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Scott Blumstein holds commanding chip lead at WSOP Main Event

Updated July 21, 2017 - 12:46 pm

One hand continues to dominate the conversation at the World Series of Poker Main Event.

Scott Blumstein raked in the largest pot of the tournament in a monumental clash with amateur John Hesp of England and owns a commanding chip lead in the $10,000 buy-in No-limit Texas Hold ’em World Championship.

Blumstein, a professional poker player from Morristown, New Jersey, will have half of the chips in play when the final table of the Main Event resumes at 5:30 p.m. Friday at the Rio Convention Center.

The tournament paused at 11 p.m. Thursday with seven players remaining.

“I didn’t expect (Thursday) to go exactly like this. I’m thrilled,” Blumstein said. “That hand versus John was pretty brutal for him.”

Hesp, the 64-year-old fan favorite, pushed the action at the final table and owned the lead for much of the evening after starting play in second place.

But the complexion of the final table changed when Blumstein and Hesp, the top chip stacks at the time, tangled.

Facing a large reraise on the turn, Hesp went all-in with two-pair and was snap-called by Blumstein, who had the best possible hand with three aces.

Blumstein raced to his friends to celebrate when the cards were revealed, and the 156-million-chip pot sent shockwaves through the audience in the Brasilia Room.

“If you’re going to play a big pot, it was nice having aces and top set,” Blumstein said. “At the same time though, he’s the only guy who could do damage to my stack, so I wasn’t planning … to play too big of a pot with him in general. If it was going to be a big pot, I was going to have top set. That kind of just happened. It’s still a big blur in my mind. Sometimes in poker that’s what it takes.”

Blumstein is sitting on 178.3 million chips, more than double France’s Benjamin Pollak in second place.

Hesp will be in fourth place when play resumes Friday, but has 19 big blinds and only 6 percent of the chips in play.

“I think it will have a huge impact, because if you see John Hesp with all those chips as opposed to Scott Blumstein, Hesp is more of a splashier guy,” Bryan Piccioli said. “Blumstein’s pretty skilled I feel like, not to say Hesp isn’t skilled. He’s just much more all over the place, unpredictable.

“I can’t really blame John for getting it in with top two-pair on that board. But for some reason, as soon as Blumstein put in that 17-million-chip reraise on the turn, I’m just like, ‘He’s not trying to bluff John Hesp in this spot.’ As soon as I heard Hesp say ‘All-in’ I was like, ‘Whoa, this is going to be a hand. It’s going down.’ It went down.”

Along with Blumstein, Pollak was the biggest riser on the leaderboard.

After opening play with a little more than 35 million chips, Pollak will start with 77.525 million (65 big blinds).

“Ben’s a really good player, obviously,” Blumstein said. “Coming into this table, obviously everyone’s good, but he was third in chips and two to my left, so I was kind of fearful of him the most, honestly. For him to have a good day kind of stinks, but I think me having the day I had kind of offsets that.”

Piccioli had a vocal cheering section that went so far as to have a pizza delivered shortly before the end of play Thursday.

Piccioli sits in third place and picked up most of his chips when he had pocket aces and eliminated Jack Sinclair of England in eighth place.

“From my own point of view, I was just lucky to not get any trouble hands, any medium-strength kind of hands I could see a flop with against some big stacks or something like that,” Piccioli said. “Luckily, I was just looking at mostly either garbage or the two aces the one hand, obviously. No real rocket science went on for me (Thursday).”

Contact David Schoen at dschoen@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5203. Follow @DavidSchoenLVRJ on Twitter.

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