Photo Masters: Purple Jacket Contenders

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.

If there is one thing that goes hand-in-hand with high stakes poker, it is prop betting and after Daniel Negreanu opened the Poker Masters series with over a dozen such bets, he was back in the action with a fantasy draft before Monday’s $100,000 Championship. Negreanu, Steffen Sontheimer, Stefan Schillhabel, and Adrian Mateos drafted teams for $10,000 a piece, only adding to Negreanu’s potential take if he can manufacture a deep run in the final event of the series.

One of the biggest names that has a shot at the Poker Masters Purple Jacket is Germany’s Fedor Holz. The retired High Roller notched a runner-up finish in Event #2 and will return for Day 2 of the $100,000 Championship with a top-five stack. Holz has been vlogging the entire Poker Masters series, including clips from both on and off the felt, and the “In the Life of a Champion” series could take on a whole new meaning if Holz can secure another major poker title this week.

The only player that is still alive in the $100,000 Championship with more Poker Masters earnings than Holz through the first four events, his countryman Steffen Sontheimer. The German, pictured top, has made three final tables and cashed for $1,221,000, which means, Event #5 prize pool aside, Sontheimer controls his own Purple Jacket fate heading into Day 2 of the series finale.

While Holz and Sontheimer did their part to improve their Purple Jacket stock last night, bagging top-five stacks, Phil Hellmuth had a difficult day at the office. The 14-time bracelet winner clashed with Sontheimer in one of the night’s most entertaining pots and even though he bagged the smallest stack of the remaining players, he stole the show throughout the PokerGO feature table broadcast. Hellmuth will have his work cut out for himself to get back into contention, butI know better than to count out anyone with White Magic on their side.