WSOP Day 1: $10,000 World Championship PLHE

Made it to the Rio today a little late. My boss was on my ass to make sure I was on time, but I didn't expect the cab ride to take more than 30 minutes. Just seems pretty ridiculous that it took that long. Maybe it's because we had to take an alternate route or maybe because we hit every red light in the area, who knows. Either way, not a good impression Donnie. But moving on from that, we had the World Championship PLHE event to cover. Last year, this event was only a $5,000 buy in, whereas this year they've bumped it to $10,000. The buzz around the WSOP was that only 200-250 or so players would come out for this event, but it was said that this event will be full of big name pros. Who else would play a $10,000 PLHE event?

Despite the skeptics, the field ran over 350, with the final amount of entries 352. Amnon Filippi took a brave prop bet in which he bet the over on 350. He made it just a few minutes before late registration was over, after sitting right at 350 for most of the second level. He pocketed $1,000 for the bet. There were plenty of other big names, both poker pros and not, in the field. Here's some of them:

Eli Elezra
TJ Cloutier
Shannon Elizabeth
Chris Ferguson
Erik Seidel
Ted Lawson
Phil Ivey
Todd Brunson
Doyle Brunson
Phil Laak
Antonio Esfandiari
Patrik Antonius
David Benyamine
Clonie Gowen
Jennifer Harman
Jennifer Tilly
Marco Traniello
Tuan Le
Kenny Tran
Bill Edler
Paul Galfond
Tom Dwan
Max Pescatori
Dario Minieri
David Singer
Daniel Negreanu

All right, you get the point. The list goes on and on. There had to be 3-5 big names at every table, it was a pretty superior field. There was some good play and some bad play. I don't really understand why when it comes to PLHE, people always want to bet the pot. This wasn't the case of the pros, but of the more unexperienced players. They always wanted to jam the pot and bet max amounts, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just easier to say "pot" than to size out your bet accordingly, who knows. But as I was logging hands on the live reporting page, you can definitely see why the pros are pros. A lot of the pros were picking up smaller pots here and there and letting their less experienced opponents hang themselves in the big pots. You rarely saw a pro racing off for a big amount of chips early on. You also saw them playing their bigger pairs slower than the inexperienced players. You know what they say, even aces are just one pair.

After the day was said and done, here are some of the big names left in the field of 70 runners:

Chris Ferguson
Andy Bloch
Anna Wroblewski
Humberto Brenes
Lyle Berman
Nenad Medic
Rolf Slotboom
Phil Laak
David Benyamine
Beth Shak
Patrik Antonius
Allen Kessler
Hasan Habib
Chris Bell
Jennifer Harman
Bill Chen
Ted Lawson
Tuan Le
Mark Newhouse
Eli Elezra (chip leader after day 1)
Kathy Liebert

There are also some fairly well known online players left in the field. I myself am a big advocate for the online game and believe that the online players are right up there with the live players in terms of ability, if not ahead of them. The philosophies, strategies and tactics, and hand experience is very abundant in the online poker world and it's only a matter of time before online players begin capturing the majority of the events played today.

Play for day 2 will begin at 2pm and play down until the final table. It should take a few hours and the money is set at 36 players. I'm thinking that the final table will consist of about 50% big name pros and 50% online players, they just both seem to have this event down. I am personally picking Nenad Medic and Patrik Antonius to go really deep in this event, along with online star Vivek "Psyduck" Rajkumar.

Be sure to check the event updates in the live reporting section at PokerNews.com.