Overnight, the WSOP has released the official chip counts for the 73 players who bagged up chips at the end of Day 1 play. The 73 who will return on Tuesday for Day 2 action are led by Alon Shahar with 264,100 in chips, with the top ten as follows:
Alon Shahar 264,100
Dario Minieri 191,600
Justin Filtz 180,200
Randall Brueckner 131,100
Frank Rusnak 127,800
Michael Skomac 123,700
Ed Fernandez 121,800
Andrew Emory 121,400
Cory Albertson 120,500
Brendan Keenan 119,100
On the very last hand of the night, Stuart Marshak won a circa 30,000 pot, his 7,000 bet on the river of a board being called down by his opponent after extensive deliberation that ran down the last couple of minutes of the clock.
Marshak showed , which was good enough to take the pot.
Paul Foltyn, who has finished the day with around 20,000, claims to have "folded the last level". However, he will be relieved to have made the cash, surviving the bubble in dramatic circumstances when his pocket jacks held up against A-Q, a queen on the turn being followed by a jack on the river.
Whilst that pot gave him around 50,000 in chips, he was unable to build on his newly acquired stack, a later A-Q versus eights encounter seeing his stack once again bisected in half.
Still, he returns tomorrow, and is more than capable of running deep, as he proved when he made the final in this very event a couple years back.
Play has now finished for the day. Our remaining players are bagging up their chips and most likely dreaming hungrily of the bar or their respective beds.
As his stack was beginning to dwindle, Justin Filtz has found a crucial double up at just the right time, his stack now boasting 178,000 and looking good for day two.
The action began with Filtz himself, his raise of 3,600 being repopped by Dario Minieri who made it 11,000 to play.
Steve Gross then sprung into action a couple of seats down, pushing all in for 58,000.
Although Minieri passed, Filtz made the call, his comfortably ahead of Gross' .
A board later and Gross was done, a casher here today, but a day one exit nonetheless.
Since Scotty Nguyen bought a round for his table, the sound of raucous laughter, raised voices and all-round hilarity and thorough enjoyment of this tournament from his table is deafening -- it's actually managing to drown out the continuous chatter-and-chip-riffle buzz of the Amazon Room. No mean feat.