I began the third day of the $15k WPT Festa al Lago main event at Bellagio with 205k at 1500/3k. I started the day at a table with Barry Greenstein, Corwin Cole, Justin Bonomo, and Bob Safai.

I was picking up a ton of big hands but was taking most down with raises and re-raises before the flop.

But just when I was getting comfortable (and it's hard not to when you have a big pair every fourth hand or so), they came to break the table.

Here was the lineup at the new table, who I believe have about $974,206,239,234 in combined earnings.

Seat 1 - Chino Rheem/Dutch Boyd

Seat 2 - unknown/Chad "lilholdem954" Batista

Seat 3 - Mark Seif

Seat 4 - Me

Seat 5 - Scott Clements

Seat 6 - unknown

Seat 7 - Jason Lester/Freddy Deeb

Seat 8 - Prahlad Friedman

Seat 9 - Kido Pham

Even friends still left in the tournament were breaking my balls about how bad the table draw was! Reporters said it was the toughest table left in the tournament. Fortunately I managed to play my best poker for almost the entire day, aside from one little spew so that I had that out of my system before tomorrow. =)

When you're seated at a table like this, it's also a great idea to stack the two guys who are inexplicably named "unknown."

I played pretty tight for the first couple of levels at the table while I got a feel for it, and because I guess I'm a nit at heart.

Then a really friendly Middle Eastern guy who played pretty tight all through day two decided to limp-reraise all in from early position with 4♥ 4♠ for ~100k @ 2/4k after I raised his limp with 10♦ 10♣.

I was pretty surprised, and of course rooted for a four for him ... just because a good anti-sweat is always fun. But a ten on the turn sealed his fate and brought me up to about 340k @ 2/4k.

Then during 3/6k I got most of my chips in against the other unknown play with A♦ K♦ against 10♣ 10♦. With ~700k in the middle it was pretty gross to see a Q♣ 9♣#X flop fall. The K♣ on the turn was GLORIOUS, but left me with twelve outs to fade. I managed to brick it and took down one of the biggest pots of the tournament.

After that I doubled up a shortstacked Prahlad Friedman for a ~300k pot @ 4/8k with A♦ K♥ against his K♠ K♣. Then I (hopefully) got the spew out of my system by losing a few more pots before we wrapped up play for the day.

With 37 players remaining and the average stack at ~445k, I have ~500k going to 5/10k to start day four. 27 players pay, and first prize is $1,218,225. Tomorrow might not be a bad day to run even better than I did today!

Matt Stout

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