WSOP: Sam Farha won his 3rd bracelet after 16-hour battle

• Author: News2
• Filed under: High Stakes Results, James Dempsey, Mike Sexton, Sammy Farha, WSOP, WSOP Articles, Yueqi Zhu
• Date: Jun 15,2010

The $10k Omaha Hi/Lo Championship was of very high quality and took 16 hours of play at the Rio Casino. The tournament - which was filled with top players - ended up in Sam Farha’s celebration.  

-Sam Farha with his prior bracelet.

23 players started the day. Three and half hours later there were only nine finalists left. The Bubbleboy of the final table was Mike Sexton. James Dempsey started the final table from chiplead, and his noisy and drunk supporters kept brawling throughout the tournament. 

When there were only seven players left, Sam Farha started his rise. During a couple of hands Farha took the chiplead, and when there were only five players left, he had nearly half of the chips of the whole tournament. After the game was changed to 3-handed, it took a very long time before the next player got eliminated. Yueqi “Richard” Zhu ranked third after which the heads up between Farha and Dempsey could begin with Farha leading 2:1 in chips.

In one phase Farha was leading even 15:1 in chips until Dempsey struck back. After two hours of heads up the two gamblers were having completely identical chipstacks. After 15 hours of play Farha announced his will to set forward the heads up since he was about to play again in the $2,5k PL Omaha tournament in only seven hours. In the end both players were really worn out, and the game got drastically slower and the audience a lot quieter.  

The solution to this exciting but wearing heads up came finally at 7am local time. In the crucial hand Farha was holding aces and kings as Q93QA came to the table. Dempsey was powerless in front of Farha’s full house and remained holding only a couple of blinds in hand.  

The final results:
1. Sam Farha $488,237
2. James Dempsey $301,790
3. Yueqi Zhu $225,326
4. Sergey Altbregin $169,368
5. Tony Merksick $128,097
6. Michael Chow $97,508
7. Eugene Katchalov $74,670
8. Abe Mosseri $57,552
9. Steve Wong $44,619

Despite his brilliant cash playing skills this was only the seventh time as Farha won money in the WSOP. But we must also note that five times he has ranked in top three. Now it’s exciting to see when Farha is gonna show up in the $2,5k PLO tournament which was scheduled to begin only six hours after he had won the bracelet…

Sources: pokernews.com, Wikipedia and TheHendonMob