The chip lead just changed hands in the main event. Joe Serock now tops the chip list with 1.3 million, overtaking the former leader Nicolas Godoy.
But while we know a lot about Serock, a multi WPT finalist with more than $1.8 million in earnings, Godoy was completely unknown until yesterday, until that point when, with the help of a tournament official who counted out his chips, he wrote his name on a bag of chips worth 724,200.
Looking up his record Godoy is completely winless in terms of live events. He's the kind of player that makes you question whether poker players are getting younger, or, whether the rest of us getting older.
Nicolas Godoy
Godoy doesn't seem capable of doing anything wrong this week with perhaps his only eccentricity being the manner in which he stacks his chips. Normally stacks of ten chips show a certain weirdness in a player. But George Lind put it perfectly when he tweeted earlier today:
@GeorgeLindIII: "For the first time in the history of poker, a guy at my tbl who puts his chips in stacks of 10 actually turned out to not be a complete donk"
Godoy is certainly no donk. The 19-year-old (yes, it appears they're getting younger), from Corrientes, Argentina, looks like a veteran of multiple PCAs, his arms casually resting either side of his stack which, although not technically the largest anymore, certainly takes up the most space. He looks calm and collected while his face has not had to undergo many shaves. He also wears his shirt open at the neck, with a more few buttons undone than usual.
Corrientes won his way here for $10 on PokerStars, turning that into a PCA package worth $16,000. Now he's turned that into at least $21,000, but nobody expects him to go out anytime soon. That will likely include his parents who, thinking their son to be too young to travel alone, have sent his aunt and uncle along to accompany their boy to the biggest game of his life.
Apparently he starts studying Business Administration in March. Let's see how things go here first.
Stephen Bartley is a PokerStars Blog reporter