Things are going great guns here in Deauville. Players are tumbling like skittles, the prizes are growing larger and the air conditioning has died in the press room. You can almost smell the excitement.

As for the poker, we are down to 32 players on four tables of eight. Here are (most of) their chip counts - you'll notice some very familiar names:

Jon Hewston (Eng) 400,000+ --
Theo Jorgensen (Den) 305,000 --
Jerome Douieb (Fra) 280,000 (PokerStars qualifier) --
Ram Vaswani (Eng) -- 275,000
Isabelle Mercier (Can) 225,000 --
Ken Johnson (USA) (PokerStars FPP qualifier) -- 210,000
Jeff Sharpe (Eng) 189,000 --
Malcolm Gorse (Eng) 145,000 (PokerStars FPP qualifier) --
Julian Thew (Eng) 135,000 --
Peter Roche (Ire) 130,000 --
Kirill Gerasamov (Rus) 128,000 --
Lex Veldhuis (Hol) 126,000 -- (PokerStars qualifier)
Julien Veyrac (Fra) 120,000 (PokerStars qualifier) --
Martin Greene (Eng) 119,000 --
Jerome Zerbib (Fra) 115,000 --
Mike Hermes (USA) 97,000 --
Ole Busborg Jensen (Den) (PokerStars qualifier) 89,000 --
Henrik Olander (Swe)
Patric Martensson (Swe) 62,000 --
Micky Wernick (Eng) 53,500 --
Bernard Greard (Fra) 52,000 --
Emile Petit (Fra) 47,000 --
Thomas Fougeron (Fra) 45,000 --
Jens Ogsaeter 42,000 --
Willie Tann (Eng) 35,800 --
Janne Airaksinen (Fin) 28,500 --
Stuart Nash (Eng) 23,000 --
Martin Pollak (Austria) (PokerStars qualifier) 21,000

Click here for details of tournament payout.

The next update will be pictoral.