by Simon Young

When it comes to poker, ElkY is a man in a hurry. The Team PokerStars Frenchman plays hard and fast on up to 12 tables at once online, and although he's only allowed to boss one table at a time here, he shows no sign of slowing down. Just one hour into the Main Event of the WSOP, and he has eased through the 30,000 chip mark - a huge jump from the 20,000 starting stack.

He was clearly enjoying the early squabbles, perhaps seizing on the nerves of many players when they sit down for a shot at the world championship. But, as fate would have it, his table was one of the first to break and he was collecting his booty in a chip tray and moving on. "It has been a good start," he said. "There was one particular guy I was able to get a lot of chips from, but I'm moving already so we'll see what the new table is like."


ElkY: Counting his early gains

ElkY was snapped up by PokerStars after his extaordinary online performances were followed by success in live poker. He repaid the faith earlier this year by coming second in the Scandinavian EPT in Copenhagen behind Sweden's Magnus Petersson, a PokerStars qualifier. As luck would have it, I bumped into Magnus a short while ago as he wandered into the Rio to buy himself in for the Main Event. "I thought I'd do it today to beat the crowds before the event starts tomorrow," he said. "Er, hang on Magnus, it started 30 minutes ago," I replied. "Really? Oh well, thankfully I had not been put into Day 1A already!"

While he went off to register, a walk around the huge Amazon room showed up some familiar faces. Barry Greenstein seemed to be enjoying the early banter on his table, while around him the room is seemingly packed with PokerStars shirts, owned by our players who would love to repeat Chris Moneymaker's achievement of winning the Big One after getting their seat through a PokerStars satellite.

We'll be following our qualifiers as they battle through this huge minefield, and bringing you some of their stories of success - or heartbreaking failure.