Last night, a friend and I were tossing about the concept of PokerStars as a live card room. You know, you walk through the glass doors into PokerStars Live Casino and sit down across from all the PokerStars players you see every day online. There’s Greg Raymer playing 2-7, there’s ElkY in a sit and go, and Barry Greenstein and Daniel Negreanu are jawing at each other in the big game.
Tonight, I saw an example of what that would be like. Table 64 is along the rail in the first quadrant of the Amazon Room. For the last level of the night, it was PokerStars live. Rahul Maitra, Vlado Marinkovic, Mike Adamo, Hiroshi Shimamura, and Hevad “RaiNKhAN” Khan are all sitting at the same table and talking more about PokerStars than they are the hands playing out in the final level of the night. More specifically, they are talking about Khan’s ability to play a ton of SNGs at the same time on a 17″ monitor.
Whether it’s just me or I’m right about the mood of the room, I think everyone is finally ready to put Day 1 to bed. After four flights of Day 1, everyone is looking forward to Day 2. I think everyone was surprised by the late rush in players coming into the World Series. The prize pool isn’t as big as last year, but it’s still bigger than 2005 when Joe Hachem won the world championship. For a look at this year’s prize numbers, check out Crunching the World Series Numbers.
In just about an hour and half, the remaining players will all be able to say they survived Day 1. Soon, the work of surviving will end and the work of winning will begin. Six hundred twenty one players are going to get paid. That’s not going to happen until at least Wednesday.
There are still tons of PokerStars players left in the field. While the final numbers aren’t end for tonight, it seems almost certain that PokerStars qualifier Jeff Norman will go into Day 2 with the overall chip lead.
However, even Norman knows that the chip lead after Day 1 doesn’t mean much if you can’t make it happen on Day 2.
Who can do that? Well, we’ll see starting at noon Tuesday.
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