Shaun Deeb left the Rio following Day Three of the WSOP $10,000 Dealers Choice tournament with the chip lead. However, the 2018 Player of the Year angrily exited the Amazon room due to his disdain for tournament director Jack Effel’s tournament structure that forced play to conclude early for the day with just five players remaining.
Howard Mash, however, was in a better mood when he exited the poker room on Sunday. The Floridian shipped the $1,000 Seniors No Limit Hold’em for $662,594.
Can’t We Just Finish it Now?
Prior to the start of the $10,000 Dealers Choice event, the structure called for a stoppage of play on Day Three with six remaining players. After Nick Schulman busted in sixth place ($52,656) at around 7:00 pm, just five hours into the session, play concluded for the day and everyone told to return at noon PT on Monday. There won’t be a live stream available of the final table, by the way.
Despite the pre-tournament agreed upon structure, the remaining players could have chosen to play down to a winner on Sunday. But there were two unnamed players who voted against it. That made Shaun Deeb rather angry.
Deeb, who plays a full schedule each summer as he chases Player of the Year, did not appreciate the new four-day structures for the $10k’s. He prefers to move onto his next events as quickly as possible. But he wasn’t able to do that yesterday given that he must come back to finish off the dealers choice event on Monday.
CardsChat briefly caught up with Deeb as he stormed out of the Amazon room within the Rio Convention Center. He wasn’t in the mood to talk much but he did give us one quote.
“We’re not playing because it’s the dumbest f*****g reason ever.”
We heard Deeb cursing Jack Effel’s name. Later, he took to Twitter to vent his frustration.
Well again @WSOPTD makes an awful ruling to fuck be over think both players abused the system to increase their own equity while we were outside after the proper ruling was made no one wants short day 3s and day 4s in small events that obvious from twitter
— shaun deeb (@shaundeeb) June 17, 2019
Beyond the disdain for four-day tournaments, Deeb was also upset that the holdover would give his opponents an opportunity to study up on some of the games played in the dealers choice tournament.
WSOP $10,000 Dealers Choice Final Table Chip Counts
- Shaun Deeb (USA) 2,601,000
- Adam Friedman (USA) 1,898,000
- Matt Glantz (USA) 1,401,000
- Michael McKenna (USA) 1,038,000
- David Moskowitz (USA) 382,000
Mashing the Competition
One of the most exciting tournaments of the summer is the $1,000 Seniors No Limit Hold’em. The main reason is because the field is full of lifelong pros and recreational players who still have a burning passion for poker after all these years.
A whopping 5,916 gray-haired (mostly, or bald) men and women entered the Seniors tournament last Thursday. But only Howard Mash was left standing when play concluded Sunday night.
Mash, a Florida resident, defeated Frenchman Jean Fontaine heads-up to win his first bracelet, worth $662,594. It took one hell of a run of good fortune to earn that money.
WSOP SENIORS CHAMPIONS (Since 2014):
2014 Dan Heimiller (USA) $627,462
2015 Travis Baker (USA) $613,466
2016 Johnnie Craig (USA) $538,204
2017 Frank Maggio (USA) $617,303
2018 Matthew Davis (USA) $662,676
2019 Howard Mash (USA) $662,594
“At one point I was just staying alive barely,” Mash said in his post-tournament interview. “I stayed in and stayed in, then got lucky. Any tournament with 5,900 people, you have to get lucky to win.”
