Eric Hershler? No, I didn’t know who he was either. He may have come from what can only be described as complete anonymity, but he managed to take the LA Poker Classic title ahead of a group of better known and bigger name players. A record 791 players entered this WPT event, making it the largest $10k event in the WPT’s history. The money area, at least the lower sections, however, was surprisingly star-free, former WSOP Main Event runner-up Hans Lund took 20th whilst Kristy Gazes was 16th and online poker wizard Jason Strasser came in 12th position. Many of the big names just never simply got going, or like Daniel Alaei, Michael Mizrachi or Joe Sebok, had a solid first day before eventually fading.
The most interesting story of the early days was Dan Harmetz, who was chip leader after the first day with an astonishing 850k (roughly holding 5% of the chips in play) – remarkably, this would turn out to be more than the leading stacks on Days 2 and 3 (550k and 700k respectively). But for Harmetz, this amount somehow failed to lead him onto the final table as he took many hits on the 2nd and 3rd days, ultimately scraping into the money by the skin of his teeth.
Eventually, the final table was made up as follows:
Jacobo Fernandez -- $3,370,000
Chau Giang -- $1,370,000
Paul Wasicka -- $3,390,000
JC Tran -- $3,470,000
David Bach -- $2,070,000
Eric Hershler -- $2,160,000
And although there were few pros who had managed to cash, this final table had a nice mix of big names and unknowns, one of the more familiar names being WSOP runner up and recent High Stakes Poker star, Paul Wasicka.
Early on, JC Tran would assert his dominance over the table with constant raising enabling him to push his stack over the $5million mark. Meanwhile, big game cash player Chau Giang found himself temporarily short before doubling through David Bach with A-K against A-9.
This left Bach very low, so much so that when he pushed in his last $200k, he was called by Hershler on the button and both blinds, Fernandez and Giang. All three checked the Ah-Th-4s flop but Hershler moved in on the 2h turn forcing the blinds to fold. Bach was holding A-2, which looked good for a quadruple-up, but Hershler was sitting pretty with a set of twos.
With the blinds now at 120k/240k/30k and the crapshoot alert going off in the players' heads, a veritable pushing-fest began - even chip leader Tran with 6.2 million couldn’t afford to wait now!
Despite having doubled through, Giang was still short and pushed from the cut-off with the speculative 8c-4c and was called by Tran’s Ac-Js. Giang must have liked the Qc-9c-4d flop but the river was the unfortunate Ace of spades knocking the cash-game specialist out.
Tran carried on his carnage, taking out Paul Wasicka (right) next with 3-3 against A-7, a coinflip
preflop perhaps, but not after the K-K-3 flop. Another good placing though for Wasicka, which combined with his 12th place in the Aussie Millions is proving he is no flash in the pan. Hershler was now the short stack of the three, but quickly managed two double ups courtesy of Tran with K-Q defeating T-7 and then Q-T holding against J-T. He followed this up by check-raising all-in against Fernandez on an A-K-2 leaving the latter very short, so much so that Fernandez began to push with considerable regularity. Soon enough, he was to do this one time too many, running J-2 into Hershler’s pocket rockets leaving us with just two.
And so the stage was set, complete unknown Hershler against top pro JC Tran, the man with numerous huge wins (including the 2006 WCOOP Main event). Hershler held a slight advantage in chips with 8.7 million to Tran’s 7.4 million but most people would surely still fancy the pro to take this down. As it happened, the heads-up lasted just one hand, Hershler’s J-6 holding up aginst Tran’s A-7 on an A-J-6 board.
Tran recevied just over $1million dollars for his 2nd place and proved again why he’s one of the hottest players in poker at the moment, whilst Hershler, a South-African born LA resident, took home $2.4million dollars and the title.
Not bad for your first live tournament ever, I only lasted twenty minutes in mine.