Event #5: WSOP Europe Main Event - £10,000 No-Limit Hold’em

Hand #14: It folded to Danny Steinberg on the small blind who made it 64k; James Bord folded the big blind.

Hand #15: It folded once again to Steinberg (button) who made the call. Small blind Bord folded and Ron Lee checked.

Flop:      . Check-check.

Turn:   Now Lee bet 32k and Steinberg makde the call.

River:   Lee bet out 57k and Steinberg quickly released. The rich get richer.

Hand #9: Dan Fleyshman had the button and raised to 55,000 after action folded over to him. Everyone folded and Fleyshman won the pot.

Hand #10: James Bord raised from middle position to 65,000 and won the pot.

Hand #11: Action folded to Dan Fleyshman and he limped in. Roland de Wolfe called as well from the cutoff seat and then Nicolas Levi moved all in from the small blind for 336,000. Fleyshman folded and de Wolfe made the call.

De Wolfe:   

Levi:   

The flop came down     and Levi stayed in front. The   on the turn kept him in front again before the   paired the board on the river and solidified Levi's survival.

That's right, South Africa will be a stop along the World Series of Poker Circuit this year. From Tuesday, October 26, 2010 to Sunday, October 31, 2010, the Emerald Casino in Gauteng, South Africa will play host to two events, an $1,100 Pot-Limit Omaha event and a $5,000 No-Limit Hold'em Main Event.

This event will be the first time the WSOP travels to Africa and broadens its horizons. For more information on the schedule, head to the [URL="http://www.wsop.com/tourney/tourneydetails.asp?groupID=779"]tournament page[/URL] and browse around.

Hand #3: Ronald Lee raised to 45,000 in early to middle position and Brian Powell made the call in the big blind.

Both players checked the     flop, but Lee was less hospitable on the  , betting out for 51,000. Powell made the call.

The river came the  . Powell checked, triggering a bet of 86,000 from Lee. He didn't seem confident, but Powell indeed made the call finding that Lee had value bet   .

There were fears in the media room of a late finish, but if the opening hands are anything to go by, it seems as though the final nine are here to play rather than fold their way up the ladder.

Forget a knife, you could cut the tension with a toothpick in here. Shuffle up and deal. Cards are in the air!

Out of all the people at Victory Poker, Dan Fleyshman may be the most unrecognizable face. With pros like Antonio Esfandiari, Brian Rast and Andrew Robl on his team, Fleyshman's poker skills may go a bit unnoticed.

Fleyshman doesn't have a ton of big results on record, but he tends to make it count when he makes the money of an event. He has ten cashes and out of those ten, five are wins. That's not bad at all when you're batting .500 for an average.

The two largest scores Fleyshman has on record are a win in a $500 event at the Bellagio in 2005 for $26,740 and a win at the 2009 $2,500 WPS/CPT Championship for $38,200. In total, the man from San Diego, California has over $105,000 in career earnings, but right now it looks as though he'll be winning plenty more than that in this one event.

He began playing poker in 2005 as more of a hobby than a profession. Soon after he began playing, a year later Fleyshman won the first ever CEO Poker Championship that was held at the Palms in Las Vegas, but that's not his claim to fame.

Fleyshman began a clothing line called Who's Your Daddy that eventually launched into Kohl's and Mervyn's stores before landing a three-year distribution deal in Europe. From there, the line began raking in the cash and grossed more than $15 million over the next couple of years. After that, Fleyshman decided to launch an energy drink and saw his product rise up the charts, much like he sees his chip stack doing in this WSOP Europe Main Event. When he decided it was time to take the company to the stock market at the young age of 23, Fleyshman was made the youngest owner of a publicly traded company in history. Ever had Who's Your Daddy Energy Drink? Well, that's Fleyshman's stuff.

Fast-forward a few years to when Fleyshman was 28. He becamse the CEO of Victory Poker and hopes to see the company rise through the ranks much like his other successes have. If it's anything like he's been doing in this event, hard work and solid decisions will lead him there.

Fleyshman will begin the final table as the chip leader with 1,946,000. That's about 18.75% of the chips in play.

James Bord is 29 years old and plays poker for a living. Prior to playing a card game for a living, Bord worked in banking. He has since turned his funds into poker chips on the felt and so far it's proven to be a solid decision, which will be further solidified if he can win here today.

This event marks Bord's sixth cash in a WSOP event. It's not his first final table though, he placed sixth this year in the $1,500 No-Limit 2-7 Draw Lowball event for just under $13,000. His largest cash on record came from a second-place finish in a Venetian Deep Stack event for $29,269.

Although Bord doesn't normally play tournaments, he's done very well to grind his way to the final table here. He regularly plays high-limit cash games around the world, but this final table could have him catching the tournament fever. Bord will enter the day right in the middle of the pack, fifth in chips with 1,331,000.

