World Series of Poker 2010 Main Event Champion Jonathan Duhamel, fresh off his recent victory at the EPT Deauville High Roller event, is set to try and repeat history against the rest of last year’s November Nine. As part of Foxwoods’ Mega Stack Challenge XIX poker series, 18 qualifiers will join all 9 members of last year’s WSOP Main Event final table, including Duhamel and Michael “the Grinder” Mizrachi, in a special 3-table no-limit Hold ’em poker tournament.
Foxwoods, the world’s largest casino, is staging the event to coincide with the opening of its brand new tournament poker room. Already the largest poker room on the East Coast, the Foxwoods poker room will undoubtedly be the center of the poker world’s attention as the November Nine will be fully reassembled for the first time since the concept was introduced a couple years back.
It will be very interesting to see how the top 9 finishers from last year’s WSOP fare in this event, given that many of them are now familiar with each others’ style of play. The atmosphere will also be much more relaxed, now that each of them are already millionaires and they’re not playing for millions more in front of ESPN’s cameras.
Specifically, this poker blogger would be interested to see how Duhamel, Joseph Cheong, and John Racener play if they happen to reach the final table short stacked. I happen to think each of them found success at last year’s WSOP specifically because they all knew how to play big stacks well. To be able to nurse a small stack all the way to victory would definitely go a long way towards proving to me that their top 3 finishes weren’t lucky flukes.
Racener, Cheong, Duhamel, and the Grinder will be joined by John Dolan, Jason Senti, Matt Jarvis, and Soi (Cuong) Nguyen, as well as the every excitable Filippo Candio. I’m gonna be rooting for Candio in this one, simply because he has (by far!) the best personality of all of them and would make for the best story!
Learning a ton from these neat artciles.