Today was one of the biggest days in WSOP history so let’s get to it. In the $5,000 NLHE three players were coming back to decide who would pocket the $952,694 for first place. Dan Smith had the chip lead but was first out; that would leave Kyle Julius and Panayote Vilandos scrapping for the bracelet. Things went Vilandos’ way and he eventually snagged his 3rd bracelet.

Yen Dang is the lucky lady who won the $1,000 Ladies’ NLHE event. For her achievement she takes home $170,587. In only took her about 10 hands to dispense with Debbie Pechac in the heads-up battle where she dodged an open ended straight draw to seal the deal.

In the $2,500 10-Game Mix, we have ourselves the first female bracelet winner in an open event since Vanessa Selbst in 2008. So, who takes over her mantle? No-one, Selbst won another one! She knocked out everyone except one opponent at the final table. She had a big chip lead on heads-up opponent Michael Saltzberg and made it stick, winning $244,259 and her second bracelet.

At the latest $1,500 No Limit Holdem event we played down from 348 to 28 players today. The chip leader at the end of play is Hugh Henderson, not far in front of Randy Ashe. Victoria Coren is also in touch with the chip leaders. The average stack is still a relatively large 40 big blinds, so it’s unlikely they’ll play down to a winner tomorrow.

In the $1,000 tournament that started today, 3221 players ponied up the buy in and the eliminations came thick and fast. So fast in fact that only 265 are left after the first day’s play. Most of the A-listers were concerned with the One Drop tournament so not too many big names to report on in this one. The chip leader is James Mackoff who has run up his stack to 148,500 with Alex Kravchenko close behind. The likes of Huck Seed and Matt Stour are also coming back tomorrow.

All eyes today however, were on the Big One for One Drop, the $1M tournament that has a sell-out 48 player field with plenty of contenders for ‘table of death’. As usual, Phil Hellmuth showed up almost two hours late, but ended up with 8.4M in chips from the starting stack of 3M. Brian Rast who was down to 2M early is the chip leader on 10.7M at the end of the day. Justin Smith was the first player to be eliminated. One player who wasn’t going home on day 1 no matter what was Mikhail Smirnov, who folded quad 8s on a Js8c7s 8s Ks board to an all-in by John Morgan. In total there are 37 players remaining coming back tomorrow; among those who fell today were Jonathan Duhamel, Andrew Robl, Elky, Eric Seidel, and Michael Mizrachi. Players return to action at 12 pm tomorrow.

There’s one new event starting tomorrow, a $1,500 NLHE which kicks off at 12 pm.

Author Profile: Rob O’Connor+

written by Rob \\ tags: Big One for One Drop, Bracelet, Panayote Vilandos, Poker, Winner, World Series of Poker, WSOP