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Daily 3-Bet: Back-to-Back Hall, 130mph de Melo, €1m Coaches

Daily 3-Bet: Back-to-Back Hall, 130mph de Melo, €1m Coaches

Daily 3-Bet: Back-to-Back Hall, 130mph de Melo, €1m Coaches


The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is a fluffy robe, a pair of topsiders and all the sunscreen required to go over afternoon poker news hand ranges on the foredeck.

Have something you’d like to see in a future 3-Bet? Tell us about it in the comments.

Today in the 3-Bet we find Cate Hall owning WPT Maryland again, Fatima de Melo goes full throttle and the best poker coaching gig ever.

1) Hall, Elias at Maryland FT

The WPT Maryland Live! Main Event has narrowed its field down to the final six and, to no one’s surprise, two complete WPT crushers have made their way into the mix.

catehallwptmaryland

Cate Hall.

Both Darren Elias and Cate Hall have continued their long-term WPT dominance with final-table slots.

Elias is second in chips at 4.5m as he guns for his third career WPT title.

Hall, meanwhile, will come in as the short stack but after narrowly missing last season’s WPT POY title she’s repeated her final-table appearance at WPT Maryland from last year.

Pros Ben Zamani, who’s leading the WPT POY race this season, and Mario Silvestri have also fought their way into the final six alongside two amateurs in Ryan Belz and Zack Smiley.

Play resumes at 3pm ET today with live updates (but no stream) available at WPT.com. Here are the counts and payouts:

Seat 1.  Ryan Belz  –  4,865,000  (81 bb)
Seat 2.  Zachary Smiley  –  1,255,000  (21 bb)
Seat 3.  Mario Silvestri III  –  2,700,000  (45 bb)
Seat 4.  Darren Elias  –  4,515,000  (75 bb)
Seat 5.  Benjamin Zamani  –  2,075,000  (35 bb)
Seat 6.  Cate Hall  –  1,235,000  (21 bb)

1st:  $356,536*
2nd:  $239,412
3rd:  $153,983
4th:  $113,905
5th:  $85,429
6th:  $68,554

2) Fatima = Fearless

Fatima Moreira de Melo’s willingness to dive into daunting undertakings – from singing live on TV to playing cutthroat on Survivor to switching to poker from Olympic field hockey – is a big reason she was nominated for our 2016 Spirit of Poker Most Inspiring Player Award.

Fatima Margets

No fear in Fatima.

While she ultimately couldn’t catch Brazilian poker hero Felipe “Mojave” Ramos in the voting she did easily make the final three and proved her irascible spirit has plenty of admirers.

That spirit is pretty much always on display, whether commentating on the EPT or playing the Battle of Malta, but never was it more evident than this year at the famous Isle of Man TT motorcycle race.

Not only did she jump in a course car and speed around the track for a look-see, she actually jumped on the back of TT racer Connor Cummins’ bike and topped 130 mph for a real feel of the death-defying drama. 

Check the footage below.

3) Bring Your Shove Charts and Your Boat Shoes

The pros can’t play in the lucrative, €1m invite-only Big One for One Drop coming up later this month but they can, apparently, reap the rewards of their talent with some of the sweetest poker coaching gigs known to humankind:

I will be attending One Drop playing coach to the man himself: Guy Laliberte. Coaching venue is his yacht in the south of France next week.— Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) October 3, 2016

I would like to also note that I have hired one of the best players /coaches in poker @scott_seiver off of my end @YouStake @droponedrop— Daniel Shak (@daniel_shak) October 1, 2016

Sweet gig if you can get it. Someone let the other 33 players know we’re available and can check our push-fold charts at the table much more discretely than this guy!