Event 24: Phillip Hui Holds Monster Chip Lead at Final Table

$1,100 No Limit Hold’em (Re-Entry)
Level 28: 30,000/60,000 with a 10,000 ante
Players: 9 of 828 players remaining

Phillip Hui
Phillip Hui

It was a nearly 16-hour day for players in the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open $1,1,00 No-Limit Hold’em (Re-Entry) event — a tournament that attracted 828 entries (up 34 from the year before) —  but the final table of nine is finally set. Leading the way is  World Series of Poker bracelet winner Phillip Hui, who also happens to be the better half of poker pro Loni Harwood.

Hui grinded a short stack deep in the money but caught fire at just the right time, which included getting lucky against Allen Kessler, who he would eventually send out the door in 23rd place. That was the start of Hui’s heater, which saw him chip up all the way to 4.575 million.

To put that in perspective, that is nearly three times as much as Ruslan Dykshteyn, who bagged up the second-biggest stack with 1.69 million. Additionally, four of the final nine are in the six-figure, which is well below average.

That said, plenty of players stand between Hui and victory including Aaron Massey, a poker pro with more than $2.9 million in lifetime earnings including topping a field of 1,394 to win the 2012 Winstar The River Guaranteed $4 Million Poker Series of $651,559. More recently, the former Heartland Poker Tour Player of the Year topped a field of  820 entries to win the Mid-States Poker Tour FireKeepers Main Event for nearly $175,000!

Aaron Massey
Aaron Massey

There is also poker pro Daniel Buzgon, who has more than $1.5 million in lifetime earnings. Buzgon only has one win on his HendonMob, which came in January 2015 when he topped a field of 2,882 entries to win the WPT Borgata Winter Open Event #15: $500 NLHE for $195,509.

Daniel Buzgon
Daniel Buzgont

The final table gets kicked off on Tuesday at 2 p.m. inside of the Hard Rock Live. All four of The Big 4 final tables will run alongside each other with Maria Ho and Ali Nejad MC’ing the action.