The third and final Day 1 of the 2012 Main Event has drawn to a close with a huge 3,418 players taking their seats - the single biggest number of entrants in a single day in Main Event history. However, the final count was slightly lower than last years (267 short to be precise) although the 6,598 entrants have still created a massive $62 million prize pool with a pretty tasty $8.5 million pay day in store for the eventual winner. The massive attendance for day 1c was perhaps inevitable given the reduction in Day 1's to play in this year from four to three. When the chips were bagged at the end of the days play a clear leader had emerged in Jason "Mkind0516" Laso who, with 240,350 chips is a fair step ahead of his closes rival Randy Haddox who closed on a little over 188k.
With a field as vast as this I couldn't possibly hope to mention even a fraction of the famous names on show yesterday but a brief glimpse at the leaderboard shows a few in good standing currently in the +100k club including; Brandon Adams, Chris Moorman, Jake Cody, Joe Cada, Josh Arieh, Sorel Mizzi, Farzad Bonyadi, Fabrice Soulier, Kelly Kim, and Viktor "Isildur1" Blom. Blom is lucky to still be in the fight as he doubled up in the latter stages of the day despite being a 3-1 dog when the cards were flipped - his AK outdrawing his opponents KK to chip him up nicely.
Still in the hunt, albeit with lesser stacks we see the likes of; Johnny Chan, Antonio Esfandiari, Phil Galfond, cricketer Shane Warne, Gus Hansen, Michael Mizrachi (Mizrachi was for a while leading the field with a c.160k stack but fell pretty hard during the latter stages going back to his 30k starting stack before rallying slightly), Sam Trickett, Luke Schwartz, Doyle Brunson (who had tweeted earlier in the day that he was not going to play before having a change of heart a few hours laters) and Phil Ivey. Ivey, the current POY front runner will certainly have his work cut out if he is to progress from Day 2 as he sits on a short stack over just over 11k and will need to pick his spot pretty early on to stand a chance of getting back into the tournament.
A fair few big names inevitably became day 1 casualties and no further part in this tournament will be played by; Annette Obrestad, Andrew Robl, Chris Moneymaker, Justin "Boosted J" Smith, Chino Rheem, Xuan Liu, Jonathan Duhamel, David "Bakes" Baker, Jimmy Fricke, Humberto Brenes and Lex Veldhuis.
Day 2 (a & b) both start tomorrow (although playing in separate rooms) as for the first time all three Day 1's will have separate Day 2's, with Day 1c's competitors having the day off today and coming back Wednesday.