WSOP Event #6: Freddie Ellis Claims The First Place
Eleven players returned for Day 3 of the Seven Card Stud Championship. In the end, it was Freddie Ellis who managed to best them all and claim the first place for which he received $373,744.
table by the end of Day 2, as scheduled, but instead 11 players
returned for Day 3. Consequently, the play started an hour earlier than
it would have begun if the field had been whittled down to the last
eight players.
After only 15 minutes into the play, Ray
Dehkharghani and Daniel Negreanu (pictured right) packed their bags. Negreanu played
another tournament in his lately usual manner of being short-stacked
and surviving by picking a pot or two from time to time. This time his tactic carried him almost to the final table.
The
following victim of Day 3 was the 2007 WSOP Seven Card Stud bracelet
winner Jeff Lisandro. The final eight players continued their race for
the title and it took two hours for the next player to get eliminated.
Thirty minutes more and three players less, the play was now down to
Freddie Ellis, Eric Drache, Hasan Habib, Max Pescatori and Villie
Wahlbeck.
Ellis was rapidly increasing his stack and reached the 2 million mark,
while the closest challenger Drache had only about half of that. The
other three players all had less than 500,000 in chips. Pescatori
managed to double up through Habib who was seen packing his bags
shortly after this encounter.
Pescatori (pictured left) found himself also on the way out only 20 minutes later. Pescatori moved all-in with 
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against Wahlbeck's wired queens. Even though he made jacks-up on sixth
street, Wahlbeck paired eights on the river and sent Pascatori to the
rail in fourth place.
Ellis entered the three-handed play with a
dominant chip lead and after over two hours of play, Wahlbeck was the
first one to leave the table. The heads-up play saw Ellis having a 2.5
million to 1.8 million chip lead over Drache, but the chip lead changed
after 20 minutes into the play.
The chip lead continued to change throughout the night until Ellis
managed to land the finishing blow. Ellis won the final hand with 
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for a flush and the well-deserved title. This was Ellis' first
appearance in the WSOP and secon cash in a major tournament over the
last six years. Ellis commented:
"I was playing poker just to do something different and I started playing, really, casino poker when I went to Atlantic City, when they got it officially (in 1993). The one thing I wanted to (when I came to Las Vegas), was play in the Seven Card Stud tournament and that was one of the main reasons I came."
Here are the final table results:
| World Series Of Poker Event #6 Results |
||
| Place | Name | Prize |
| 1st | Freddie Ellis | $373,744 |
| 2nd | Eric Drache | $231,014 |
| 3rd | Ville Wahlbeck | $152,915 |
| 4th | Max Pescatori | $107,959 |
| 5th | Hasan Habib | $80,969 |
| 6th | Ivan Schertzer | $64,297 |
| 7th | Greg "FTB" Mueller | $53,886 |
| 8th | Tim Phan | $47,532 |
