This week the Sixth Annual World Heads Up Poker Championship has been steadily losing runners, one at a time, as the intense deep stacked one-on-one battles continue. A great showing of Brits and blondeites made it to Barcelona, but only a handful remain as the prize money goes up and those who fell earlier involve themselves in the plentiful side events (more on that later).
Out in the earlier rounds were El Blondie (as detailed in his report, direct from Barcelona), Mickey Wernick, Pascal Perrault, Joe Grech, Ash Hussain and John Duthie among others, leaving, however, a
good sight more well known players still fighting for the top spot. And Paul Jackson has to be one of the favourites at this point - having beaten Anthony Lellouche and Bad Girl, he encountered Carlos Mortensen, and finished him off too. Not an easy set of match-ups, but the calm ActionJack is safely through round 4 and looking at more than €11,250 in prize money at the very least.
I was looking forward to writing the title of this news piece as 'Woody Deck is Still In!" but sadly after winning a fantastic 13 heads up matches in a row, he was eliminated by German card whiz (in every sense) Jan Heitmann. Jan was knocked out in Round 4 by Dutchwoman Tsai Chen, but his friend, occasional percentage-swapper and fellow traveller George Danzer took out Santiago Holguin to remain in the competition.
Robert Binelli beat Thomas Fougeron, Isaac Mayola de Vega beat Shannon Shorr, and Frank Blumlein beat Santiago Terrazas, to give you some idea of what the next stage is shaping into, and a certain Nick Gibson is still going strong, having vanquished Ben Battle. With Thierry Cazals losing to Markus Golser, they are probably all resting before it all continues tomorrow - with a higher probability that they could end up on that Feature TV Table.
Meanwhile Paul Jackson also found the time to win the €1,000 NL Freezeout in the 20th, with young James Atkin coming 4th and Bad Girl Pham coming 7th. Stephen Pearce came out on top of the €500 NL Freezeout and also cashed in the €300 Limit event (which was won by Spain's Crisant Gellida). These events continue right the way through the week, and we'll be keeping a beady eye on how the blondeites are doing over there in Barcelona. Watch this space...