Day 1 Concludes
When we arrived for today's Day 1 of Event No. 46, the $10,000 No-Limit Hold'em Six-Handed event, we expected to see a stacked field of top pros, including many of the online phenoms for whom the short-handed game is their bread and butter. On that count our expectations were fulfilled.
Looking back at Event No. 40 (the $5K version of this event) and its turnout of 732, we thought perhaps we'd see a field of half that or even a little less, given the double-sized buy-in. There we found our expectations to be off, as a surprising 474 runners bought in for this one, together creating a huge prize pool of $4,455,600 to be distributed among the top 48 finishers. That also means a $1.15 million-plus payday for the winner, the largest first prize thus far at this year's WSOP.
Just 162 of those 474 made it through to tomorrow's Day 2, which meant we saw many of those notables hitting the rail along the way. Meanwhile, Joe Cada catapulted to the top of the counts by mid-afternoon, soon to be challenged by David "Bakes" Baker, James Akenhead, McLean Karr, and Dmitry Gromov.
By night's end a few players had pushed up past the 200,000-chip mark to land at the top of the leaderboard by the time the end-of-night bagging of chips commenced, among them Mike Sowers, Ben Lamb, and Kevin Saul. But ahead of them all is Alan Sternberg with 260,600 to end the night.
Play resumes at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow local time for Day 2. What do we expect? More three- and four-bets. More action. And more drama as they reach the money and push toward that final table full of six-figure scores. See you then.