Derke Leads 109 Players into Day 2
Today marked the day for the biggest Limit Hold'em buy-in of this year's World Series of Poker. A total of 166 players showed up all dishing out $5,000 to compete in the most mechanical form of poker. Play started off traditionally slow, with many big bets in play, but there were some very interesting tables to watch. Defending champ Daniel Idema was in the field, as was this year's WSOP Player of the Year leader, John Monnette. The latter will not be adding any points to his already impressive total as he busted out quickly. The title holder is still in the race as he survived the day with 3,500 chips.
In order to have some fun you need to get table talk going and there was plenty in this tournament. Over on Table 356, Daniel Negreanu, Eugene Katchalov and Jameson Painter sat down, and during a small pot some fun chatter started. You can read all about that here in the blog post.
One player always up for table talk, and some needling here and there, is Mike Thorpe. He's better known as "Crazy Mike" and proved once again he deserves that name. From the start he was very loud and active and especially Michael Winnett, who wore a dinosaur suit, was a big target.
Thorpe didn't survive the day just as, among others, David Chiu, Carlos Mortensen, Maria Ho, John Racener and Dan Kelly. Kelly started the day off in a very interesting situation matching up against seven other superstars. His table full of late registered players looked like this and many of them survived the first day of play.
| Seat | Name | WSOP Bracelets | Live Tournament Earnings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Erick Lindgren | 1 | $8,457,544 |
| 2 | Shawn Buchanan | 0 | $4,678,970 |
| 3 | Greg Mueller | 2 | $1,989,989 |
| 4 | Mark Radoja | 1 | $1,197,755 |
| 5 | John Juanda | 5 | $12,378,559 |
| 6 | Nick Schulman | 1 | $5,118,771 |
| 7 | Huck Seed | 4 | $7,260,200 |
| 8 | Unkown | - | - |
| 9 | Dan Kelly | 1 | $2,219,790 |
In total we lost just 57 players on day one and among the ones returning for more tomorrow we see Shawn Keller, Jason Mercier, Dwyte Pilgrim and Terrence Chan. Chip leader is Nicholas Derke followed by Warwick Mirzikinian who finished third in the $5,000 Mixed-Max cashing $162,443.
The tournament will resume at 2:00 PM local time with 109 players as we will make our way towards the money and ultimately the final table. A total of 18 players will cash in this event and the grand prize will be $206,760. See you all tomorrow for more Limit Hold'em action as PokerNews brings you the exclusive live coverage!