Heads up nearly took longer than the rest of the final table as Shihao Zhao and Eric Dunham battled it out. I had very little time to watch this one until they got heads up — I got over to the table to take the FT pics, and by the time I’d uploaded and posted them, the final table had dropped from 9 to 3.
Zsuzsanna Spence then went out to leave Zhao and Dunham as the final two. Zhao started with the big stack, but Dunham turned it around pretty quickly, and then never looked back, holding the lead for the rest of the game.
But it wasn’t easy to dispatch Zhao — he seemed dialed in, knowing when to fold, and when to shove his short stack. They played a few levels with Zhao chipping down to 200k at one point, but then climbing back to 600k. In the final hand, he was in good preflop with queen-jack against jack-nine for Dunham, but 10♣K♦Q♠ was the flopped nuts for Dunham. The rest of the board bricked, and Zhao was out to a dominated jack.
