WSOP Main Event reaches final table - Joe Cada still in

The winner of the 2009 Main Event is only 8 players away from a never-before-seen accomplishment.

The final table is set at the 2018 WSOP Main Event, with Nicolas Manion in the lead. The US player accumulated a massive stack of 112,775,000, which equals to 188 big blinds. The other big stack with also more than 180 bigs is Michael Dyer.

Despite his smaller stack, the biggest story of the final table is certainly Joe Cada, who can be the first two-time Main Event winner in the post-Moneymaker era. The last time a champion was able to repeat dates back to 1997, when the legendary genius, Stu Ungar took down his third title. Since then, poker grew to a masses game, the average field-size now is more twenty-times as big as back in the day. Naturally, winning it two times now is much harder (not to take away anything from Ungar and the others).

Cada has already made history, as he's the first champ who made another final table in the 21st century. "It feels unreal," Cada said. "What other feelings are there?" When asked about the comparison of the 2009 event and the current one, Joe replied: "It's poker nine years later(...) That's enough said there. Everyone here's really good. Everyone was really good [in 2009] too. Everyone deserved to be there but everyone's advancing in the game."

[3]

"It was a lot more of a grind this time. I respected the tournament more. I had 9K at one point in this tournament and I just grinded a short stack. I was like maybe one-fifth of average almost the entire tournament."

His 39 big-blind stack is far from the chip leaders but definitely gives him some room to maneuver.

Nicolas Manion is in a completely different situation than Joe. This is the first-ever Main Event for the $1/$2 cash game grinder, who is waiting for the finale with a massive stack. At the end of Day 7, Nicolas found himself in a situation, most players don't even dare to dream of. He opened from UTG and got called by Antoine Labat. Yueqi Zhu shoved from the hijack for his 24.7 million and Manion moved in for 43.1 million. Labat, who had the biggest stack also made the call. Manion turned over pocket aces, while both of his opponents held kings! With this hand, Nicolas skyrocketed to 112 million, while Zhu busted at 10th place for $850,025.

[3]

"When I got both calls I didn't even… I flipped over my hand and I didn't even stay to see what they had," he said. "I went straight to my rail and looked up at the TV and they had set up pocket kings and my aces. And, somehow, this is real life."

The play will resume at 5:30 PM local time on Thursday. Stay tuned for the updates or subscribe to PokerGo [4] for the live stream with cards up!