LeFrancois loses to Cheong

After cashing in on two events prior to the Main Event at the WSOP, Joseph Cheong has now made it to the November Nine after an impressive run

Joseph Cheong received one of the liveliest virtual rails of the WSOP, he can normally be found playing online under the name “subiime”. He comes from La Mirada, California and in May 2009 won a Mini Full tilt Online Poker Series worth $55,000 at only 23 years old.

Cheong will be in the 2010 WSOP November Nine and come to the final table with the third largest chip stack. Along the way to his place he pushed Pascal LeFrancois down to 11th place, LeFrancois went all in after a series of raises pre-flop when he was holding Queen and Jack of spades. However, Cheong had a pair of kings and called. A jack hit on the flop which would have scared Cheong, however, there was a king on the turn which meant LeFrancois was drawing dead to the river.

Cheong was one of the more aggressive players along the way, possibly because of his success online. However, he only succeeded in knocking out Le Francois on the 8th day of the Main Event. He will now be facing a media whirlwind when he gets home to California before the November Nine in a few months.
Cheong entered Day 7 with a stack of 5.56 million which is the tenth largest tally from the Amazon Room. Before the Main Event Cheong had finished in the money in two other events at the WSOP, one of which was 29th place in the $5,000 No Limit Hold’em Six-Handed affair from which he won $17,000.
Cheong has won a WSOP Circuit gold ring when he won a $340 No Limit Hold’em tournament at Harrah’s Rincon in March 2010. He had to defeat PokerStars Pro and WSOP bracelet winner David Williams heads-up to win, Williams won $10,000 while Cheong took home $17,000.

In July of last year Cheong won the Full Tilt Poker $75,000 Guaranteed and $22,500 Guaranteed and in total took home over $50,000. In January of this year he won the Full Tilt $100 Cubed for $23,000, he also won a PokerStars Nightly Seventy Grand for $13,000.

Most impressively perhaps, he has won six of the $100 buy-in tournaments on PokerStars in July 2009.

There were a number of players rooting for Cheong during the final days of the Main Event, many from PoketFives.com including Scott “SCTrojans” Freeman, Michael “benvo123” Benvenuti, David “The Maven” Chicotsky, Nick “Grip” Grippo, and Sam “siola” Iola. Cheong thank them posting, “TYTY guys. Running pure and I hope it keeps up. GLGL to everyone else still (except vs me).”