Mo Arani surges into WPT Five Diamond Day 3 chip lead, leads 45 hopefuls into penultimate day of contention
The giant 1,001-person field of the WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic was whittled down to just 45 hopefuls after three days of play. Mo Arani bagged the largest stack at the end of Day 3 of the prestigious tournament to place himself in great position to attack the top and his first WPT title.
Arani rose to the chip lead late last night. He won a massive pot against Calvin Anderson on the penultimate hand of the day to top the temporary leaderboard with 2.2 million worth in chips. Anderson was the start-of-the-day chip leader and the player who dominated action for the greater part of the day.
He sat on Arani’s left and the overnight chip leader said that he really felt forced to tighten his range early into the day as Anderson was applying quite some pressure at their table. Anderson bagged and tagged 650,000 at the end of the day and will certainly seek to regain the chip lead on Day 4 of the Five Diamond championship.
As mentioned earlier, the tournament attracted a behemoth field of 1,001 entries at the Bellagio. That created a prize pool of $9,709,700. There will be payouts for the top 126 finishers. In fact, the money bubble burst about mid-day during Day 3 of action, with Andjelko Andrejevic busting Nikolai Sear in 127th place to make him the unfortunate bubble boy and bring everyone left into the money.
Each of the remaining 45 hopefuls is guaranteed a min-cash of $36,945. And each of the six final tablists, the names of whom are to become clear by the end of the day, will leave with no less than $344,529. As for the winner, they will receive $1,631,468 in first-place prize money to celebrate their big victory.
Notables Still in the Mix for the Title
There are a number of former WPT Main Event winners among the final 45 players, with those being Darren Elias, Mike Del Vecchio, Simon Lam, Keven Stammen, and Ravi Raghavan. Raghavan is eying a second consecutive WPT final table, after making it to the final table of the WPT Rock ‘N’ Roll Poker Open. The player finished sixth in that tournament.
Raghavan is also the last surviving former Five Diamond winner. The player took down the tournament six years ago. Last year’s champ, Ryan Tosoc, tried to lock up a back-to-back victory but busted shortly before the money bubble.
There are also plenty of notables who are looking for their first WPT title, with some of those being Andrew Lichtenberger, Sorel Mizzi, and Patrick Mahoney. Joe McKeehen, the 2015 WSOP Main Event champion, is also still in contention. The player actually bagged the second largest stack last night, good for 2.03 million.
Day 4 action is set to begin today at noon local time at the Bellagio.
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