Day 1a Is In The Books

After four and a half levels of play we've reached the end of the opening flight of the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event. The players are bagging up their chips and exchanging bad beat stories as they drift out of the Amazon Room, content in the knowledge that they've safely survived day one of the Main Event. For many, a huge achievement in itself, and hopefully the first of many long days ahead on their road to the Holy Grail.

We started out with 1,125 entrants and approximately 800 have lived to fight another day. It wasn't a great day for 2004 World Champion Greg Raymer, who started off in high spirits with the "Shuffle Up and Deal" honors, but just a few minutes later was crippled and eliminated from the tournament. Such are the highs and lows of tournament poker. Others to join Raymer on the rail included Nick Schulman, Chino Rheem, Mike Caro, Victor Ramdin, Jimmy Fricke and Ray Romano.

At the other end of the spectrum 2003 World Champion Chris Moneymaker should feature in the ESPN highlights as he was prominent along with $50,000 Poker Player's Championship winner Michael Mizrachi. It will be some time before we have the official end-of-day counts, but as the players were bagging up we spotted Dwyen Ringbauer with 191,125 which should put him near the top of the leaderboard, but James Mitchell bested that by writing a whopping 241,075 on his bag. Corwin Cole capped out the day with 228,200. We'll have the official counts for the entire field for you shortly.

Join us again tomorrow as we do it all over again for Day 1b as the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event continues from Las Vegas. The action kicks off at noon and we look forward to your company then! Until then, good night from the Rio!