After five levels of action-filled poker, Day 3 of the 2012 World Series of Poker Main Event came to an end with 720 remaining players. It started over 12 hours ago when 1,738 players returned to the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino with hopes of making it through the day, and Gaelle Baumann from France had the lead with 505,800 chips.
Just like Day 2 many big names hit the rail during Day 3 - to mention a few: Barry Greenstein, Eugene Katchalov, Nick Schulman, Brian Hasting, Ben Lamb (2011 WSOP player of the year) and former WSOP Main Event Champs Dan Harrington (1995), Robert Varkonyi (2002), Jerry Yang (2006), Peter Eastgate (2009) and defending world champ, Pius Heinz.
The new chip leader is Dave D'Alesandro (picture) with 1,100,000 chips, closely followed by Sean Rice (1,076,000) and Jacob Balsiger (1,065,000). Notable players with plenty of chips include, for example, Vanessa Selbst (814,000 - 10th place), Sorel Mizzi (738,000 - 15), Vivek Rajkumar (678,000 - 18) and Shaun Deeb (598,000 - 33), and The Big One for One Drop ($1 million buy-in tournament) winner Antonio Esfandriari (485,000 - 56).
The Day 2 chip leader Gaelle Baumann is still in the tournament, but she can now be found in 32nd place with 599,000 - about 90k more than she started Day 3 with. It will be interesting to see how things turn out for her during Day 4. Would be pretty amazing if a lady reached this year's final table!
