This one has been one for the record books.
After 339 runners crammed themselves into the ballroom for Day 1a on Wednesday, we wouldn't have guessed you could fit another soul in this room. When the floodgates opened, though, the players came streaming in at a clip this town has never seen before. An astonishing 509 runners joined the fun today, creating a total field of 848. That's a huge increase over last year's record-setting field, and this EPT London has once again broken its own record as the largest poker tournament ever held in the UK.
And it wasn't just a room full of online qualifiers and wannabe nobodies. Phil Ivey played! Still in town from his deep run in the WSOPE Main, Ivey came to play today, and it was, unsurprisingly, a smooth and steady climb up the scoresheet all day. He finished up in the top 25 or so, but we'll have to wait for the paperwork before we're certain.
Others who came (and survived) included Team PokerStars Pros Jude Ainsworth, Matthias and Christophe de Meulder, JP Kelly, Daniel Negreanu, Joe Hachem, etc. etc. There's really too many to list in one place.
It's easier to talk about those who've already been sent home. Johnny Lodden was one of the first casualties of the day, followed closely by Toby Lewis, Melanie Weisner, Dennis Phillips, Shane Warne, and everyone's favorite emo-haired Scandi, Viktor Blom.
Those lucky enough to make it to the end of the day with chips left were all playing for second place during the last level. As we just mentioned, Claudio Cecchi racked up a huge lead during the course of that last hour, skyrocketing his stack all the way up to 237,500 at night's end. That puts him more than 30,000 chips (a starting stack) in front of the second-biggest stack we could find, that of David Vamplew. Tony Cascarino, Kenny Hicks, and Max Steinberg are all well in contention to challenge that lead tomorrow with over 150,000 apiece.
Speaking of tomorrow, we've got a lot of work to do. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 players will reconvene here tomorrow, the survivors from the two starting days. It's another noon start time (sorry, midday), and it's gonna be a good one.
We're off to the bed or to the bar or something like that, but we'll see you right back here tomorrow to do it all over again and press on towards the easy money.
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