They say eights are lucky, and if you finish in 888th spot or higher in the Seniors Event this year, you're in the money. A min-cash is worth $1,499 and Sunday's winner will take home $662,594. So said the announcement to the remaining field five minutes ago - currently 2,420/5,916 players.
Joe Schulman, who finished 8th in this event last year (winning $76,191), is on the lookout for another final table appearance in 2019. His stack at the end of Level 9 is just over 160,000, more than three times the average.
The Pavilion Room is starting to break but there are still plenty of tables in action as the Day 1 field starts to trim down.
Riad Agel was spotted with a 157,000 stack, and a few tables over Cristobal Romano is holding on to one of the biggest stacks in the field, at 191,000.
Agel played three consecutive pots, winning two, to chip up to his current count.
Scott Kateian has been slowly working his way in from the table outskirts at the Rio Convention Centre today, starting off in the poker room (the actual poker room, in the casino proper) which comes into play when fields of this magnitude need to be accommodated. His stack, however, has been working its way down; when he arrived in Brasilia ("I'm finally on the stage!") he had only nine big blinds. He won a pot by getting a walk once, but that just kept him level.
Finally he picked up pocket aces, with 8.5bb remaining. It was opened preflop to 2,500 with one caller before action reached him and he moved all in. Neither player would put the rest in the pot to see a showdown, however, so he picked up 7,500 right there, enough for nearly a full double through.
Having spent more time up from his seat watching basketball (like a fair few players, to be fair) than in it for the last level, Norm MacDonald has hit the rail right after the cut-off time for re-entry. Down to 11,600, he three-bet all in from the cutoff over a preflop open in early position; call.
MacDonald: 
Preflop opener: 
The flop came down with the 
in the door, plus an accompanying 
. "Don't do it," was said. But the turn did it: the 
brought in the straight for the pocket queens, and no amount of saying, "Pair the board!" could make the river 
do so.
"Brutal," said one of his neighbours, then, "See you in October."
Level: 9
Blinds: 500/1,000
Ante: 1,000
Players will come back for Levels 9 and 10 after the final 20-minute break of the day.
After an opening raise to 2,500, a player with 10,000 total chips (the blinds about to rise to 500/1,000) moved all in preflop. Mark McCluskey, after a moderate tank, then three-bet over the top to 42,000. This covered the initial raiser by a few thousand, and after about half a minute he folded, showing face up. The all-in player held 
and McClusky 
. The tens held over the 
run-out and the experienced British player (both online and live) adds 14,000 to his stack.
Allan Rosen has built a lead-challenging stack in Level 8 - over 160,000. During the short time his stack was being counted, he picked up two pots in a row with three-bets preflop (to 6,400 and 6,500) from the cutoff and then the button worth 4,000 each.
Tables are breaking elsewhere, moving new friends (and separating some big stacks in the process). Ken Lipscombe and Peter Fenn were the last to tray up their stacks and disperse from the latest table in the Pavillion Room to break - probably because they had quite a few chips to move each.
"Guys from Texas are always fun," said Lipscombe to Fenn, who presumably hails from that state.
"You haven't met 'em all," replied Fenn, before shaking his erstwhile opponent's hand and heading to another table.
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