Play has now wrapped up for Day 1b of the last $1,000 event of this WSOP series and it's turned out to be the second biggest in history just behind the inaugural "Stimulus" event at the start of the 2009 series which was won by Steve Sung.
At the end of today's proceedings, it looks to us as though Eric Afriat will be the Day 1b chip leader with 100,200 with about 380 players remaining from the second start day for event #54 joining our 275 survivors from Day 1a tomorrow in the Amazon room.
We had a whopping 2,644 players start today including numerous well-known players such as Jonathan Duhamel, Galen Hall, Liv Boeree, David Williams and Michael Mizrachi but all of them fell by the wayside early on in this rapid fire event. Fortunately this is a four day event so there is lots of time yet to whittle this field down to it's conclusion.
We'll be restarting tomorrow at 2.30pm, perhaps slightly in the shadow of the $50,000 Players' Championship event, but with a gold bracelet for the winner nonetheless and with 468 places being paid, you can be sure that we'll be trying to follow everyone involved to the best of our ability.
We just caught the tail end of a three-way preflop all in. One player had , another had , and Kori Breeding had them both covered but the third-best hand: .
The board ran out , and the river drew a beastly celebration from Breeding. He spikes the two-outer, knocking two players out to climb to about 75,000 among the chip leaders.
It looks like Shane Schleger has pushed himself toward the top of our notables in the chip counts, as well. We count him down at about 33,000 right now.
Also making an assault on the chip counts page is Bree Goldman.
They're still far from the overall chip lead as we eye up a few stacks over 60,000. And they'll all have to go a long way to catch Paul Volpe's end-of-day count of 124,500 from Day 1a yesterday.
We joined the put just in time to see Humberto Brenes bet 1,500 into a pot of about 2,500 in a flop. His opponent was out of position in the big blind, and he check-called. The turn came the , and the big blind check-called another 2,500, leaving himself just 1,100 behind. Brenes bet 1,000 on the river, saying something about leaving the last T100 alone. His opponent check-raised it all in, though, and Brenes' was the winner.
We didn't see how it went down, but we did see that Vitaly Lunkin doubled back up to 13,000 with . The board was out on display, and Lunkin was pushed the pot to push him back into contenion.
We were starting to get a little bit lost in the mundaneness of this massive Day 1b, and we sort of got sidetracked looking at the headwear people are wearing. It actually paints a pretty broad picture of the crowd that's assembled.
It looks like the majority of the players have gone with sports teams on their heads today. At least the Americans have. We see the MLB represented heavily:
New York Yankees (3)
San Francisco Giants (2)
Toronto Blue Jays (2)
Cincinnati Reds
Boston Red Sox
Houston Astros
Anaheim Angels
The NFL? Sure. The San Diego Chargers, Arizona Cardinals, New Orleans Saints, and Kansas City Chiefs all have their hats on participants today, and there's a gentleman sporting a Devin Hester jersey from the Chicago Bears, too.
Speaking of jerseys, we have one gentleman wearing a Vancouver Canucks jersey in the room too (and it's not Terrence Chan, either). The jersey of the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks is also being worn by a gentleman nearby.
Other logos on top? The Knoxville Sprint Car Championships, CFL's Grey Cup, The North Dakota Sioux, Finland, The Macau Poker Championships, Quiksilver, Boss, Maserati (sick brag), Titleist, and Kangol. There are also three people sporting fedoras and two people in cowboy hats. Our personal favorite is a guy wearing a Pac-Man hat, and a matching shirt. The shirt actually has a big picture of a blue ghost from Pac-Man and huge letters that spell: "Eat Me!"