WSOP
The 29th of May 2013 was the first day of the 44th World Series of Poker at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas.
Event #1
The Series started off with, as you’d expect, Event #1, the Casino Employee Event. This event is only open to, as you’d expect, Casino Employees, and has the lowest buy in of any of the WSOP Events at only $500.
896 players entered, including Shaun “The Dealer” Harris, and WSOP Executive Director Ty Stewart. Neither of these two made it to either bubble, or day two.
The bubble did burst on Day One, and 90 players will be heading out of the Rio with at least $909.
There are 55 players left coming back to the tables today, all of them hoping to take home the first prize of $84,915.
The top ten chip stacks are as follows:
- Michael Trivett – 133900
- Sean Small – 103,700
- Chhad Holloway – 99,400
- Wyatt Gibson – 96,900
- Kevin Weathers – 91,300
- Troy Wilcoxon – 86,700
- John Harris – 84,400
- John Podobnik – 74,800
- Robert Jones – 74,700
- Steven Karr – 73,300
Action starts again at 13:00PST (21:00 BST), when the blinds will be 1k/2k with a 300 ante.
Event #2
This is the first year that the Casino Employee Event has shared the spotlight of Day one, and this year it’s sharing it with a lot of the big names of Poker. Event #2 is the $5,000 NLHE 8-Max Event, and it has attracted a lot of the bigger names, who may not have made the trip to Vegas so early otherwise.
481 players all stumped up the $5,000 entry fee, and by the end of play, only 194 players were preparing to comeback today. These didn’t include Daniel Negreanu, or Phil Ivey, both of whom had bust earlier in the day, as had Jason Mercier.
The biggest star of the day wasn’t someone we usually link with the Cards. 18 time Olympic Gold Medal Winning Michael Phelps was playing the event, and in his first ever WSOP Event, he stood his ground, and will be returning for Day 2 with 20,850 chips.
Leading the pack going into today’s action will be Tom Marchese, who’s stack is a towering 153,975 going into level 9 of the tournament.Considering the average chip stack is only 37,191 give him a serious advantage going into Day Two.
The players with the biggest stacks were:
- Tom Machese – 153,975
- Scott Baumstein – 111,100
- David Sands – 110,825
- Stephen Bokor – 95,325
- Darryll Fish – 93,000
- Jaime Armstrong – 87,850
- Bryan Piccioli – 85,900
- Takashi Ogura – 81,650
- Antonio Esfandiari – 80,650
- John Riodan – 78,275
The players are back at 2pm local time today (10pm UK), and will start Level 9, with the blinds at 300/600 with a 75 ante.
Today sees the continuation of Events #1 and #2, and the two starting flights for Event #3.
We’ll have another daily round up for you tomorrow covering all the action, along with a Final Table report from Event #1.
