Sihoki Slot very own “Tuscaloosa Johnny” Kampis entered Day 2A of play with over 40K in chips– well above the field’s starting average of around 25K. I just caught up with Johnny at Table 143 and he’s now sitting on about 54K after his pocket kings held up against A-K. Keep it up, Johnny!

Ryan of Absinthetics also started play with around 40K today, but has slipped to 32K.

“Bad beat?” I asked him.

“70-30” he shrugged, as he turned back to his chips.

Ryan comes into this WSOP after an incredibly successful first half of the year. He made five cashes at the L.A. Poker Classic and another cash at Commerce’s Heavenly Hold’em tournament. Ryan is not only the best tournament player I know, he’s a damn fine writer to boot. He’s also updating his blog on breaks from his Sidekick– how insane is that? Check it out for yourself.

UPDATES:

2:35 PM- Johnny just stopped by the media room on break to grab a snack and let us know that he’s up to 71.5K!

4:10 PM- Ryan has about 53K after dropping the hammer.

4:55 PM- Ryan text messaged “I am so stupid at poker” to the media room and we all feared for the worst. At least four bloggers took off for the floor to see what happened. Not to worry, our man is still in it with 30,000 chips. He tried checkraising the river with A-K on a 5-7-9-9-T board with three diamonds (representing that the river made his straight or flush) after his opponent checked the flop, checked the turn, and bet the river. The guy called and showed Q-Q.

5:20 PM – Johnny has 114K after hitting quad tens and being gifted with his opponent’s entire stack.

8:45 PM – Coming back from the dinner break, Johnny has 97.5K and Ryan has 30K.

10:27 PM – Card Player finally picked up Ryan’s chip count and lists him at 50K. I’m off to the floor to find out how accurate that is…

10:32 PM – Ryan’s stack is more in the 35K range. He and Johnny are now seated together at Table 143. Only one more hour of play to go…

1C + 1D = 2B

All four fights from Day One are in and we have all of our semi-accurate preliminary, almost complete numbers for you.

First–the official total of entrants in the 2006 Main Event is 8,773 or 8,774 or 8,778.

Remeber the system for combing four Day Ones into two Day Twos. 1A+1B=2A and 1C+1D=2B. After the play today (2A) and tomorrow (2B) there will be a day off on Thursday and then beginning Friday we will have just one field in one room for the final seven days.

Day 1C (Sunday drew 2,160 players with 821 moving on to Day 2B on Wednesday August 2nd.

Day 1D (Monday) saw the biggest field of the four “first” days with 2,298 getting the cards in the air and as expected there were more survivors from this group but the number is surprisingly high at 915.

This means Day 2B (Wednesday) will start with 1736 players, while Day 2A (today is Tuesday) will have only 1598 or 1637 players. In theory, both days will play down to approximately 700 players, however it works out, they will both play exactly the same number of levels, probably six (levels 7 thru 12 on your structure sheets.)