WSOP Event #33: A Strong Forefront Emerges

185 participants decided to take part in the $10,000 World Championship of Fixed Limit Texas Hold'em, creating a prize pool of $1,739,000. As we all know, it is a lot harder to bust when you can't just move all-in as you wish, but a whole 69 players still managed to pull it off and had to go to the rails during the first day.

As for any Championship Event, the list of participants read like the who is who of the poker world: Jeff Lissandro, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, Dario Minieri, Barry Greenstein, Chad Brown, Brock Parker, Annie Duke, David Benyamine, Vitaly Lunkin - it just goes on and on. With this incredible line-up, we could certainly expect some serious action as the blinds increase.

It also meant we would see a field of concentrated poker skill today, and it wasn't just the rookies who were on the receiving end. Gavin Smith, Mike Matusow, Max Pescatori, Daniel Negreanu, David Oppenheim, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Nick Schulman, Gabe Kaplan, Jeff Lissandro, Andy Bloch and Brett Richey were amongst those who had to take an early leave.
On the other side of the ranking, we can find a very solid top. Jennifer Harman (pictured left), arguably the best female pro of the world, leads the pack as she's made it up to an impressive 127,600  chips on the first day. In one of the bigger hands, she put in a 3-bet from the button with against Noah Boeken's raise from the cut-off.

On the flop she hit both an open-ended straight draw and a flush draw - which seemed to be more than enough to stay aggressive. Betting on all streets, she didn't manage to extract much more value as she hit her flush on the river, though - Boeken had already switched to passive call down mode.

Schaun Deeb also looked rather good today as was holding the chip lead for quite a while and still comfortably sits in fifth position, with a mere 20,000 chips separating him from Harman. On the last spot of the leader board, we can find Chino Rheem, who impressed his opposition with a very good aggressive game today. Vitaly Lunkin finished just short of the top ten as twelfth, and there are a lot of other big stacks who are names to be reckoned with.

All in all, the Fixed Limit World Championship promises to be an exciting event as we enter day two. The blinds will increase and the action will definitely heat up.

World Series Of Poker Event #33 Standings
Rank	Name	Chips
1st	Jennifer Harman	127,600
2nd	Mark Klecan	117,000
3rd	Mario Ho	113,400
4th	Josh Arieh	112,100
5th	Schaun Deeb	106,000
6th	Mark Teltscher	99,900
7th	Randall Mccallum	95,000
8th	Kyle Ray	90,300
9th	Dmitry Gromov	87,800
10th	Chino Rheem	87,400