The £10,000 buy-in tournament initially attracted a star-studded field of 103 of the world’s best poker players. Among them were four past world champions – including Phil Hellmuth (1989), Huck Seed (1996), Chris “Jesus” Ferguson (2000), and Carlos Morstensen (2001). There were also 23 former gold bracelet winners in the field, holding a combined 71 WSOP titles between them.
However, at the conclusion of Day Two, almost everyone was long gone. The only four survivors are Gus Hansen (Monte Carlo, Monaco), Ram Vaswani (Hendon, UK), James Collopy (Washington, DC USA), a.k.a. "BigQueso," and Andrew Feldman (London, UK).
To this point, all four remaining players have each survived five consecutive heads-up rounds. The winner must endure a total of seven rounds to win the tournament, which means winning a combined eight matches overall. The heads-up finale is a best two-of-three format.
The semi-final (Round 6) matches are as follows:
Gus Hansen (Monaco) vs. Andrew Feldman (UK)
Jim Collopy (USA) vs. Ram Vaswani (UK)
For all remaining players the road to a possible WSOP victory has been littered with land mines. Here's a list of opponents each player has defeated en route to the semi-finals:
Gus Hansen: (1) Bye, (2) Max Steinburg, (3) Mark Everett, (4) Phil Ivey, (5) Neil Channing
Andrew Feldman: (1) Bye, (2) Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, (3) Mori Eskandani, (4) Saar Wilf, (5) Daniel Negreanu
Jim Collopy: (1) Bye, (2) John Racener, (3) Scott Fischman, (4) Martin Kabrhel, (5) Huck Seed
Ram Vaswani: (1) Justin Smith, (2) Phil Hellmuth, (3) Yevgeniy Timoshenko, (4) Marius Torberger, (5) Kevin Eyster.
Semi-finals will be played Thursday, September 23rd at 3 pm and are sudden-death format. Winners will advance to the finals, which are expected to be played sometime Thursday evening in a best two-out-of-three series until the champion is ultimately determined. The winner receives £288,409 (equal to about $451,880), plus the coveted WSOP gold bracelet.
The £1,030,000 prize pool in this event established a new WSOP Europe record. For the first time ever, a non-Main Event tournament at WSOP Europe exceeded the million-pound prize mark. This is quite impressive, given the host casino has a limited number of tournament tables and seats and can only accommodate a fixed number of participants. Want to compete for a WSOP gold bracelet? There's still time. Only one open gold bracelet event remains in 2010, which represents the last opportunity to win a WSOP title this calender year. The tournament schedule closes out with the £10,000 buy-in Main Event championship, which begins on Thursday, starting at noon. There will be two starting days, meaning players can come and register to play as late as Friday afternoon The 2010 edition of WSOP Europe continues through September 28th.
For more information about the WSOP and WSOP Europe, please click HERE.