Saul, who beat Mike Matusow in heads-up play to become king of Bellagio in the 2007 version of the Bellagio Cup, wrote on his blog last week that he was playing some of the best online poker of his life.

That would prove to be an understatement.

On Wednesday Saul outlasted 857 players to finish 10th in Event 16, $200+$16 Omaha-8, which made him the final-table bubble boy. Although the payout was a modest $1,800, it's important to remember that he made it much further than players like Jonathan "PearlJammed" Turner, Stuart Paterson, Jordon Morgan and Justin Bonomo, who all made it into the money.

Although nortti77 would eventually win Event 16, Saul was just getting started.

Later that day Saul would decide to play in Event 17, $300+$22 No-Limit Hold'em Six-Max Rebuy, which was a very good move.

Saul was on his game again and this time came within one player of taking the whole thing down. Saul overcame 1,058 players before finally being beaten by MishkaT in heads-up. The $167,842 paycheck for second certainly had to soften the blow of losing at that stage.

It's worth noting that GetPWN3d finished fourth in Event 12, which Ben Fineman eventually won, and took down $105,000 for his efforts.

Although Saul is most likely disappointed he didn't walk away with a win in either tournament, he did leapfrog to the top of the FTOPS IX leaderboard with 460 points. It's a startling development considering just yesterday Bronshtein seemed to have a firm grip on the leaderboard, with the 407 points from his back-to-back victories.

Meanwhile the trend of hosts not making it into the money of their own events continued as both Scott Clements (Event 16) and Peter Feldman (Event 17) were shut out.

Markus Golser finished a respectable 14th in Event 16, however, and Ram Vaswani continued his fine play at FTOPS IX by nearly making the final table of Event 17, eventually coming in eighth for a cool $25,357.

Vaswani is currently ranked sixth on the FTOPS IX leaderboard, although he'll have to do something incredible if he hopes to overtake Saul or Bronshtein, because he's short-stacked with 289 points.

Here's a look at the rest of the final-table finishers for Event 16 and Event 17:

Event 16 $200+$16 Omaha-8 1. nortti77 $45,000 2. masterace222 $28,500 3. dolphin75 $21,100 4. RolldUpTrips $16,500 5. mikegambles $12,500 6. swimmer36 $9,000 7. hasuling $6,000 8. Royal_Clown $4,500 9. Jopke $3,200 Event 17 $300+$22 No-Limit Hold'em six-max rebuy 1. MiskhaT $251,763 2. GetPWN3D $167,842 3. IWEARGOGGLES $119,542 4. Masterhp $89,355 5. eisenhower1 $63,997 6. Claw1980 $41,055

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Tomorrow will see two more events kick off, with Event 18, $500+$35 No-Limit Hold'em 3 X Shootout, beginning at 14:00 ET while Event 19, $300+$22 Mixed Hold'em six-max, starts at 21:00.

Hosts will be Andy Black and Erick Lindgren so don't expect the fields to be too easy.

Those two events will take us even closer to the main event of FTOPS IX, with its astounding $2,500,000 guaranteed.

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