The main event at the Los Angeles Poker Classic saw a total of 696 players pay the entry fee of $10,000 this year which made almost a $6.7 million dollar prize pool and in the end would be paying the winner of the event a total of $1.68 million. Well the tournament started on February 21st and saw some of the best action a tournament could offer with the new structure that was put in place this year by the new tournament director Matt Savage. However that is not the reason for this article and in fact the real reason for this article is the Los Angeles Poker Classic is finally down to the last twenty players and only after four days of play. That is correct only twenty players left but no one should get comfortable yet because you still have to make it to the final six players of the tournament to make the tv final table so no one is safe yet and that includes the chip leader.
You ask who right now going into Day 5 as the chip leader in the Los Angeles Poker Classic, well that is easy to answer because it is none other than one of the team members on Team Full Tilt and that player is Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. Right now Chris is sitting with a comfortable but not safe stack of about $1.7 million in chips and the player that is closest to him in chips is Payman Arjang who is sitting with about $1.4 million in chips. The reason I say that no one is safe is because there is still some very tough competitors left in the tournament like Nick Shulman who is sitting with $850,000 and then there is Peter Feldman who is sitting with $423,000 chips. Another player who is still alive is the self proclaimed king of the short stack Teddy “IceMan” Monroe who is sitting with about $230,000 in chips, but do not count the “IceMan” out just yet because earlier in the tournament he came back from a stack that was so short it was just a matter of time before he was standing on the rail, but instead he dug down deep and showed the patience to bring the stack back up.
The tournament right now is currently set to start at level 22 when Day 5 starts and that means players will have blinds set at $6000/$12000 with a $2000 ante from every player. This is when the tournament is going to get good and it should be interesting to see who actually makes the final table and to see if Chris “Jesus” Ferguson can take one down for pros just like the great Phil Ivey did last year.