Knock, Knock. 

Who’s There?

Harrison Gimbel?

Who’s That?

There isn’t a punchline to that joke but a 19 year old named Harrison Gimbel hopes his PCA is an introduction to the live world of poker that an online poker kid is just biding his time until he turns 21.  There is a lot of poker to play but Gimbel in a hoodie, in the Bahamas, went about building a house out of chips and having a lot of people recall teenager Annette Obrestad’s convincing introduction to the live poker world a few years back.  Now she’s an old fogey at the ripe age of 21.  

One player that had his fill of meeting Gimbel was online poker pro Justin Bonomo.  The two had substantial stacks with they locked horns with Gimbel flopping the nut flush.  Bonomo was helpless as he shoved on a river card that paired the board and Gimblel insta-called.

While people were asking who Harrison Gimbel is others were asking where Praz Bansi was.  The day 2 chip leader didn’t want to replicate Day chip leader Wayne Bentley’s start but did just that.  Within the first few hands of sitting down he shipped 300k in a kamikaze mission to Phil Ivey.  Not only did Bansi fall back to the pack, but he enriched the one guy at his table he probably wanted least to give chips too. 

Those were fighting chips as Ivey and the one time chipleader mixed it up all day.  There was a great deal of deft poker strategy at play as Ivey was relentless attacking Bansi’s big blind from the button and Bansi had no problem defending it.   The two battled like the seasoned online/live poker players they are, even if Bansi’s seasoning came in a different era.  The poker acumen on display left the rest of the table to mostly just watch the two big stacks just square off.

Then the table broke.  It’s a shame because that is one battle that it would have been much more fun to see one of them broke than the table dispersed.  Bansi moved on to bigger and better things and did in fact duplicate his countryman’s u-turn by cultivating his stack again.  Without Ivey the kid thrived.  

Ivey on the other hand, found his new table was no bed of roses, though he had plenty of Bill Gazes.  Gazes welcomed Ivey to his table by promptly crippling his stack.  Ivey couldn’t even shuffle his remains.  Well, maybe you can shuffle two chips but it’s not much fun.  Ivey lost those two on the next hand and that was all she wrote for the scariest player in the tournament who had to settled for a min-cash. 

Bansi’s poker chip reclamation project paid big dividends as he ended the day with over 2 million.   Not quite Harrison Gimbel’s stack but not too shabby either.  Odd, that he very closely replicated the tribulations of Wayne Bentley the day before.  Both experienced the roller coaster that is poker by being second in big early pots and then got things into gear and rode up the leader board–Bentley to second and Bansi to third.  Praz Bansi did do one thing slightly different than Bentley he rolled into work late, but with a chip stack like that can you blame him?

Bentley’s Day 3 didn’t go quite as well as his day 2.  Once again, he started losing his stack in piecemeal fashion and once again he got his act together.  Only problem he got back to where he started but players like Gimbel and Bansi were in the fast lane to more than double his chips. 

Of the bigger remaining names, it was a bad day for the likes of Dennis Phillips, Matt Graham, Kathy Liebert, Daniel Negreanu, Victor Ramden and baseball pitcher Orel Hershiser.  As always in a poker tournament, their misfortune was the gain of the likes of Barry Shulman, John Duthie, and Eric Froehlich stayed in the field as he was one of the 280 starting players to make it all the way to the money and the final 62.