The final table here will be easier than an online sit-and-go - Dave Benefield

It’s impossible to get a handle on the size of the Main Event unless you’re there. With four day ones, it’s also hard to gauge it as an actual tournament as opposed to a world record attempt. Early reporting is impossible and it’s only on day four – after the money bubble bursts at 666 – that it starts to take shape.

Fewer than 500 players remain and the Rio’s Amazon Room feels like a blasted-out war zone. Clearly, the aftermath is nigh. Too few tables are scattered around the huge room, players and dealers appear battered from the brutally long hours of gambling, and the most optimistic of the poker sharks begin girding for the home stretch of this long haul.

Others – those less fortunate and nearing the edge of chip-less decimation – dodge bullets and strategise survival.

Not too surprisingly, considering the size of the field and the booming state of online poker, many of the players still left in look barely old enough to buy themselves a beer. Headphones and iPods are not as prevalent as you might expect, and a surprising number of contenders have ditched their shades in exchange for searing eye contact.

Familiar faces become increasingly rare: toward the end of this fourth day only a handful of superstars remain in play. Mike Matusow (looking surprisingly slinky and still shooting off his mouth) and Gus Hansen (head and face equally buzzed, gaunt and dour) square off from opposite sides of the same table. Allen Cunningham quietly, cheerfully, does his thing. Mark Vos holds court in the manner of a jolly publican.

And online superstar Dave ‘Raptor’ Benefield never loses hyper-focus of his surroundings. ‘The final table here will be easier than an online sit-and-go,’ he predicts. ‘I’m not being disrespectful to anyone, but it’s a fact.’ True or not, we’ll never know: Raptor gets himself knocked out one day later, after starting his final session with a large stack.

Brat alert

Whether these known quantities like it or not, Phil Hellmuth has been drawing enough attention for all of them. Perhaps surprisingly, he remains locked into his game, rarely criticising the play of those around him, keeping himself focused on winning hands. He wears a big, black-and- gold UltimateBet jersey, with ‘Poker Brat’ emblazoned across his upper back. TV cameras zoom in as he tells the table about being ‘at the top of my powers’ and leaves the impression that his less than huge stacks reflect bad breaks. They are, he says, indications of ‘my struggle’.

By night’s end, with tournament chips being bagged till play resumes the next day, he and Matusow are fake-fighting on the edge of the roped off players’ area. Between feigned shoves, they commiserate about terrible tables and rotten luck. It reminds me of the time, in 2005, when Matusow busted out and literally cried on the shoulder of Hellmuth. Now, though, there are no tears, just lots of talk about bad beats and suck-outs. ‘I’ve fought so hard in this tournament,’ says Hellmuth. ‘And I’m feeling really good about it.’

Of course, though, Hellmuth can keep his cool for only so long. On Day 5, while playing at the feature table with Matusow, Hellmuth comes up against Christian Dragomir. A young unknown with an Eastern European accent, Dragomir has a habit of overrating 10-6 (‘I won with it earlier,’ Dragomir tells me with a shrug, ‘so I wanted to play it again’) and does this against the 11-time bracelet winner.

At hand’s end, Dragomir shows his cards, rakes the pot, and the inevitable heated lecture about this ‘not being poker’ ensues. In the wake of enduring Hurricane Hellmuth, Dragomir looks shaken up as he recounts being called ‘the worst player in the world’ – Hellmuth’s 10-minute tirade is supposed to cost him a one-orbit penalty, though that is ultimately rescinded – but Dragomir’s satisfaction will come later: when he outlasts the volatile Brat. As the dust settles, Matusow looks at the target of Hellmuth’s vitriol and dryly remarks, ‘It’s really too bad. This guy was the only one at the table we were able to win money off.’

No doubt, Tiffany Michelle can relate. During Day 6, the lanky, pigtailed Michelle – who favours distressed leather, acts sweet, goes by the nickname ‘Hot Chips’ and seems to be having a blast – finds herself sitting next to Dragomir. Rather than berating him, she has a weird habit of patting him on the shoulder. ‘I won four million chips off the guy,’ says Michelle, who’s best known as a tournament correspondent for PokerNews.com (in fact, Tony G – a partner in the site – is one of her Main Event backers). ‘So I was trying to make him feel better. It really does help to have players at your table liking you.’

Crying shame

Over the course of the penultimate day, big-name pros unceremoniously flame out. Last of the recognisable studs to bite the dust is Matusow, who pushes in with A-J and gets outdrawn. During a post- elimination interview, the tears come and so do the acknowledgements that his life is great, he’s very happy, and he’ll probably never again get this close to final-tabling a Main Event. A modest Mouth explains that he’s a little rattled over getting unlucky at the wrong moment and that he hates going out in such a manner, especially after playing what he classifies as ‘perfect poker’.

The busting of Matusow leaves the Amazon room, along with its tournament millions and untold sums in promotional fees, to amateurs and poker world nobodies. There is Nikolay Losev, a young Russian (he describes himself to me as ‘semi-professional’) who finds himself heads-up in a hand against Aaron Gordon, the longest-standing Brit.

