Las Vegas – Four players remained at the final table of the World Series of Poker’s main event after British player Jon Kalmar lost a head-to-head bet against South African Raymond Rahme on Tuesday.
Kalmar, 34, said he was thrilled to have made nearly $1.26 million with his fifth-place finish, and said he intended to use his winnings to pay bills and perhaps buy a car back home in Chorly, England.
His failed gambit to double his dwindling cache of chips boosted Rahme, a 62-year-old former bed and breakfast inn owner from Johannesburg, to a distant second behind Jerry Yang.
Yang used aggressive play to eliminate three other players in the first five hours of the no-limit Texas Hold ’em tournament.
Only minutes earlier, Hevad Khan, 22, from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., became the fourth player eliminated when his ace and queen of spades couldn’t top a pair of jacks belonging to a surging Yang. Khan didn’t seem disappointed with sixth place and his $956,243 payday as he celebrated with friends in the audience.
When play resumed, Jack Effel, tournament director, offered congratulations to the remaining five players.
“You are all millionaires,” he said before guards brought in metal cases and unloaded the winner’s $8.25 million share on a table.
Yang, a Hmong psychologist from Temecula, Calif., piled up 71.3 million in chips by Kalmar’s ouster. He faced an eclectic group of poker unknowns including Rahme, a grandfather from South Africa, and Tuan Lam, a Vietnamese Canadian who once couldn’t get hired as a dishwasher but read through a bluff by former champion Scotty Nguyen on his way to the final table.
