Registration continues in the lobby to the Casino Barriere de Deauville, but the chips are already in the air in the ballroom and the action is underway.

A view from the stage

Thomas Kremser, tournament director, has announced that we will be playing ten one-hour levels today, the same tomorrow for flight 1B, with those remaining returning for day two on Friday. An eight-handed final table will complete proceedings on Saturday.

Among the well-known faces competing today, we have:

Carlos Mortenson, Marcel Luske, Jeff Duval, Patrick Antonius, Rehne Pedersen, Noah Boeken, John Kabbaj, George McKeever, Ross Boatman, Ram Vaswani, David Pomroy, Tiffany Williamson, David O'Callaghan, Roy Brindley, Marc Naarland, Philip Hilm, Pascal Perrault, Simon Young, Xuyen Pham, Mark Teltscher, Peter Eichhardt, Cecilia Nordernstam, Bambos Xanthos, Dave Clayton, Dario Alioto, Robert Cohen, Torstein Iversen, Juha Helppi

There's a fair bet that by the end of the week we will have another handful of players who have made a name for themselves. We'll check in with some of those PokerStars qualifiers soon.