On To Day 3

No, I wasn't visiting Coney Island to go on their roller coaster. I just thought this would be the perfect picture to describe Michael's day yesterday in the World Series of Poker main event Day 2b. I don't even think Rocky would have been able to fight his way through the day he had and still remain standing. It was a day of ups and down and ups and downs and then mostly downs. At one point he was down to 35,000 chips, from his starting amount of 123,000, but in the last hour was able to double up and survive.

They started playing yesterday at noon and finished at 1AM. Since there's a three hour time difference, that means I was up until 4AM following him. He would text message me often during the tournament with his chip counts, some of which got me excited and many of which didn't. But I was happy when I got the final call at 4:22AM. I have a special ringtone on my phone for when Michael calls and it's Daughtry's song, "It's Not Over", which was so appropriate last night as it rang out with those words.

So it's not over for Michael and it's not over for five other of his friends. I had written about all of those, who were still in the hunt, a few days ago. Of the eleven I wrote about, only five of them have survived to go on to Day 3. Just to give you an idea of the scope of this tournament, 6,844 people started and there are now 1,308 left, so approximately 5,500 players have made their exit. Another 642 will have to be eliminated until the payoffs begin.

Here's who's still left and who I'll be rooting for:

Brandon Schaefer ---- 228,300 chips

Steve Billirakis ---- 157,400 chips

Michael Martin ---- 70,700 chips

Ben Sprengers ---- 61,200 chips

Noah Boeken ---- 61,100 chips

Ryan Daut ----- not sure of his chip count

Here's a picture of what a 500,000 stack of chips looks like. I hope that at the end of Day 3, they're all sitting behind something like this. Good luck boys!!!!