By the by, with registration now closed the numbers are fixed and we can announce that we have almost doubled the field of the last EPT held in Vienna.
Our Day 1b field officially numbers 353 players packed into the Kursalon ballrooms, bringing the overall total to 587. When Pascal Perrault won this event back in Season 1, there were just 297 runners.
Prize pool information will follow shortly.
Did we say yesterday was quiet? Well table 4 is like a morgue. The man bossing the table at the moment is Peter Bosen who is one of the early contenders with a chip stack of ~110,000.
We caught him playing a hand, very quietly, with fellow countryman Andrew Schneider.
Schneider opened the action from late position to 550 and Bosen made the three-bet from the small blind throwing out 1,850 in colour. Schneider made the call and we saw a Heads Up flop of 
. Bosen bet 2,700. Schneider with a stack of ~30,000 made the call. The turn was 
and Bosen checked. Schneider bet 5,100. Bosen stroked his hair, peeked at his cards, stared at Schneider who was just staring at the flop and then made the fold.
The Dealer quietly pushed the chips towards Schneider who quietly stacked them.
Level: 4
Blinds: 150/300
Ante: 0
Team Pokerstars Pro Luca Pagano faced a third raise preflop courtesy of a player sat two to his right, and after a round of statue-sitting he made the call of what was now over 3,000. The flop arrived 
and in a fraction of the time it took him to decide to call preflop, his cards now sailed into the muck.
Luca Pagano has one of the foremost track records at the EPT, having graced the tournament circuit all the way back to its first incarnation (he cashed in Barcelona in 2004 too). In fact there aren't many countries he hasn't cashed in, as he has the record for the number of cashes (and keeps breaking his own record). Final tables and six figure wins are not uncommon (his largest being €337,000 for his sixth place at the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo in 2008) but he's yet to hoist a glass trophy here.
As ever, many stacks are +/- a few thousand only after just two and a half hours of slow, deepstacked play, but a couple are healthier than others...
We only caught the very tail end of this one, but it was enough to see Team PokerStars Pro Florian Langmann make a much-needed recovery.
The board read 
and Langmann bet 3,000. His opponent called without much of a pause for thought, and indeed he just mucked to Langmann's flopped 
set.
That rather nice hand bumped Langmann back up to around 16,000 - just over half his starting stack.
Javier Garcia, a man with just two live results to his name (albeit very respectable ones - he took 17th place at EPT Vilamoura in 2009 and 10th place at this year's EPT Monte Carlo High Roller event) - is refusing to be cowed by his rather better known tablemates.
The man who crippled Daniel NEgreanu earlier on has now gone one better and knocked out Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier.
ElkY bet a little over 5,000 on the river of a 
board, but Garcia then check-raised to cover him. ElkY called all in, but was shown 
by Garcia and just mucked before taking his leave.
There was around 4,500 in the pot by the turn of the 
board when we arrived tableside. Daniel Negreanu spent a few moments dithering, before putting his whole 10,000-or-so stack in the middle.
His opponent Javier Garcia - the same gentleman who was responsible earlier for Negreanu's near-crippling - folded instantly.
Today seems much more stocked with early big moves and river check-raises and general stackery than Day 1A. Whenever a pile of 5k chips has coalesced in the middle of a table, it draws press over like vultures - and that's exactly what happened when Vincent Attal moved all in on the river of a 
board. He'd check raised Igur Kurganov who had 10k in front of him (but may have bet less and been waiting for change). The all in bet was 19,000 and Kurganov considered for a while before finally throwing in the call and showing 
for the straight which felt uncomfortable with the pairing river - but not uncomfortable enough to fold.
Attal heads to the rail with no look of grief, but a smile for the table.
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