$50k HORSE day 3

Of course, the same as yesterday, most of our attention was drawn by our own James "Mig" Mackey at the tables. Today once again was like a minefield, to get to the final 24, 43 other pokerpro's had to be eliminated to get to our final 3 tables. At the end of day 1, Mig's table looked like this:

Andy Bloch $362,500
Gabe Kaplan $278,500
James Mackey $175,500
Isabelle Mercier $146,000
Robert Williamson III $104,000
Scotty Nguyen $101,000
Alex Kostritsyn $71,500

Apparently we had some changes to the tables, it looks like Mig had been moved to table 5 (it's rather hard to tell, live updates only go about as far as interesting hands evolving). He had some problems in the early stages, but not much after that he knocked out Doug Ganger at Stud-8. In a 3-way pot with Mickey Appleman involved as well, his pair of aces were good enough in the end, giving Mackey about 250k in chips. Soon after that, we see him get more chips, he shows up in the leaderboards with about 510k chips. Mig got moved again, this time to a table which contained: Chad Brown, Farzad Bonyadi, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, Gabe Kaplan and Erick Lindgren.

We see player after player being eliminated, like Jeff Lisandro, Bill Chen, Phil Galfond, Tom Dwan, Dario Minieri, Marcel Luske (who was sitting at Mig's table), Alex Kostritsyn and David Oppenheim being the last to be knocked out today. This means we get down to the final chipcount, and much to our dismay we see James Mackey as one of the shortstacks. Tables got redrawn and Mig is sitting at table one; the final 3 tables are the following:

Table 1:
James Mackey -- 151,000
Farzad Bonyadi -- 365,000
Ralph Perry -- 1,043,000
Joseph Michael (aka "BigJoe2003") -- 647,000
Lyle Berman -- 939,000
Barry Greenstein -- 1,311,000
Mike Wattel -- 474,000
Phil Ivey -- 145,000

Table 2:
Michael DeMichele (chipleader, see picture)-- 1,351,000
Andy Bloch -- 421,000
Brandon Adams -- 290,000
Huck Seed -- 190,000
Chad Brown -- 81,000
Patrick Bueno -- 806,000
Gabe Kaplan -- 360,000
Scotty Nguyen -- 1,033,000

Table 3:
Matt Glantz -- 521,000
Raymond Davis -- 438,000
Erick Lindgren -- 485,000
Edwin Ting -- 261,000
Daniel Negreanu -- 1,226,000
David Bach -- 801,000
Michael Mizrachi -- 701,000
Doyle Brunson -- 777,000

There really are no soft tables at the $50k HORSE, but being this close to cashing makes you wonder. The first 16 of this event will get paid at least $124,320 , up to a maximum of almost 2 million dollar! So tomorrow we'll know who won't make the money and we hope to see Mig at the final table, ready to ship his second bracelet, but it's gonna be as hard as ever to achieve it with the 3rd shortest stack.

Interesting facts: 3 of the top 4 players at the World Championship Mixed Event (event 8) make it to the final 24 at the HORSE: James Mackey, Matt Glantz and Michael DeMichele (all at different tables btw). There are still 2 players in the race for back-to-back cashes for the $50k HORSE event, Gabe Kaplan (9th last year) and Barry Greenstein (7th last year). Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu and Erick Lindgren are actually the only 3 players still remaining that have won a bracelet this year at the WSOP. The average stack is 616,667, with 24 people remaining, Michael DeMichele is our chipleader (see picture above) with almost 70 big blinds, Chad Brown the shortstack with about 5 BB's.

We wish Mig the best of luck tonight to finish in the money and at the final table tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll see who makes the final table and who is still in the race for one of the most prestigious of poker events known to date.

By: Pindarots