Tournament: Newhouse leads Day 3 of LA Poker Classic

Online poker pro Mark "newhizzle" Newhouse has the chip lead at the end of Day 3 of the US$10,000 buy-in World Poker Tour LA Poker Classic. Newhouse has a slim lead of only nine thousand chips over fellow online poker veteran Chris Moore. Newhouse is also going after his second career WPT title; he also won the Borgata Poker Open Main Event in Atlantic City, New Jersey in September 2006.

Newhouse's efforts in Atlantic City earned him the biggest payday so far in his poker tournament career: US$1.5 million for first place. If he can maintain his lead after vanquishing the other seven hundred forty-four players in this field of top pros, he will surpass that mark. The top prize for this year's LA Poker Classic is estimated to be nearly US$1.8 million, with US$1 million for the second-place finisher.

Newhouse is also known for his success in major online poker tournaments. He won the Full Tilt Poker Sunday Mulligan US$200 buy-in tournament last November, earning US$67,000, and the PokerStars Sunday Million US$500 buy-in event a month later, taking home US$246,000.

Of the seventy-two remaining players who finished in the money, the field includes several experienced female poker pros. Annie Duke sits in fifteenth place overall with over 320,000 chips. Jolyne Thompson, a veteran pro from Houston, Texas, is in fifty-eighth place with just over 100,000 chips. PokerStars pro and "GoDaddy Girl" Vanessa Rousso is near the bottom of the standings in sixty-fourth place with only 46,000 chips.

Two former World Series of Poker Main Event champions are also on the leader board. 2001 Main Event winner Juan Carlos Mortensen is in seventeenth place with 305,000 chips, while two-time winner Johnny Chan is in thirty-second place with 218,000. Four-time WSOP bracelet winner and former WPT and WSOP Player of the Year Daniel Negreanu is also in the hunt; he sits in twenty-ninth place with 222,000 chips.

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