collected more than $1 million in WSOP cashes. Phil Hellmuth will be happy with his day – doubling his chip stack to sit in fifth position – while overnight leader from Day 2 and leader of the WSOP Player of the Year rankings, Ben Lamb, will regret making some early errors which saw his chip stack slip to below 300,000 before recovering to 582,000.
Those Who Will Not Be Champion This Year
Day 3 (of 5) of this event was always going to be a tough one, with marginal decisions required and tournaments lives put on the rack throughout the day. Those who we won´t see back at the tables tonight include 2011 bracelet winners Fabrice Soulier and Bertrand Grospellier – and sadly UK poker player Matt Ashton. Greg Mueller, Erick Lindgren, Eugene Katchalov, Justin Smith and Abe Mosseri were among other notable players to be eliminated in a day which saw some big swings in fortune for Gus Hansen.
Gus Hansen has Big Hands
Overnight second-placed Gus Hansen seemed to be involved in the vast majority of significant pots. For much of the day he was chip leader after taking out Alexey Makarov in the Pot Limit Omaha round with a flush on the turn, crippling Chad Brown in the Limit Hold´em when his two pair were too strong for Brown´s mucked hand and busting David Bach with quad kings in a later round of PLO. However, the “Great Dane” also had some big hands go against him including a huge loss of chips to Jon “PearlJammer” Turner in the Limit Hold´em when Turner flopped a full house. Gus Hanson will start Day 4 in eleventh position with 774,000 chips after having well over 1.2 million earlier in the day.
Chip Counts
The Chip Counts for the 29 players remaining in the Poker Player´s Championship are as follows:
| Player | Nationality | Chips | |
| 1 | Josh Arieh | USA | 1,819,000 |
| 2 | Brian Rast | USA | 1,633,000 |
| 3 | George Lind | USA | 1,304,000 |
| 4 | Vladimir Shchemelev | Serbia | 1,181,000 |
| 5 | Phil Hellmuth | USA | 1,174,000 |
| 6 | Scott Seiver | USA | 1,137,000 |
| 7 | Jason Lester | USA | 948,000 |
| 8 | Jon Turner | USA | 948,000 |
| 9 | Yan Chen | USA | 887,000 |
| 10 | Shaun Deeb | USA | 876,000 |
| 11 | Gus Hansen | Monaco | 774,000 |
| 12 | Minh Ly | USA | 715,000 |
| 13 | Sebastian Ruthenberg | Germany | 625,000 |
| 14 | Ben Lamb | USA | 582,000 |
| 15 | Marco Johnson | USA | 570,000 |
| 16 | Sebastien Sabic | France | 550,000 |
| 17 | Robert Mizrachi | USA | 500,000 |
| 18 | Barry Greenstein | USA | 440,000 |
| 19 | Roman Yitzhaki | USA | 429,000 |
| 20 | Jeffrey Lisandro | Italy | 330,000 |
| 21 | David Baker | USA | 277,000 |
| 22 | Michael Binger | USA | 274,000 |
| 23 | Matt Glantz | USA | 259,000 |
| 24 | Alexandre Luneau | France | 251,000 |
| 25 | Rami Boukai | USA | 208,000 |
| 26 | David Oppenheim | USA | 159,000 |
| 27 | Doug Booth | USA | 158,000 |
| 28 | Owais Ahmed | USA | 156,000 |
| 29 | Phil Galfond | USA | 74,000 |
Quote of the Day
Quote of the day came from WSOP regular Jonathan “FatalError” Aguiar, who tweeted that “Celebrating “independence” seems pretty LOL this year considering if the British had won we would still have online poker”. Nice One!