It's another noon start for the latest of several $1,500 No-Limit Hold'em events on this year's slate. Event #32 is, as with all the other popular $1,500 tourneys, sure to draw a sizable crowd and stretch the Amazon Room at its seams.
Last year's event was won by David Stucke, who emerged from a 2,315-player field to win $603,069.
It's just been announced that the players are to be let into the room in about three minutes. Play is scheduled to begin in just under twenty minutes and it's looking like we may see an on-time start. The monitor for this event tells us that there are currently 1,898 entrants (and quickly rising) for this event. The cards will be in the air soon, so please stay with us!
Despite the roughly 1,977 entrants in this event, the room is eerily quiet. The persistent hum of shuffling chips is blatantly audible, but there seems to be very little chitchat taking place.
Looks like the WSOP just had their first registration snafu this year. There is still a lengthy queue of players still outside the Amazon Room trying to register for this event. Dealers have been instructed to take all of the stacks that don't have a player in front of them and put them in the "well" so there isn't any confusion between tardy players that have pre-registered and those who are registering late.
Only fifteen minutes into today's event, we're already hearing a steady chorus of dealers calling out "Seat Open!" indicating that a player has busted from their table.
While writing this post (which admittedly took less than a minute), I heard that siren call an astounding 17 times in the Orange section alone.
Mark Seif, Juha Helppi, Paul Spitzberg, Bill Spadea, Young Phan, Shawn Buchanan, Chris "The Armenian Express" Gregorian, Jared Hamby, Theo Tran and Joe Pelton have all been spotted so far. With the registration issues we've already mentioned, we may see many more late arrivals.
Not even 30 minutes into level one and the bad beat stories are already surfacing. A clearly disappointed player just wandered over to talk to his friend in the blue section. "What happened?" said the curious friend.
"I ran my full house into quads," replied the wanderer.
"You're kidding!" yelled the surprised friend.
"Nope...he flopped quads...what can you do?"
With no further dialogue between the two, the eliminated player stumbled off, presumably to a cash game to recover his tournament buy-in.