The $10,000 No Limit Hold’em Championship, or more commonly referred to as the ‘Main Event’, is the most anticipated event in the entire WSOP, with thousands of players partaking, and milliions waiting to see who will make it to the very top. It’s been a long road to the pinnacle of the WSOP, BUT with the Godfather of Poker, Doyle Brunson, opening the event by saying ‘shuffle up and deal’, the gruelling week-long tournament has finally begun.

Player Turnout

It’s only Day 1 of the poker tournament, and there have so far been only 897 entrants, all of whom were hopeful that they would make it through the first day of grinding. By the end of the day, only 556 were left. What was quite disappointing about this was that there was a large decrease in the number of players participating. Last year, there were about 1,225 players who registered for the first day, making the attendance drop by 20% this year. Still, officials are hopeful that the numbers will increase as each day goes by. There aren’t many pros who have joined the fray yet, no doubt preferring to save their energies until the following days for registration. But there are some who are quite notable, especiall Doyle Brunson. Many expected that they would no longer see Doyle Brunson in the Main Event due to a disheartening Tweet he posted earlier this week.

However, it seems that the Texas Dolly’s spirits have recovered as he enthusiastically opened the event by announcing the traditional ‘Shuffle up and Deal’ and heralding the start of the tournament. Hopefully, Doyle Brunson will win this year’s Main Event, a fitting end to his career, if he really does plan to do so. Other pros who already joined were Jerry Yang and Greg Raymer. Johnny Chan was also spotted in one of the tables. Scott Montgomery was also there, but he was eliminated by Fred Berger, te chip leader of Day1A.

The Leaderboard

As mentioned, it’s Fred Berger sitting on the very top of the leaderboard as the only player with over 200,000 chips. Following him is Shane Sigsbee and Kyle Burnside. There aren’t very many notables in the leaderboard right now, but if the trends at the previous Main Events are any indication, then anything can surely happen in the following days, and these numbers will hardly matter. We’ll have to wait a little longer before the winner can be determined tough, because as usual, play will only go up to the Final Table. Once the last remaining 9 players are determined, we’ll have to wait for November 9 before play can commence.

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