The final woman to be eliminated was Mario Ho, from Los Angeles, who received US$237,865 for her 38th place. In the 38 year history of the Big Dance, only once has a woman has made the final table.

Each of the nine left has an incredible story to tell of their journey to the final table, but perhaps the most incredible is that of Jerry Yang, the most inexperienced player of the field. He has only been playing poker two years.

Yang says he was born into abject poverty in Laos, and recounts the stories of how his family was so poor they couldn’t even afford a ball to play with. He eventually managed to escape Laos, began to learn English at age 13 and eventually obtained his masters degree in health psychology. He thanks God for being here. He talks about his wife and six kids. And he pledges to give away 10% of what he wins to charity.

ESPN has equipped the poker table with hole-card cameras, and cameras on dollies constantly swing around the table. A director sits at a desk off to the side, pushing buttons and marshalling cameramen. All the ESPN people are wearing headsets. It is more like a scene from a movie shoot than a poker game.

Play started at midday. The first fourteen hands took a little over an hour or so, and are relatively innocuous. Suddenly, on hand number 15, the overnight chip leader, Phillip Hilm, inexplicably pushed all-in and was busted by Jerry Yang. From this moment until to hand number 60, Yang had a rush of cards, and busted four players out in quick time. A fifth player was busted out by the South African, Raymond Rahme. Only 60 hands had been played, and we were down to our last four players at only 5:30pm, so it looked like the tournament could be over relatively early in the evening. How wrong that proved to be.

The last four players suddenly tightened up markedly. The stakes were so high, it became very rare for a hand to actually go the distance. A single raise, followed by all other players folding, became the order of the day. Perhaps 80% of hands play out essentially in this manner. Some big hands took as long as eight or ten minutes. During these key moments, you could cut the air with a knife. Tension is everywhere, it’s nail-biting stuff.

It took a painful 107 hands before the fourth player, Alex Kravchenko, is finally busted out at 12:55am. Forty-five minutes later he is followed by the third place player, Raymond Rahme. So it was down to heads-up, only two players remaining. In the previous three years, it had taken an average of five hands of heads-up play before a winner is determined.

But not so this year. Not for Tuan Lam. Jerry Yang had over 100 million in chips, the first man in the history of the world’s poker tournaments to do so. Lam had a mere 20 million or so. But Lam didn’t play ball. He wasn’t going to rollover and quietly die. In fact, he lasted for an incredible 35 hands, over two hours of play. He showed a surprisingly ability to fold, even heads-up, and his chips dwindled to about 10 million until he picked his spot, and doubled up to about 20 million again. It was past 3am. We were in the thirty-sixth level of the tournament and the blinds and antes were now almost incomprehensibly huge: 400,000/800,000 chips and 100,000 chips respectively. No-one was used to dealing with numbers this big, not the players, not the dealers, not the crowd, not the commentators.

These two men had now played more than 70 hours of poker in the tournament. Finally, just before 4am, it happened. Lam moved all-in for his remaining 22.2 million chips, and Yang called. After the flop, Lam was in front, and it looked like the tournament could drag on for some time yet. But Yang luckily picked up a runner-runner draw to hit a straight and we had our new champion. The crowd went wild and the celebrations began. No-one got to bed until after sunrise.