Day 1b of the 2012 WSOP Main Event has reached its conclusion and after a hard days play the days chip leader is American John Hoang with 180k chips. Although not exactly a household name Hoang knows his way around a poker table and over the past decade or so has won over $2.1 million in live poker tournaments. Close to Hoang we see James Schafer with 171,250 with two time bracelet winner Vanessa Selbst in third with 168,350. Selbst came across half of her monster stack on the last hand of the evening, doubling up with AA vs KK. Still the overall chip leader by some margin is William John from Day 1a with 266k.
The turnout for day 1b was almost twice that of day 1a with another 2,114 players stumping up $10k for a shot at the big one and we expect even more today, the final first day of the tournament. With so many runners turning out yesterday there were of course a big sprinkling of big names. Some who came and went include; Tom Dwan, former Main Event Champs Greg Raymer, Carlos Mortensen and Scotty Nguyen, as well as Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Victor Ramdin, Eli Elezra, Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, Andy Bloch, Vanessa Rousso, Roland DeWolfe and Todd Brunson (to name but a few).
A fair few notables are however still in contention with Daniel Negreanu finishing the day in 11th with a little over 140k chips - it has been a very disappointing series for "KidPoker" after a promising start with an early final table appearance. There were also good displays from Jason Sommerville (144k), Maria Ho (140k), Shaun Deeb (125k), Brian "$tinger 88" Hastings (119k), Barny Boatman (98.2k), Eugene Katchalov (96.3k) Barry Greenstein (60.8k), Justin "ZeeJustin" Bonomo (54.2k) and Liv Boeree (40.5k).
Day 1c is currently underway and again the big names are out in force. Some already on the radar having picked up some early chips include Gabriel "verve.oasis" Goffi, Randy "nanonoko" Lew, Johnny Chan, Jennifer Tilly, Sorell Mizzi, Chris Moorman, David Benyamine, Phil Ivey, Viktor "Isildur1" Blom, Annette Obrestad, Jake Cody and John Juanda.
By the end of the days play we will have the full line up of players making in through to Day 2 as this year there are only three day ones rather than last years four.