We love breaking records on the UKIPT and we smashed two of them out of the park today. A massive 788 players turned up to play Day 1B of this event, eclipsing the previous single day attendance record for a UKIPT Main Event of 736 (set at UKIPT4 London 2).
Add them to the 214 who put their faces above the parapet on Day 1A and it meant the total number of runners in this huge UKIPT Main Event was 1,002, some 142 more than pitched up at UKIPT4 Galway, our previous best on Irish soil.
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All told those 1,002 players created a prize pool totalling € 971,940. Over the next four days that'll be split 151 ways with the winner collect €176,900. You can see the full payout structure here.
There was actually a third record broken today, but we didn't break it, Stefan Schillhabel
did. His gargantuan end of day stack of 352,000 is a UKIPT Day 1 record, just eclipsing the 351,200 tht Neil Van Der Merwe bagged up in Bristol earlier this year. The 28-year-old German, who finished fourth in the EPT11 Malta Main Event, hails from Dusseldorf and started playing poker in 2006 with friends and is still a recreational player. He is currently studying for a Masters in sociology and also has a part-time job in sales.
Other players who turned 25,000 into substantially more today include:
Thomas Boivin, 342,400
Olivier Ferrero, 315,500
Adam Owen, 252,900
Adam Milewski, 232,900
Thomas Finneran, 216,000
James Akenhead, 182,500
Padraig O'Neill, 181,700
If you searched hard enough in the huge Day 1B field you'd have found half a dozen players sporting various versions of the famous PokerStars Red Spade.
Representing Team Pro were ElkY and Eugene Katchalov. Neither will be back for Day 2 though. The Frenchman ran kings into aces to bust #sosick.
Team Pro Online's sole representative proved he can cut it in the live arena too. That should come as no surprise given his name's Mickey Petersen. EPT champion Mickey Petersen. The Danish online tournament beast looked like he was going to reach Day 2 but busted on the final hand of the night.
Still going strong though is Felipe Ramos. It was easy to miss people in this hectic day, the Friend of PokerStars flew under the radar but flew he did as he'd turned his 25,000 starting stack into 78,200 by the time play ended.
We saw a new type of patch on the tour today, one that read, 'PokerStars Live at The Hippodrome Casino Team Pro'. The Hippodrome Casino in London's West End is PokerStars home in the UK and they recently sponsored two players to reprensent them at poker tournaments.
Both are tour regulars but it was a case of contrasting fortunes for the pair as Chris Gordon navigated the choppy UKIPT waters to finish on 88,700, whilst Kelly Saxby, who had a deep run at UKIPT Bristol earlier in the season, busted during level eight.
With so many well known players in the field today - there were 10 EPT champions just for starters - it's no surprise that plenty of them will be back for Day 2. Among the sharks hungry for UKIPT cash on Day 2 will be:
Charlie Carrel, 157,200
Andrew Chen, 149,900
Jeff Madsen, 138,900
Nick Newport, 125,400
Patrick Leonard, 83,000
Jamie Sykes, 76,400
Dara Davey, 71,200
Dara O'Kearney, 57,000
Surinder Sunar, 53,000
Gareth Chantler, 44,700
Keith Johnson, 24,600
Of course for some their tournaments went the other way. EPT11 Malta champion Niall Farrell was pretty vocal about the early 10am start time not being to his liking (not the only dissenter to be fair) and he was even more vocal about the bar not opening until 3pm. He busted out shortly after midday and tweeted - in jest - the reason for his quick exit.
Was forced to bust the UKIPT immediately in protest of the late bar opening. Stand with me brothers.
— Niall Farrell (@Firaldo87poker) February 11, 2016
He wasn't the only EPT champion who found the UKIPT a tougher nut to crack. Sebastian Pauli, Kevin MacPhee, Jannick Wrang, Ognyan Dimov, Dominik Panka, David Vamplew and Anton Wigg all busted out.
You could also set fire to the tournament slips of Chris Moorman, Ben Heath, Chance Kornuth, Max Silver, Matthias De Meulder, Jude Ainsworth and Fergal Nealon. As the day progressed, they did not.
Around 222 players made it through the day, add them to the 52 who advanced from Day 1A and somewhere in the region of 275 players will be back to play Day 2 from noon tomorrow. The march to the money begins in earnest then. We'll be back as we burst the bubble and move towards the final table during 10 one-hour levels.
Join us then, you can catch up on all today's action via the links below, and overnight chip counts and the seat draw will be posted shortly. Keep an eye on the widget to the right (or at the bottom if you're on mobile) and the @PokerStarsBlog and @UKIPT accounts for that information.
Until tomorrow good night from Dublin.
All photos are copyright of Mickey May