The world's richest dance floor

There is a dance people do. It happens in corridors and casinos. It happens festivals and fairgrounds. It happens anywhere too many of us are in too small a space.

You understand how it really works. You spot him coming. He sees you coming. You both need to be polite, but there's no structure to the crowd, and neither of you recognize which way is out of how. So that you step right, and he steps in front of you. So that you step left, and he responds in kind. Eventually, certainly one of it's a must to take the initiative and choose for you both how you will avoid colliding.

Sometimes that works. Sometimes you find yourself in a chest-to-chest collision that perhaps you could've avoided, or even not. Fate doesn't give a damn about you, and infrequently it just likes the laugh of watching you appear to be an idiot.

These varieties of collisions and dances happened on a daily basis of the arena Series of Poker when the hallways outside were full of throngs of distracted people in a rush. Sometimes there have been apologies. Sometimes there have been just muttered expletives. It is the way crowds work.

Now we've reached the stage of the WSOP Main Event where just a couple hundred people remain. The hallways are easy to navigate. The actual trouble is throughout the Amazon Room where the dances and donnybrooks are happening on the tables.

You can watch it happen because the nerves begin to ratchet up. A player looks at his hand and chooses his path while someone around the table does the similar. Before long, they're locked on this seated version of the hallway dance. One player insists on a path, and insists on being within the way. Unless one concedes, the collision happens, and every time they clash it may possibly mean the tip of the street for one or the opposite. It is the nature of poker tournaments. They're built at the concept that persons are too stubborn, distracted, or otherwise mean to get out of the way.

That's where things stand here on Day 5 of the primary Event. Each passing minute offers another chance at a collision. We watch Marc-Andre Ladouceur and Jennifer Shahade, the last of PokerStars' official representatives within the field, and neither looks particularly happy about their day thus far.

"Eh, I'm still in," Shahade says looking down at a stack that may be only 1/3 of the chip average.

Meanwhile, Ladouceur isn't looking a lot more pleased, despite having a stack much in the direction of the common. He is taking the time to take a photograph with a fan, but it's clear he'd otherwise be the fellow who has enough chips to shop for up all of the little chips before the color-up.

Marc-Andre Ladouceur

It would take just a 15-minute break to paint up the chips, and just slightly greater than that to finish Shahade's day.

Just after she got back from break, she had a type of unavoidable collisions. She had aces. She ran them into queens. The board ran out a heart flush for her opponent. And that was it. She placed 204th for $42,285.

Jennifer Shahade

While Shahade is one of the latest victims of this silly dance we call poker, she is going to not be the last today. Before the chip bags come out, there'll likely be fewer than 80 people left within the WSOP Main Event. So they can only leave Sunday and Monday to play before we work out which of those people will visit the large dance in November.

$1 million Spin & Gos running now! Click here to get a PokerStars account.Brad Willis is the PokerStars Head of Blogging. Follow him on Twitter: @BradWillis. WSOP photos by PokerPhotoArchive.com.

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