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Event #49 ($50,000 World Championship H.O.R.S.E.) cost each of the 95 players fifty grand to play, took five days to complete, and the final table took twenty hours, but it is finally done; it’s in the books. The most important thing that happened in this event was that Gus Hansen was eliminated teasingly close to the final table (he was the bubble boy).

Carsten didn’t take the easy road to the championship. When the final table started he was near the bottom of the pile with 900,000 chips. Most other players have more than a million; a few of them owned stacks more than twice the size of Carsten’s.

Jeff Lisandro has three bracelets to his name this year and Brock Parker has come out of nowhere to win a pair of bracelets. Of the big names, only Phil Ivey has managed to show up at the Rio. He has won his 6th and 7th bracelets this year. We can now add Greg (FBT) Mueller to the list of folks who have taken multiple bracelets away with them this June.

It took three days of hard poker playing, and the demise of 761 other players, but Brandon Cantu collected his second bracelet at the conclusion of Event 48 - $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo 8-or-better. The first time he strapped a piece of WSOP jewelry on his wrist was in 2006 when he won a no limit hold’em event. He now has a bracelet for each wrist and an extra $228,867 in his bank account.

Event #43, the $1,000 Seniors World Championship, was odd in a couple of ways. First of all it didn’t really end when it should have. The winner from Event #44 could have been in the audience watching the final table of this event and showing his new bracelet off to anyone who cared to see it. Secondly, we learned that a big stack does not a champion make.

Sometimes you have to look at a player, and with a sense of awe consider just how ridiculous his accomplishments have been. Jeff Lisandro is having a WSOP for the ages. He has picked up his third bracelet of the WSOP season.

A million and a half chips is a really big stack. It must look even bigger if this number of chips is the difference between your stack and the guy you have to beat in order to win a tournament. If you are the wrong end of this deficit it could drive you into the sort of demoralizing funk that even self-esteem guru Anthony Roberts would have problems talking you down from.

Usually when we are talking about effeminate poker players getting into the boxing ring, we are discussing the latest exploits of Gus Hansen and his girlish fists of fury. In the case of this event, it will be UltimateBet spokesplayer Liv Boeree taking out her more distressing emotional issues on PokerNews’ video hostess, Melissa Castello.

Doyle and Daniel were both eliminated. Doyle got an ovation from the adoring fans as he headed for the rail, and Daniel was also shown respect by fans and foes alike. Booting these guys from the tournaments was just part of the sport of poker, and their opponents probably did so with no malice. Phil Hellmuth’s departure from Event #38 is another story.

It seems to be almost a common occurrence when only two players are left in a WSOP event. One has a chip stack so big that it would require a team of Sherpas to circumnavigate it, and the other player has barely enough chips to pay for a McDonalds Happy Meal. In these situations the heads-up portion of the tournament is usually a very short affair. This was not the case at Event #36.