July 21, 2010 (CAP News Wire) – After two weeks of Main Event action, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Final Table has been determined.
No Hellmuth. No Ivey. No Annie Duke or Doyle Brunson. But despite the lack of marquee names, this year’s WSOP Final Table is packed with poker pros who are serious about the game, although most of them will be sitting at that table for the first time. For this reason and others, the November Nine is already full of surprises, before the first card is even dealt.
And, of course, that card won’t be dealt until November (110 days from now, to be exact!), so there’s going to be plenty of time to analyze each of these players and predict who will or won’t walk away with the pot. That’s part of the fun, right?
So, who’s in? The finalists are: Chip leader Jonathan Duhamel, Matthew Jarvis, Joseph Cheong, Jason Senti, John Racener, John Dolan, Filippo Candio (the first Italian poker player to make the WSOP Final Table), and Cuong “Soi” Nguyen (the only player who isn’t strictly a “professional” poker player, per the Atlantic City Weekly).
Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi is also in the Final Table — he’s reportedly already won “$8.6 million from live tournament cashes alone”, according to OnlinePoker.net.
“For Mizrachi, poker’s 2005 wonder boy, this makes official and complete the reascent of his star,” blogs Gary Wise at ESPN.com. “He’ll now have to wait for a few months to see if he can pull off the most remarkable double of all time: winning the Players’ Championship and the main event. If he can, he’ll tie Frank Kassela for Player of the Year, which Kassela seemed to have all locked up just a week ago.”
So, poker affiliates, while it’s too late to offer players 2010 WSOP qualifiers, there’s still a chance to take advantage of WSOP excitement as the Final Table draws nearer — especially since ESPN won’t begin airing its coverage of the Main Event action until August. (The games aren’t shown live but instead heavily edited to compress the game play into time segments more digestible for casual viewers — the 12+ hours of game play over the weekend, for example, don’t translate that well over to television.)
Some of the event’s biggest sponsors will be featured prominently, so get ads for those poker affiliate programs out in front and center of your site and you might see an uptick in signups.