BlueBomber's Guide To The November Nine, Part One

Nine people remain out of six thousand eight hundred forty four.

One of them will win over NINE million dollars. To put that into perspective, I think there are about 5 people with more than that. Jaime Gold, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Joe Hachem, and Allen Cunningham.

Eight will win over one million dollars. That's right. All you have to do is break one player and you're a millionare. Sounds nicer than a $900,000-nare, right? I think it does.

On Saturday, I'll announce my pick for the winner of this tournament, but before I talk about the nine finalists, let's bring you up to speed for what I thought about the Main Event.

We got 9 people left and these are their chip counts:

Blinds: 120,000/240,000 Ante: 30,000 Average Stack: approx. 15,200,000 or 63.3 BBs.

Dennis Phillips, 26,295,000
Ivan Demidov, 24,400,000
Scott Montgomery, 19,690,000
Peter Eastgate, 18,375,000
Ylon Shwartz, 12,525,000
Daris Suharto, 12,520,000
David Rheem, 10,230,000
Craig Marquis, 10,210,000
Kelly Kim, 2,620,000

So, we got a deep stacked field, except for 1 guy, eveyone has over 40bbs. Phillips has over 109BBs... that's nice. It also seems that the fifth through eighth guys are pretty well shmushed.

What do I have to think? It's going to be a MARATHON. Since the majority of final tables begin with a total of 30BBs a player for an average stack and the slow structure, I hope these nine guys stock up on Red Bull. It's going to be a drag...

Still, it should be exciting. Except if these guys collude, then I'm going to be infuriated. Really infuriated. Still, we got 9 players, all but one really young, two, three, maybe even four pros and three guys who I've seen before and actually think that they'll win something big later on in life.

Tuesday's the clip show, so maybe I'll see it, because they'll have Philly on in and he'll rant and call them all donkeys/idiots/brain-dead morons who shouldn't be working at Domino's let alone playing poker. I'm excited. It's going to be long because unless Kim gets frisky, they'll wait until he busts of Broomcorn Uncle's off because of his low stack.

Have fun and get ready for Part 2 on Saturday. (And yes, before you ask, I'm cool with the new password system. It's better for me because now I don't have to clear up my day before playing in a FR.)