WSOP 2010 November Nine

Next month the November Nine will meet to decide the fate of the WSOP Main Event, here we offer some insight into what to expect

The World Series of Poker’s November Nine is fast approaching where the winner of this year’s Main Event will be determined at the Rio All-Suites hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The players are all in fairly similar positions, at first the average stack will have less than 50 big blinds however, the bottom three players will have an average of just 21. This means that play will start very tight, none of them will want to be the first eliminated and the players will be looking to warm up to the game.

Whilst Jason Senti is the short stack it is unlikely that he will be the first player eliminated. Senti played excellently with a short stack to survive the 10-handed marathon sessions, and unless he is extremely unlucky it is expected that he will climb a few spots.

Whilst it will take some time for the first player to be eliminated once it happens the pace will pick up. Blinds will increase to 300,000/600,000 after about an hour as level 36 passes, two hours later they’ll increase to 400,000/800,000. After two complete hours at that level it is unlikely that the table will be playing with less than 50 big blinds in the average stack.

The favourite to win this year is Joseph Cheong. He is cool, calm and collected and can handle a bad beat and still play fantastically. His path to the final table saw some amazing play under pressure and even though his chip stack is only about a third of the size of Duhamel’s it would not be surprising to see him knock out a few players as he tries for chip lead in the first few hours. Once he has a good stack his aggressive style could easily see him taking home this year’s title.