The World Poker Tour (WPT) Grand Prix de Paris Main Event is pushing toward the final table. Day 3 ended with just 24 players remain in contention for the title heading into Day 4 of the tournament. Leading the way for the second straight day is German poker pro Phillip Gruissem, the only player to crack the 1 million chip mark at the end of Day 3.
Gruissem will be joined at his table on Friday by some other notable poker pros including Juha Helppi and Joe Serock, while the other two tables still in action contain well-known names as well, like Kyle Julius, Bruno Lopes, Mohsin Charania, Fabian Quoss, Andrew Lichtenberger, and Theo Jorgensen.
The leader-board is a case of the haves’ and the have nots’, with Gruissem and Matt Salsberg way out in front of the rest of the field, bringing four-times the amount of chips into Day 4 as Florian Leconte, who is sitting in 10th place and nearly twice as many as the man in third place, Idris Ambraisse. Here is a look at the Top 10 chip counts entering Day 4 of the WPT Grand Prix de Paris:
1. Philipp Gruissem – 1,060,000
2. Matt Salsberg – 951,000
3. Idris Ambraisse – 591,000
4. Bruno Lopes – 440,000
5. Joe Serock – 411,000
6. Jérome Douieb – 402,000
7. Mohsin Charania – 307,000
8. Grégoire Boissenot – 299,000
9. Fabian Quoss – 279,000
10. Florian Leconte – 266,000
Despite not being a super-well-known player, Gruissem is one of the best young talents in the game. He has yet to break-through in a major televised tournament (mainly because he focuses on the cash-games and high-roller tournaments) but he has racked-up over $2.7 million in tournament winnings, an impressive number considering he plays a very limited schedule.
Gruissem plays at the highest stakes in the game, as evidenced last month when Gruissem finished in 10th place at the Macau Super-High-Roller event that featured a $250,000 buy-in, pocketing over $500k for his efforts, and earlier this summer he was a participant in the Big One for One Drop $1,000,000 buy-in event at the WSOP. In 2011 he won two high-roller events on the EPT tour, in Barcelona and in London, where he won over $1,000,000 collectively in the two events.
When the players return to the Aviation Club on Friday they will be in for a long day, as the schedule has them playing down to the final table of six players. With the blinds at 2,500/5,000 with a 500 chip ante, the average chip-stack (about 285,000) is still at 57 big blinds, with the two chip-leaders nearly 200 big blinds deep.
