Photo Masters: Final Purple Jacket Push

PokerGO is your home for everything and anything Poker Masters. Feature and final table streams from the highest stakes week of the years will give fans from around the world the opportunity to watch the world’s best players compete for the Poker Masters Purple Jacket™. “Photo Masters” will recap each day’s action with shots from the floor, helping to tell the Poker Masters story throughout the series.

For the 15 players that returned for Day 2 of the Poker Masters $100,000 Championship, the goal was simple. Navigate your way through a field of the world’s best No Limit Hold’em tournament players and make the final table. Easier said than done, but after a few hours of play, the field was trimmed to the final nine. Making the final table wasn’t enough though, because only six player would make the money in the $100,000 Championship. Over the last hour of play, Brian Rast, Jake Schindler, and Stephen Chidwick all hit the rail in quick succession, dropping the field to six and setting the stage for Wednesday’s PokerGO streamed official final table.

One player that won’t be at the $100,000 Championship final table is Daniel Negreanu. The all-time tournament money leader came back for Day 2 with a top-five stack, but things never seemed to get going for Kid Poker. After falling just short of the final table, Negreanu strung together a few tweets talking about how he needs to improve his No Limit Hold’em game to compete with the best, where he’d currently rank himself, and how he plans on studying to get his game back to where it was when Negreanu was at the peak of his powers in the early 2000’s. 

While Negreanu has been at the top of the poker world for the better part of the last two decades, Christian Christner was a relative newcomer to the live tournament arena coming into 2017. That all changed this spring, when Christner won a $100,000 ARIA Super High Roller for $1.4 million prior to the Super High Roller Bowl. Christner now has another shot at a seven-figure score, thanks to a timely river card, and a top-two stack at the Poker Masters Championship final table.

Former NFL head coach Herm Edwards said it best, “You play to win the game!”, but I’d imagine Edwards would have slightly different advice before the $100,000 Championship final table. That’s because one player doesn’t have to win to actually win. Steffen Sontheimer just has to, Herm Edwards voice, “Play to win the jacket!” It will be interesting to see if Sontheimer keeps an eye on the scoreboard during the final table, along with the jacket they should have started fitting for him a week ago.