A total of 2,114 players bought into Day 1b, which is up from the 985 in 2011, but it’s worth noting there are only three starting days this year so that might be part of the reason for the increase.
Numerous big-name poker players hit the felt today including Jason Somerville, Brian Hastings, Sammy Farha, Jerry Yang, Darvin Moon, Vanessa Selbst, Erik Seidel, Peter Eastgate, Barry Greenstein, Liv Boeree, Erick Lindgren, JC Tran, Lauren Kling and Maria Ho.
Arguably the two most famous were Negreanu and St-Pierre.
St-Pierre, who is currently a streak of nine straight victories in the UFC, made his first appearance at the WSOP as an ambassador for 888poker.
The Montreal-native only lasted a couple levels but seemed thrilled to take part in the competition and even gave the player that busted him, Stephen Patz, a big hug as he left the Amazon Room.
Negreanu, Selbst, Somerville Up, Dwan Down
Daniel Negreanu was on fire on Day 1b and busy doing the Kid Poker thing, hamming it up with numerous fans on the rail. He built a massive stack of 140,575, which puts him near the top of the chip leaderboard.
Tom Dwan also played on Day 1b but didn’t exactly set his table on fire. Dwan showed up after the dinner break and busted after a couple levels. Dwan arrived late at the 2012 WSOP and finished with zero cashes.
Although we won’t have an exact count on the number of players to bust on Day 1b, there were a lot, including Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier, Scotty Nguyen, Ville Wahlbeck, Joe Sebok, Yevgeniy Timoshenko and Chip Jett all busted.
On the other hand Vanessa Selbst (168,350), Jason Somerville (144,725), Maria Ho (130,425) and Shaun Deeb (125,900) rocketed to the top of the chip counts.
They’re all finished until Wednesday when they will all return and play five more levels that day.
Meanwhile tomorrow, Day 1c, is the final starting day of the 2012 WSOP Main Event, and will likely be the biggest one yet.
We’ll also get our first look at this year’s prizepool so be sure to check back here at 12 p.m. tomorrow.
For all the action from the WSOP in Las Vegas click through to our 2012 World Series of Poker Live Coverage section, brought to you by 888poker.com.
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