Seat 4: Ali Eslami (395,000)
After Day 1, Ali Eslami led the field in this $10,000 Regional Championship. He's been able to keep himself towards the top of the leader board since and has made it to the final table fourth in chips with 395,000.
Eslami is from Los Angeles, California and regularly plays the highest cash games in the world with some of the best players. That doesn't mean he doesn't know how to play tournaments though and seems to fair pretty well when he does, having earned himself over $370,000 in live tournament earnings.
Eslami has cashed in World Series of Poker events 10 times and made two final tables. His first WSOP final table came in 2007 in the $2,500 H.O.R.S.E. event. He took fifth place in that event for $2,501. In 2008, Eslami found himself at the final table of the $1,500 Limit Hold'em event and eventually went on to finish in seventh place for $41,441. He's cashed in the Main Event only once, back in 2004 for $45,000 after coming in 45th place.
In July 2007, Eslami joined Phil Laak in a competition against Polaris, a poker bot designed by the computer poker research group at the University of Alberta. Both Eslami and Laak played four duplicate matches of 500 hands each for a total of 16 hours. In each match, the same cards were dealt to both pairs of players, human and bot, but with the seating reversed. In the first match, the players and Polaris tied. In the second, Polaris won. In the third and fourth, the players won. Eslami and Laak split the $10,000 prize for defeating Polaris in matches three and four along with $2,500 for scoring a tie in the first match.
Just recently, Eslami was in Los Angeles for THe Big Event at The Bicycle Casino. In the Main Event there, Eslami took 35th place for $9,000. Just a couple days later, he made the final table of the $10,000 Bounty Shootout at the same event and went on to finish in second place for $56,000.