The fourth day of the Foxwoods Poker Classic is over and Ted Forrest finds himself on the brink of his fifth spin under the mood lighting at a World Poker Tour final table.

Without question one of the greatest all-around players in the game today, Forrest has seen marked improvement in his WPT final-table performance since his fifth-place finish at the WPT World Championship in Season 1.

Forrest also logged fourth- and second-place finishes at the Los Angeles Poker Classic and Mirage Poker Showdown before finally taking down the Bay 101 Shooting Star tournament in San Jose last season.

Forrest spoke to www.pokerlistings.com at the end of an up-and-down day at Foxwoods.

How did your day go today?

Today started pretty quickly. On the very first hand I got involved with Erik Seidel in a pot, where he’d come to the table with about $450,000 and I had $378,000 or so. He’d been pushing me around a bit on the day before but I won a big pot with a third bet pre-flop and that sort of set the tone for the day.

Before I knew it, my chips had skyrocketed to about $2 million and then I had a rocky stretch for about three hours, where I sort of got chipped down to about $1.3 million and made a comeback the last hour to end the day with about $1.7 million.

You seemed to get the tougher draw when the field got down to 18 with Erik and Joe Simmons, among others, at your table. Being the big stacks at the table, did you and Erik try and stay out of each other’s way?

No. Erik’s been pushing me around pretty good this tournament in general. But tomorrow’s another day.

Do you have any sort of read on him at this point? You must have played countless pots against him by now.

Yeah, he plays f***ing great! (Laughs.)

That about sums him up. You had an early hand where you cracked Daniel Woolson’s kings with tens and seemed unrepentant when it came to those tens. Why’s that?

Tens have been pretty good for me in this tournament. I think I’ve flopped three or four sets with tens. I mean, three of the four times the tens were ahead anyway, and then this time I outdrew the kings with it. But he had, I think, $300,000 before the hand.

Later on you had a strange bet with Adam Katz that ended with you taking $400 from him. What happened?

Yeah, it was just kind of a silly bet. We were in a hand and three hearts had come on the flop. I bet on the turn and showed the ace of hearts, and he says, “Well, you couldn’t have had another heart,” and he wanted to bet.

So I say, “Let’s bet $10,000. If you say it’s a bet it’s a bet.”

He said, “No, I’ll bet you four hundred.” So, OK. I turned over the second heart and he paid me the $400. I gave him back the $400 and he said, ‘No, you just kept me off life tilt.'”

He said he’d flopped the king-high flush. So, I said, “OK, as long as it’s going to keep you from killing yourself.” And I kept the money.

What’s your assessment of the field now that we’re down to the final nine?

It’s going to be a tough, tough nine players. We’re going to drop down to six players and go from there. Tomorrow’s going to probably be a short day.

I don’t really know too many of the remaining players. I know four players have most of the chips – I’m one of them – so I’m really just hoping to be in the final six and we’ll take it from there.

You recently went deep at Bay 101 in San Jose, defending your title from Season 5. Can you talk about that experience?

Well, I finished 25th at Bay 101 after winning it last year. I was pretty much short-chipped the whole tournament, but I think what happens when you’re defending a title and what we saw happen here with Raj Patel, last year’s champion, finishing 11th this year, is you become extremely motivated to do as well as you possibly can in [the] tournament.

I made it as deep as I possibly could have with the short chips that I [had] to work with. And usually I have to make it deep in a few tournaments before I start winning them, so I’m hoping to start with this one.

You’re in a pretty good position to do it. Thanks Ted.

Sure.

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It may have been more profitable in the long run for Forrest had he let Adam Katz keep his money and deal with the life tilt that followed. Katz enters the penultimate day of play in Foxwoods second in chips, posing along with Seidel the major barricade to another WPT victory for Forrest. With Forrest’s final-table pedigree and his cards seeming to run hot at just the right time, however, it would come as a surprise to absolutely no one if Forrest was the man left standing at the end of the night on Wednesday.