One-third of poker field remains as Main Event enters Day 3

By Case Keefer (contact)

Sunday, July 11, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.

An old tournament poker superstition states that it's unlucky to have a ton of chips early in an event.

Hovering over a monster stack, some would argue, matters little until a tournament enters its late stages. However, players such as Vanessa Selbst and Gabriel Walls don't subscribe to that sort of thinking.

Selbst and Walls ended Day 2B of the World Series of Poker $10,000 buy-in Main Event near the top of the chip counts.

"I made a bunch of hands today," Selbst said. "I was running good. I have an aggressive image, so I get paid off. It was just coasting, playing the big stack and re-raising a lot."

Selbst ended Saturday with 265,000 chips, which is plenty to work with when approximately 2,500 players out of 7,319 entrants return to the Rio on Monday to play Day 3 of the Main Event.

Walls used similar tactics in accumulating 241,000 chips.

"I'm used to playing a big stack," Walls said. "I'm not very good at playing small stacks like a lot of these tournament players. Why this tournament goes so well for me is because it's like a cash game — a cash game with bad players."

Walls, a recreational player and recycling facility owner from Indianapolis, has an impressive Main Event résumé. He's played in the tournament only twice before, 2005 and 2009, but cashed both times — finishing 87th in 2005 for $91,950 and 239th last year for $32,963.

In both 2005 and 2009, Walls spent time as the chip leader late in the event.

"My skill set is reading people and playing deep-stack poker, so I play a lot of hands and play a lot of hands out of position," Walls said. "I like to feel them out. The hands don't really matter. Ninety percent of the time I'm not concerned with the hands and not doing range equations or math. I'm going on feel."

Working with a lot of chips is nothing new to Selbst, who splits her time between playing poker and attending Yale Law School. She already owns one World Series of Poker bracelet and won one of the biggest tournaments of the year in 2010.

Selbst took down the Pokerstars.net North American Poker Tour Mohegan Sun Main Event in Connecticut earlier this year for $750,000.

As proud as she is with that victory, it would pale in comparison to making a run next week at the Rio. First place will pay $8.9 million.

"This is the tournament everyone wants to do well in," Selbst said. "If I somehow made it deep or final-tabled it, that would be the best feeling in poker I could possibly imagine."

There's still a long way to go. Play will continue for six days next week until a final table of nine emerges from the field and returns in November.

Although two amateurs — David Assouline and Ricardo Fasanaro — will enter Day 3 as the only players with more than 380,000 chips, many notable pros lurk closely behind.

Two-time Main Event champion Johnny Chan, cash-game specialist Patrik Antonius, online stalwart Phil Galfond and three-time bracelet winner Sammy Farha all are in the top 50.

Some notable exits also occurred Saturday at the Rio. "The Godfather of Poker" Doyle Brunson, poker's biggest star Phil Ivey and 2009 Main Event runner-up Darvin Moon all met their demise.

Case Keefer can be reached at 948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer for live updates from the Main Event.