End of Day 1a
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Today the players fell quicker than the raindrops outside on this greying Thursday in London town. 339 players deposited £5,000 into the swelling pot for their chance to take over from Aaron Gustavson, who beat Peter Eastgate heads up last year.
By the end of the day, over half the field were eliminated as the aggression in poker has now reached such a level that many would regard it as simply reckless the way they threw their chips away today.
Team PokerStars Pros Vanessa Selbst, Luca Pagano and Lex Veldhuis were all casualties today as were Sorel Mizzi, Chris Moorman and Jeff Madsen. Thomas Bichon is in among the chip leaders with 185,000 while Greg Raymer and Barry Shulman are also still in the mix. The chip leader at the end of the day though is Soheb Porbandarwala with a huge 218,600 and is believed to be the only player over the 200,000 mark.
Full chip counts will be following later tonight while we will be back here tomorrow at 12pm local time for Day 1b, which is expect to get over the 400 mark in terms of runners which would put the tournament in the running for the biggest field in UK poker history.