With three heats down our online qualifiers haven’t had much of a sniff a glory but that all changed in Heat 4 as Jan Veit won through to the final after seeing off former England and Manchester United striker Teddy Sheringham.
Unlike the previous heats this was a very cagey affair. Maybe the players were too comfortable with their triple stacks to want to take the game by the scruff of the neck.
It was left to Sheringham to make the first moves when the blinds hit 5/10k – first knocking out Englishman Simon Craig, then seeing off PartyPoker.com in the Sky winner Johannes Nord Jorgensen, beating his pocket queens with AK as the killer ace hit on the flop.
Sam Trickett was the third player to fall, getting it in good with a pair of sevens again Veit’s AQ and staying in-front on the flop before Jan rivered two pair to end Trickett’s tournament.
Double WSOP bracelet winner Scott Fischman completed Teddy’s hat-trick, shoving with pocket sixes and running into Sheringham’s kings and Fischman was gone when both men missed the board. After the slow start the pace suddenly quickened as next to fall was Alec Torelli, he took a shot at Veit with J9 when Jan moved all-in, only for Veit to turn over the pocket rockets.
That left Torelli with just over 100k and in the very next hand that was down to zilch, Alec pushed in with K2 and Sheringham picking up a pair of eights to go three-handed with over one million in chips.
But the 20/40k level was not kind to the striker and as the blinds edged towards 30/60k, he bled off a portion of his stack to Veit in two hands with nothing against two pair and top pair and the balance of power began to sway in Veit’s direction. He remained dominant going heads-up with Sheringham after WSOP November-Niner Antoine Saout, who ran into trip nines to finish just outside of the qualifying places.
So Veit had the chip lead and it wasn’t long until he had them all – Teddy taking a big gamble with 102 and running into AJ, with Jan hitting a jack for good measure, it seems only Doyle Brunson can win with 102. Jan now moves into Thursday’s final and Teddy will go into extra-time (is that pushing the metaphor too far??) in the round robin playoff where he will face the other second place finishers.
The final table is shaping up nicely with four of the seven places already booked we have world renowned pros Phil Laak, Jennifer Tilly and Luke ‘FullFlush1’ Schwartz and now online qualifier Jan Veit in the mix.
UPDATE: The fifth place has been booked by yet another top class pro, more on that in the next post but if you can’t wait till then the answer is somewhere in our twitter feed over @partypokernews.