Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past year you will know that The Big One for One Drop is a one-off special event that commands a buy-in of $1,000,000. That is not a spelling mistake, the tournament really does cost one million dollars to enter!
In total 48 players enters - more wanted to but the number of entrants were capped - creating a prize pool that has only every been bested by a number of WSOP Main Events. $111,111 from each buy-in has been donated to the One Drop charity (hence the name of the tournament) but this has not stopped the first place prize from being a gigantic $18,346,673. Not only will the eventual winner of The Big One for One Drop be catapulted to the top of the all-time money listings for poker, they will also be written into history as the recipient of the largest-ever winner's prize across all sports; excluding boxing! Even the second place prize of $10,112,001 has only ever been beaten by the $12,000,000 Jamie Gold won for taking down the 2006 WSOP Main Event. This really is a truly remarkable tournament.
Leading the way after the first of three days of play is Brian Rast, who managed to increase his 3,000,000 starting stack to a tournament leading 10,710,000; an extra 2,400,000 than his nearest rival Phil Hellmuth. Rast was propelled into the limelight last year when he entered the $1,500 Pot Limit Hold'em event after being convinced to do so by his friend Antonio Esfandiari. Rast went on to win the tournament, and his first bracelet, before going onto win the $50,000 Poker Players Championship during the same series. His would be an almighty hat-trick if he could pull it off.
The vast majority of the field are well-known poker players including fourth-placed Esfandiari (6,880,000 chips), the man who won a $25,000 satellite into this event yesterday Gus Hansen (6,800,000) one of the British trio Sam Trickett (6,700,000), the One Drop's billionaire founder Guy Laliberte (6,550,000), Ben Lamb (5,770,000), living legend Mike Sexton (5,740,000) and Tom "durrrr" Dwan (4,810,000); and that is just the top 10 players at the end of Day 1!
By the time the curtain came down on the day's play 37 of the starting 48 had chips to bag up. Those who fell during proceedings were Giovanni Guarascio, Michael Mizrachi, Eugene Katchalov, Nick Shulman, Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, Erik Seidel, Paul Phua, Jonathan Duhamel, Jens Kyllonen, Andrew Robl and Justin Smith.
Play resumes at 12:00 Las Vegas time (18:00 UK) and will continue until the nine-handed final table has been reached. Each of the final tablists will find themselves in the money, ninth place being worth $1,109,333. Who will make it to the money and who will be left with a one million dollar sized hole in their bankrolls? Tune in tomorrow to find out!