WSOP
The 8th of July only had one World Series Of Poker Event going on, but it was the biggest event of the year, and the Main Event is currently the centre of the poker universe. The Rio Casino has some of the biggest names in poker sitting at their tables, and there are stories I’m hearing about Gus Hansen and Tom “durrrr” Dwan getting blinded off in the Main Event just to play Open Face Chinese Poker, with swings as big as $150k per hand against very rich Chinese businessmen. Nice work if you can find it really.
Main Event
Day 1C was always going to be the biggest day for entries, and reality didn’t disappoint. Monday saw 3,467 players made their way to the tables after depositing $10,000 into the care of the WSOP tournament apparatus. The total prize pool was announced as $59,708,800 and the prize to be awarded to first place is going to be $8,359,531.
With such a large field the number of recognisable names in the action on Monday was rather large, so if we’ve missed any of your favourites, I apologise.
Phil Ivey (119,650), Daniel Negreanu (15,600), Jason Mercier (45,650), Phil Hellmuth (92,850), Joe Hachem (67,950), Allen Cunningham (63,250), Ben Lamb (32,000) and Antonio Esfandiari (14,500) all made it through Day 1C, and will be returning on Wednesday to play their second day. Amazingly, Gus Hansen and Tom Dwan did manage to make it through to Day 2, with thier stacks having been blinded down to 17,975 and 18,075 respectively.
The chip leader going into the Day 2s is Mark Kroon (246,300), who snatched the chip lead from Imari Love (214,300) when he took Ylon Schwartz out of the competition in the last hand of the night.
Returning for the two separate Day 2s on Tuesday are Greg Merson, Ben Wilinofsky, Tony Kendall, Liv Boeree, Dn “Jungleman” Cates, Sorel Mizzi, Annette Obrestad, Rupert Elder, Scott Seiver, Dan Smith, Eugene Katchalov and Galen Hall, for a very full session.
The players from Day 1C will be playing thier Day 2 on Wednesday, and from Thursday the fields will combine, and we will be down to just one flight.
We’ll continue to bring you the updates from the Amazon Room of the Rio Casino in our daily update, as well as letting you know anything that happens out of the ordinary.
Keep your eyes on our twitter account to stay up to date.