Another day, another day 1. And now it's over.

We started day 1b with another 215 hardly souls, each stumping up £5,200, or its online satellite win equivalent, and when the clock stopped moments ago, fewer than 90 remained. Of them, there were some very familiar names.

The tournament area in the final stages of the day

Former EPT champions Patrik Antonius, Jan Boubli and Roland de Wolfe are still standing, as well as Team PokerStars' Daniel Negreanu. The latter found railbirds flocking to his table all afternoon, especially when he was lined up beside Liz Lieu and de Wolfe. But the attention is hardly new to Kid Poker, and he stayed comfortably above the average for the entire day, ending with 20,000 and change.

The early running was made by Katja Svendsen, a PokerStars qualifier originally from Fredrikstad, Norway, but now living in Denmark. She won the first double shootout she played to earn her seat here and decided to play aggressively from the outset, taking a lot of chips from Ram Vaswani, among others, to get up to about 40,000 at one point. As the end of the day neared, she lost a few coin flips against small stacks, but her 26,700 is plenty to see her into day two.


Katja Svendsen: still alive

Also in the mix are fellow PokerStars players Joris Jaspers and Phidias Georgiou, the latter spending the end of the day seated next to Negreanu and giving him some vicious staredowns.




But the probable chip leader ("probable" only because the official list doesn't come out for about an hour) is Tony Phillips, whose stack is closing in on the 90,000 mark.

He's in pole position at this early stage to take home some of this chunk of change:

1st -- £611,520
2nd -- £346,528
3rd -- £203,840
4th -- £152,880
5th -- £124,342
6th -- £97,843
7th -- £77,459
8th -- £57,075

9th-10th -- £34,652
11th-12th -- £28,537
13th-14th -- £22,422
15th-16th -- £16,307
17th-24th -- £12,230
25th-32nd -- £8,153

As mentioned, the full counts will be here within the hour, and the remaining players from days 1a and 1b will be back at the Vic at 1 p.m. tomorrow for day two.

We'll be here as well, so be sure to check back as we get nearer the business end.

Good night from London.