These days, the world's poker elite gather in Las Vegas, where the 8th year of the prestigious Poker Masters series is taking place. The battle for the purple jacket started already at the beginning of the week, when Lithuanian professional Vladas Tamasauskas made a great jump in the series, winning two of the first three events.

Three more trophies handed out

The fourth event, also with a buy-in of $10,000, produced 91 entries and a prize pool of almost a million. So far, the busiest final table served the audience with names like Daniel Negreanu, Jeremy Ausmus, Chris Brewer and Jonathan Little, so there was no shortage of good poker. Despite this lineup, Chino Rheem ($218,400) was smiling with the trophy at the end, who dealt with Jonathan Little in heads-up and took home a valuable triumph.

In the fifth event, we again witnessed an interesting story that seemed to have been written in advance. Home representative Andrew Lichtenberger, who had his 36th birthday on the day of the game, entered the final table fourth in chips. Well, he gave himself the best possible gift when he became the winner and, in addition to the trophy, he also received a reward of $204,000.

So far, the last completed event was the sixth, in which for the very first time in this series we witnessed the chip leader of the final table without any problems making his way to the overall win. The chosen one was none other than Orpen Kisacikoglu, whose game looked like it was really easy. When Orpen knocked out Chino Rheem in fourth place in a big hand, he jumped out to a massive chip lead that he never let go. He went heads-up against Jack Hardcastle with a 14:1 advantage, and after eliminating his last opponent, he took home the well-deserved trophy and $218,500.

We're going to the finale

Tonight will see the final table of the seventh event, which has already raised the buy-in level to $25,000. A field of 44 entries produced a $1,100,000 prizepool, with the last six players still in play. They are led by Nick Petrangelo, but standing in his way for the $374,000 prize are Chris Brewer, Brian Rast, Nick Schulman, Justin Saliba and Victoria Livschitz.

In addition to this final table, there will also be an 8th event with the same $25k buy-in, followed by another with same buy-in and then the final tournament with a $50k buy-in. They will decide for good about this year's champion, to whom Vladas Tamasauskas has so far come closest. But anyone can still shuffle the cards, the ongoing scoring looks like this:

Source: PGT