I'm not sure there was a day so far the World Series that carried such importance, potential wealth, or tension as Day 5. With still a hundred players in action at the beginning of the day, the jump between beginning bottom payout and the money with which players would finish was astounding. Close to life changing.

At the beginning of the day, it was virtually anybody's game. It would be a matter of not only who played better, but who ran better. That seems like a painfully obvious statement, but with the stacks as deep as they were, this was no crapshoot. It was not simply a matter of running well.

Enter the online kings Hevan "RaiNKhaN" Khan, Scott "SCTrojans" Freeman, and David Tran. All are big PokerStars players and all are huge stacks with 36 players remaining in the field. With a combination of tabletime and fading the bad luck, they all finished near the top of the field.

Scott Freeman


RaiNKhaN

In other news, Philip Yeh, a PokerStars player from Sweden, busted in 40th place. It was a battle of the blinds - Philip in the small blind re-raised all in to Billy Spadea's bet. Call. Yeh had A-5 hearts, Spadea A-8 spades, leaving Yeh in a tight spot. It got tighter when the flop came 6-Q-8 rainbow - and his tournament door was slammed shut whan J hit the turn. Yeh takes home $237,865.

Soon after another PokerStars player, Rep Porter busted in 39th. He was in the cut-off and had just 15,000 left. His chips went in with J-8, but he ran up against Tuan Lam's J-J. No miracle arrived and Porter pockets the same payday as Yeh.

With an average chip count of around 3.5 million, there are still a number of PokerStars players still alive in the field. In addition to the above runners, we'll be watching Bob Slezak, Raymond Rahme, Hoang Nguyen, Jason Welch, and Roy Winston.

Although we had a lot of technical issues here today, here's a look back at what we saw.

Alive in Day Five

The Wheel of Misfortune

Personality and poker

The Four Horsemen of the featured table

Winston has the nuts

Ryan's Slaughter

Jason Welch form the brink

Where we've been

A different kinf of rain dance

The View through Roy Winston's eyes

The final four tables will resume at noon PDT on Sunday. The plan is to play down to the final table before taking a day of on Monday before Tuesday's final table. Barring any heart attack with technical issues, we'll be here until the end.