That's the Closing Bell!

Ok! We've reached the end of the third of our 2009 World Series of Poker Day 1 flights. Day 1c saw the biggest field so far, with 1,696 players descending on the Amazon and Brasilia Rooms at the Rio Convention Center, with 1,106 surviving the day. Tucked among those 1,696 were some of the biggest names in the poker world: Hellmuth. Negreanu. Duke. Lederer.

We had a change in scheduling today. In order to accomodate the sure-to-be larger Day 2b field, the tournament staff elected to play five levels to try to get the field down to a manageable size. That Day 2b field will play four levels on Wednesday in order to sync themselves with the Day 2a field (which will play five levels).

With one extra level of play, we saw some slightly larger end-of-day chip stacks today than we did the last two days. The player that we believe leads all Day 1c runners is Joe Cada with about 187,000 chips, but there are several other people all within striking distance of that total.

One name lurking at 145,000 chips is a man who already has three gold bracelets this summer -- Jeff Lisandro. We'll be keeping a very close eye on his stack over the next several days to see what kind of a run he can make at poker history.

Tomorrow, the last of the hopefuls will kick off Day 1d play at noon local time. We have heard unsubstantiated reports that already more than 2,400 players have registered for Day 1d. That number is sure to climb overnight and into the early hours of the morning. The tournament staff may be faced with the unenviable problem of having to cut off registrations due to simple space limitations.

Be sure to join us again tomorrow at noon for Day 1d!