Dinner Break on Day 1a with Sormunen in the Lead
Six out of the eight scheduled 75-minute levels are done and the players have been sent into a 75-minute dinner break.
Day 1a started with an insane rush for Ireland's Mahmood Rasheed, as he first had a full house with eights over kings against an inferior full house, followed by quads kings and boosted his stack to more than 65,000. Soon after, Martin Kozlov made quads nines against his jacks and Rasheed was cut back down before eventually departing in level six. Kozlov himself has last been spotted with around 20,000 while Pasi Sormunen on the same table tore apart his opponents.
Sormunen sent Dario Sammartino and Rasheed to the rail and also took care of Max Silver and Stephan Zesiger. Silver shoved short with pocket fours, Zesiger just called with kings and Sormunen saw a flop with the 
. Ultimately, the open-ender of the Finn got there on the river to crack two sets and Sormunen went on to accumulate 174,000 by now.
Other big stacks include Sergey Sergeev (130,000), Graydon Kowal (102,000), Dan Shak (83,000), Paul McCartney (80,000), Dmitry Yurasov (80,000), Thomas Mjeldheim (78,000) and Jakub Michalak (74,000). Sergeev got lucky early on to crack the pocket kings of Jens Luebbe with pocket queens, then steam-rolled up his stack. Shak got it in with a jack-high flush draw against Luke Marsh's ace-queen and hit a jack on the river for a massive double.
Early casualties included Caitlin Hall, EPT12 Dublin 5th place finisher Iliodoros Kamatakis and Jorryt van Hoof. Fatima Moreira de Melo had her aces cracked when Anatoly Korochenskiy turned quads tens and the German High Roller regulars Philipp Gruissem and Martin Finger lasted less than half an hour each before also joining the rail.
Other notables still in include Ole Schemion (49,000), Adrian Mateos (45,000), Juha Helppi (42,000), Charlie Carrel (33,000) and Connor Drinan (19,000). They will all return at approximately 9.30 p.m. local time and play another two levels, bagging and tagging then takes place around midnight. In the meanwhile, you can also read up on [Removed:17]'s victory in the €25,750 Super High Roller.