The general idea behind our regular midday updates from the 2017 World Series of Poker Main Event is to give you a broad overview of the situation at the Rio, to keep you posted as to the major tournament developments so far.
And in this case, here’s the story: There’s absolutely no way of knowing what on earth is going on.
We titled today’s opening post “‘B’ stands for bigger'” but it turns out we had no idea. Today’s Day 1B is enormous: players are spread in all four sections of the Amazon Room, the Brasilia Room is full and they’re also playing in most of the Miranda Room.
This is shaping up to be a very large tournament indeed–at least 2,000 people for today already.
From the point of view of the Red Spades, it’s been a mixed start. You have likely already heard about Vanessa Selbst’s spectacular bust-out, and it also seemed to be a little bleak for Chris Moneymaker.
On a recent walk around the room, his seat was filled by somebody who had not won the World Series of Poker in 2003 (or any other year for that matter). Had Moneymaker been knocked out?
Actually, no. He had been moved. About three tables over, Moneymaker was betting 5,600 at a completed board of A♦ 3♥ Q♣ 2♦ 6♣ . He got a call, then tabled 5♥ 4♣ , which was an unbeatable straight. He then counted 43,000 chips in total and declared, “I’m back in the damn tournament now!”
Registration is open until the end of the impending dinner break, which is just as well because the registration line still snakes like at a theme park through the corridor. It means that we may yet see some more Team PokerStars Pros show up. However, here are those we know about playing today, as well as their approximate stack size at this time:
Barry Greenstein — 50,675
Celina Lin — 62,000
Liv Boeree — 50,000
Randy Lew — 70,000
Igor Kurganov — 50,000
Maria Konnikova, whose story you should definitely catch up with, has around 28,000 at this stage.
Not only is this a big field, it’s packed with quality too. Moneymaker is not the only former WSOP champion playing: there’s also Jonathan Duhamel, Greg Raymer, Jamie Gold, Greg Merson, Robert Varkonyi and Joe Hachem, as well as last year’s POY Mike Gorodinsky.
Meanwhile, Boeree is far from the only former EPT champion in the mix. There’s also been sightings of Adrian Mateos, Gavin Griffin, Toby Lewis, Michael Tureniec, Stephen Graner, Sebastian Pauli, Niall Farrell and David Vamplew and I expect there are even more.
Long-time friend of PokerStars Blog Marc Convey is playing today, and his table-draw gives a pretty good idea of the quality of the field. Convey has Stefan Huber, Killian Kramer, Danielle Anderson and Tom Marchese for company. Even if he gets a table move, all of the following (and many, many others) are also in the Day 1B field.
Terrence Chan, Nick Schulman, Justin Bonomo, Stephen Chidwick, Jake Schwartz, Timothy Adams, Brian Hastings, Connor Drinan, Daniel Colman, Erick Lindgren, Christoph Vogelsang, Benny Glaser, Dan Smith, Erik Seidel, Charlie Carrel, David Yan and Ole Schemion.
The official tournament reporters list Jeremy Joseph and Albert Daher as the top stacks at this point, with around 140,000 each. But in keeping with the rest of the day’s chaos, I wouldn’t quote us on that. It’s mayhem!
WSOP photos by PokerPhotoArchive.com.
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