Unsure of whether or not to call an all-in bet from Gordon, Losev does something that I’ve never seen before in a major tournament. He asks a friend of his for a coin, flips it, squeezes the result, sees that it has landed on the positive side, and calls. ‘He doubled me up,’ says Gordon, who came to Vegas from the UK, expected to withdraw enough money from a Rio ATM to buy into the Main Event, found himself able to take out only $600 at a time, and wound up needing to win his way in via satellite (heroically, he did it). ‘I had A-K, he called me with A-J and my hand held up. That was great.’

With plays like that one, Losev is a dead man walking. Never mind that at one point, the Russian, who dubiously claims to speak no English and wears the same embroidered white shirt for several days running, muscles his way into being chip leader. Ultimately, his supremely aggressive style bites him back. It comes courtesy of the endlessly bullied, desperately short- stacked Nick Sliwinski (a recent college graduate who moved to Vegas just days before satelliting his way into the Main Event).

On the final-27 bubble, Sliwinski pushes all-in, twice in a row, against Losev. Sliwinski gets called both times and wins both hands. The latter victory busts Losev out of the tournament, and Sliwinski suddenly jumps from short stack to medium stack, happily going into the big day on which a final table will be set for the ultimate showdown in November.

The final hurdle

The session proves to be a tough one for the remaining British hope Gordon, a college student from Brighton. When, with 24 players remaining, he finds himself getting slaughtered at the second feature table, he needs to push in his remaining one million. He makes his move with small, gapped cards. The guy to his left, a burly New Yorker named Paul Snead (who is being supported by 2005 second-place finisher Steve Dannenman) folds. Two other players call and Gordon triples up after matching cards hit the board.

It’s only a stay of execution, though, Gordon biting the dust soon after in 24th. Sliwinski is still alive though, and brimming with confidence. Some of it comes courtesy of Johnny Chan. Days earlier, after watching Sliwinski for a bit, impressed by the young man’s patience and knack for reading opponents, Chan began to tout Sliwinski as the favourite to win the WSOP. Of course, the last person to receive JC’s seal of approval was Jamie Gold. For Sliwinski, though, it’s not to be.

He busts out close to the final-table bubble, in 13th, making a curious play in which he pushes all-in on a bluff. ‘I thought I had a read on the guy,’ Sliwinski grimly tells me, on his way out of the Amazon Room, off to claim his $463,201 prize. ‘It’s complicated to explain, but I thought he had a naked Ace. I was sure I had him beaten.’ What does Chan think of Sliwinski’s play? ‘He played great. He’s got a great future ahead of him and this is a really nice score for Nick.’

Chan is not the only big-name guy to have taken an interest in a lesser-known player. Marcel Luske and Michael Mizrachi spent much of the final night at the Rio rooting on a skinny poker pro by the name of David ‘Chino’ Rheem. He’s a boyhood friend of Mizrachi’s, and the pair of bracelet winners are convinced that Chino will be back in November for the final table showdown. ‘Chino is definitely the best one out there,’ insists Mizrachi. ‘My brother and I brought him into poker. He lived with us. We played in home games together. It’s all about Chino.’

Watching as Chino takes down a small pot, Luske points up to giant portraits of World Series winners past, which ring the room’s upper reaches, and says, ‘I’d like to see Chino up there.’

Similar thoughts, for various players, go through many minds in the Rio tonight, especially when the field is down to just 11 players, spread between two tables. One more needs to drop before the remaining competitors will be compressed into a single 10-person set-up, and play down to the nine finalists who’ll compete for the 2008 World Series Championship bracelet.

The big moment occurs after Joe Bishop, wearing a billowing red polo shirt, takes a good-sized stack and pushes all-in three times, in quick succession. He loses the last of these hands to Chino and busts out with shocking efficiency. Bishop’s defeat is met with roars of approval from the others at his table. Presumably it’s nothing personal, but they don’t mind seeing him going out if it gives them the chance to move on.

With his former opponents still hooting and celebrating, he is asked what happened. Bishop rattles off reasons why the plays made sense, then he facetiously says, ‘I’m probably retarded. I think I will get Chino tattooed on my ass.’

Single table

Swiftly, the remaining 10 group together around the primary TV table, inside a room that is outfitted with stands for spectator- seating and designed to look a little like a game-show set. As the guys get mic’ed up and seated, the condensed space buzzes with energy. There’s no doubt that history will be made in the next few hours. Crowding in among the media, angling for a seat with a good view of the action, is poker pro Robert Williamson III.

Conceding that he’d much rather be on the other side of the rail, Williamson takes a moment to consider what he would do if he were still in action. ‘I would risk sacrificing my seat at the final table for accumulating chips. But that’s my style. I like to come in with a big stack.’ That said, he hesitates for a beat, takes in the air of excitement around him, and reconsiders. ‘Actually, in light of everything that would come with making the final table here, it’s possible that this would be one of the few times in which I’d play to keep my seat instead of risking it all to win more chips.’