Barry Shulman Wins WSOPE
July 7, 2010
The WSOP main event in Las Vegas and the WSOP Europe are different tournaments. Vegas brings 6,494 players competing on poker’s biggest stage while Europe offers a much smaller environment (334 players in 2009) but a harder field. Gone are the thousands of amateurs in Europe, pro after pro after pro. It’s a tournament filled with the best, and for the second year in a row, the final table featured six WSOP bracelet winners and some very familiar faces.
Two-poker player just emerged onto the poker scene in July. James Akenhead and Antoine Saout made the WSOP final table in Las Vegas and followed in the footsteps of Ivan Demidov (a November Niner in 2008), by making both main event final tables in the same year. The two poker players will hope for a better result in Las Vegas as both failed finishing 9th and 7th place respectively. In any case, most members of the November 9, 2009 have had success since they left the Rio and the additional final table experience is sure to help Akenhead and Saout in November.
Joining the 2 poker players is Jeff Shulman that is more motivated to win a title in November since his father, Barry, defeated Daniel Negreanu in WSOP Europe main event title after a marathon final table of 16 hours and 32 minutes. Jeff Shulman is a 63-year-old CEO of Card Player magazine captured his 2nd bracelet and earned 801,603 pounds for 1st place.
“Its a lot of fun for me to be here right now,” Barry Shulman said. “It’s been great. When I moved to Vegas, I took up poker. I tried to prove that I could beat the best in the world. I got pretty good for a while, but then I started to focus more on my business at Card Player. Since then, I have not been playing as hard. Now, I’m back on the winning trail and feeling very good about it.”
With Negreanu holding the chip lead, he has Q-J while Shulman has pocket aces. The flop came 5d-8d-Jc and with top pair, Shulman led out, Negreanu raised and Shulman moved all-in. Negreanu made the call. The turn was another jack, putting Negreanu in the lead and needing to dodge only the two remaining aces in the deck for him to become world champion.
And then there was the ace of diamonds on the river to silence the crowd, make Negreanu hate poker and give Shulman all he needed to finish off “Kid Poker” for the title.
“The truth is, because it was on television and we were heads-up, I knew I got in with the best hand [holding pocket aces],” said Shulman. “When the jack came on the turn, I had pretty much given up. I said to myself, well, at least I am not going to be embarrassed here. What are you going to do? That’s poker. When the ace came [on the river], I just about passed out.”
Shulman first took the chip lead by moving all in post flop and turning a flush with Ah-5h against Ac-As of Negreanu. Negreanu battled back, but only to fall short in the end. This was Negreanu’s 2nd consecutive appearance at the WSOP Europe main event final table; he finished 5th last year. He started as the short stack at the final table, and while no player was eliminated during the first 5 hours, Negreanu has the huge stack of cips. Negreanu finished 2nd place earned 495,589 pounds and became the all time tournament money winner.
Despite the accomplishment, and with good reason, Negreanu had only one thing to say on his typically very busy Twitter feed: “Those two key hands will make you hate poker.”
Article source www.pokerinthenews.com
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