by Howard Swains

We started with three, we found two more, and we're left with just those two.

As we return from an extended dinner break to find just 189 players remaining in the main event (a mark we were not scheduled to reach until about midway through Sunday), our European PokerStars player count is low.

Our chip count, however, remains buoyant, thanks largely to Dave Murray who currently sits behind $1.2 million of the little babies. It might be even more. I just leaned over the ropes to chat to our Dublin boy and he was raking in another pot. His highly trained dealers' fingers couldn't even count fast enough and the figure reached was a typical European understatement. We always round down. It's in our nature.

Dave Murray

Our other player is Dave Pendley, known as RiverDave both on PokerStars and the British poker community at large, where he is a well-known player in the Grosvenor, Luton. He's been moving up and down the leaderboard today and when I checked up with him recently he was in more of an ebb - down to about $350,000. But there are about 3,500,000 players who would happily swap places with him, so nothing really to worry about.

All this, of course, means that our bright hopes Akshay Kumar and Gary Jones have both been snuffed out. Akshay couldn't get going today, taking beat after beat, before his final chips went in on a three-way coup. He had A-Q, another short stack held 6-6 and the table leader scented a double bust-out with A-K. As it was, the sixes were good but Akshay was out the door in 261st, for $38,759.

Gary's was a similar story. Those chips dribbled away - and a huge chunk fell when Gary moved into aces - eventually ending in 206nd place. Ole Busborg Jensen couldn't manouvre his small stack into anything sizeable and fell early today.