If you are a professional poker player then you probably got one of your first tastes of the game watching it on TV. If you did, then it is very likely that you were watching the final table of a WPT event. It is a poker players dream to have their names pour from the mouths of Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten. Today, in the Aviation Club de France, at the WPT Grand Prix de Paris, 18 poker souls, were dreaming of achieving that very feat and by the end of the day six players had.
312 players entered this event and Byron Kaverman is currently out in front with 2,079,000 chips. Kaverman started the day with 729,000 chips and after the first few levels he had added an additional 100,000 without much fuss. In fact it wasn’t until the 7th elimination that Kaverman wielded his axe. Andras Kovacs felt the full weight of it when Kaverman called the Kovacs short-stack shove with [kx][tx]. Kovacs held [jx][jx]but a king on the turn handed the American the winning hand. This put Kaverman over a million chips for the first time but he was still chasing the top two Mikko Sundell and fellow countryman Matthew Waxman.
Then just before dinner Kaverman had his five-minutes of fame after he eliminated Alexandre Brivot. On a flop of 
Kaverman called an all-in shove by Brivot while holding a draw. Brivot had 
and Kaverman had 
. The 
on the river sending a seething Brivot through the roof and Kaverman up to 1.6 million chips. Despite that hand Kaverman was still in third place, going to dinner, but the gap between himself and Sundell/Waxman had shortened considerably.
Then after the dinner break Frederic Magen took a bite out of Matthew Waxman’s stack and Hugo Lemaire did the same to Mikko Sundell. As no one was biting the stack of Kaverman he managed to sneak into the lead and remained there as Yacoub Dori was being shown the door in 7th place.
Joining Byron Kaverman on the final table will be Hugo Lemaire (1,962,000), Mikko Sundell (1,791,000), Frederic Magen (1,554,000), Matthew Waxman (1,423,000) and Martin Jacobson (482,000).
The final table will be taking place at 16.00 (CET) Saturday and it is going to be one hell of a spectacle. The event will be streamed live and the PartyPoker blog will feature the live stream as well as the usual live updates. The live stream commentary will come from Tony Dunst and we will also have an array of special guest commentators.
To read all of the details of today’s titanic tussle click here.
The full story in pictures can be found at a press of a button here.
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