Dancing girls bedecked in giant pink and white feathers made their first appearance on the EPT today. Not playing, just here to inject a little high kicking pomp and ceremony into day 1a to an audience of poker players riffling and waiting. They cheered them on to the stage and cheered them off again and after singer Sabine Neibersch got the same treatment after belting out a pretty good rendition of La Vie en Rose it was time to get down to business.

That business is poker. Eight levels of Texas hold’em – each level 60 minutes long, with breaks every two, meaning survivors can expect to hit the room service speed dial button some time after 1am.

Shoehorned between the stage and the rail are today’s contenders; a couple of hundred poker players with a few Poker idols scattered among them.

Team PokerStars Pro is ably represented by the faces of Kravchenko, Thorson and Horecki, while they’re flanked by sponsored folk with the names Demidov, Spindler, Kranich and Strassmann.

Copenhagen’s runner up Peter Hedlund plays today, as does Barny Boatman and former winners Joao Barbosa (already up to 16,000), Arnaud Mattern, Andreas Hoivold and Thang Nguyen. More will make themselves known before long, the shrieks of victory and defeat will soon strike.

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