Brian Powell hails from Louisville, Kentucky and is 29 years old. Powell is a professional poker player.

Back in 2006, Powell recorded his first cash when he finished 17th in the $2,500 No-Limit Hold'em event at the Five Diamond World Poker Classic. That score was only worth about $7,000, but the following year he would earn a much larger one. Powell placed 11th at the Legends of Poker in 2007 for $57,155. It wasn't the big win he was looking for, but after going zero for ten in WSOP events that year, the money helps to ease the pain.

When it comes to the WSOP, Powell has four cashes on record and three of those are in bigger buy-in $10,000 events. In 2008, Powell cashed in the World Championship Heads-Up event at the Series for over $14,000. That was his only cash that, but he recorded two more the following year, including his largest to date. First, Powell took 13th in the World Championship Mixed event for $27,718 before going on to finish 66th in the Main Event for over $90,000 and his largest-ever live cash. This year, Powell only hit the money once in a WSOP event, taking home about $8,000 for a 29th-place finish in the $2,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event.

Powell has over $200,000 in live tournament earnings, but that doesn't mean he's going to settle for anything but first place in this one. He comes into the WSOP Europe final table sixth in chips with 842,000.

The Frenchman has been a professional poker for a few years now and is currently based in London. With seven WSOP cashes to his name and over $765,000 in lifetime earnings, Nicolas Levi is still looking for his breakout victory after many deep runs in events around the world. This one could be it here in the WSOP Europe Main Event and what a dandy it would be.

Checking in on Levi's WSOP history, he has one Main Event cash in London that came back in 2007, the first year the event was held in Europe. He placed 27th that year. He also has one final table in a WSOP event, placing ninth in 2008 out in Las Vegas in the $2,500 No-Limit Hold'em event. Earlier this year, Levi scored his best WSOP finish. He placed fifth in the $5,000 No-Limit Hold'em Shootout event for over $92,000, his second largest score to date.

Besides doing well in WSOP events, Levi does a lot of damage on the European felt, especially in EPT events. He final table EPT Dortmund back in 2007, cahsed at EPT Prague in 2009, made it to the final four tables at EPT Deauville in 2010 and then also cashed at the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo in 2010.

Despite all of his success though, Levi has still yet to score a win. After looking over all of his live scores, not one of them is a victory. It'd be one hell of a thing to win your first event in the WSOP Europe Main Event and that's what Levi will be looking to do today. He may have to get lucky and do it early with only 428,000 chips, but this is poker and anything can happen.

Roland de Wolfe began in the poker industry as a writer for the English magazine Inside Edge. After spending a short career pushing the pen around, de Wolfe decided it was time to take his own shot at pushing chips around.,

De Wolfe began playing some smaller buy-in tournaments in 2004 and had some pretty reasonable success. The following year though, he had a big breakout after he won the WPT's Grand Prix de Paris for just under $575,000. With that big win and a swollen bankroll, de Wolfe began playing more and more events worldwide. The more events he played, the more results he posted.

In 2006, he entered the WPT World Championship where he took third for over $1 million. During the summer of that year, he would go on to cash in two WSOP events, making the final table of one of them. Also in 2006, de Wolfe won an event at the Poker Meltdown Festival in London and took home nearly $700,000 for a win at the Irish Masters in Dublin. Two more six-figure paydays rolled in during November and December when he placed second in a pair of events.

Back in Dublin the following year in 2007, de Wolfe took second to Marty Smyth in an event at the Irish Open for over $400,000. That year was also a pretty big year for de Wolfe on the WSOP felt. He cashed in five WSOP events in the U.S. and once here in London at the WSOP Europe.

The following year in 2008, de Wolfe final tabled the $5,000 Limit/No-Limit Hold'em event at the WSOP, coming in fourth for over $117,000. In 2009, he recorded five more WSOP cashes and was able to land his first gold bracelet. De Wolfe won the $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi/Lo event for nearly $250,000 to claim his first piece of WSOP jewelry and he'll be looking to add another here today. That same year, de Wolfe also placed fifth in a $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em event at the Series for $112,957.

De Wolfe can often be found playing online when there's no live action to satisfy his craving. He's frequently found on the Omaha tables at the higher limits, grinding out a tournament bankroll. Over his career, Roland has earned more than $4 million in tournament winnings, and he's well on his way to another nice score here this week.

Although this has been one of de Wolfe's more down years on the felt with only $241,193 in winnings so far, he has managed to make it to the final table of this elite event. Earlier this year in February, de Wolfe won the £2,000 No-Limit Hold'em Mansion Poker Les A London Open for £77,000 and will surely be looking to make this his second title of the year, and a massive one at that.

De Wolfe is the only Full Tilt Red Pro left in the field and comes into the final table fourth in chips with 1,377,000.