Xuan Liu in Final Three of $2,500 Event

There are three players in the Fallsview Casino tournament area playing poker for serious money, but none of them will be taking part in this year’s main event.

The $2,500 buy-in side event at Fallsview drew an amazing 753 entries, so each of the three players still alive in the tournament are guaranteed to take home at least CAD $137,419. Second place will take home CAD $213,185, while the winner earns an impressive CAD $304,056.

The big name among the three is Xuan Liu, who would like to follow in Mike Leah’s footsteps with another big name Canadian pro winning a big-field side event here. She is competing with Ryan Yu, fresh off a top-ten showing in the partypoker.net WPT Montreal main event, and Daniel Watton.

The players are fairly even in chips. Here is a look at the counts from while the main event was on break:

Ryan Yu – 5.8 million
Daniel Watton – 4.6 million
Xuan Liu – 4.35 million