We're not sure how we missed him the first time around.
One player in our field has done better than all the rest. Alexandru Masek is a four-time WSOPC gold ring winner, and he just narrowly missed out on a Main Event title earlier this year. He finished as the runner-up in Los Angeles, behind Freddy Deeb.
Masek is one of three men with four Circuit rings, tied with Chris Reslock and Men Nguyen. They three trail only Mark "Pegasus" Smith, whose five rings give him the all-time lead for now.
Masek may have something to say about that this week.
The seats are still filling in, and it looks like our crowd has grown close to 150 players. On our first pass through the room, we snagged an early list of notables.
Despite the holiday weekend — or perhaps because of it — a few familiar faces have found their way to Council Bluffs this weekend. Most notable among them is Dennis Phillips, the 2008 WSOP Main Event finalist. Phillips lives here in the midwest, and this stop was close enough to home to find a spot on his calendar. Also very notably here is Allen Kessler, the Chainsaw, who has just strolled in a few minutes late.
Chris Bell has made the trip over from North Carolina, while Bernard Lee came down from Boston to once again try his hand at this event that has treated him well historically. Lee finished in fourth place here in 2008, then bubbled the final table with a tenth-place showing two years later.
We also have a former member of the PokerNews family in the house — Garry Gates.
Last night, we saw Kevin Saul, Scott Clements, and Huy Nguyen playing cash in the Poker Room, and we'd expect to see that trio enter this Main Event, as well.
Also on the list are two of the finalists from the 2009 trip here, runner-up Dennis Meierotto and eighth-place finisher Jeff Bryan.
Good morning out there, and thanks for joining us. Today's live reporting comes to you from our nation's breadbasket, the border regions of Iowa and Nebraska in the middle of the midwest. The Horseshoe Council Bluffs is this week's WSOPC host city, and the first ten ring events have already been put in the books. Today is the big one, though.
The $1,500 Main Event is set to kick off at noon local time, just about 45 minutes from now. That's when we'll welcome the Day 1a crowd to the felt, and a second group will return at 7:00pm for the Day 1b flight. If a player is eliminated in the first flight, they can come back for another shot at the evening session.
This is the sixth consecutive year that the Circuit has come to Council Bluffs, and this is PokerNews third trip to the property. The last time we were here in 2009, the Main Event carried a $5,000 buy-in, and live multi-tabling amateur Jesse Hale final tabled two ring events in the same night. When the Main Event finalists bagged up after Day 2, Hale stuck around to do some work in the PLO side event, eventually finishing in third place. The next day, he bested that effort in a big way by taking down the Main Event in a commanding performance, earning himself six figures and a gold ring.
This time around, the buy-in is a more wallet-friendly $1,500, and we'd expect to see many more than the 67 players that Hale topped in 2009.
The players have just begun to find their way over here to the Whiskey Roadhouse where the bare wooden cocktail tables have been swapped out for rows and rows of pristine green felt.
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