Play has entered the last level of this 5th flight in Event 3, The $250 Frenzy. Play will continue for about 30 minutes and then players will bag up their chips to return for Day 2.

Two extremely skilled and experienced players have jetted to the top during the past couple of levels – Patrick St-Onge and Jonathan G. are both playing over 150K and look to be poised to build top-5 or at least top-10 stacks by the end of the action today.

We’ll have full chip counts plus a combined list ready early this evening, plus of course coverage of the final Day 1f tonight starting at 7:30.

Players have just returned from a break as tournament staff removed the T25 chips from play. During the break we managed to get updated counts for almost everyone on the Live Counts page and also put together a new leaderboard of the top 5 at this point in the tournament.

Although there were a few front-runners, some of those have fallen back to the field leaving only Simon Huard-Dufresne still in a leadership position. Overall, though, no one has really stomped on the gas yet – so there are lots of fireworks still to come!

The players in Day 1e are back from their first break of the day and during the pause we scanned the room to see if anyone had taken an early lead in today’s starting flight. Indeed, we found that there are 3 players who have built up stacks over over 70K through the first 4 levels of play: Matthew Bissonette, Chico, and Simon Huard Dufresne.

We’ll continue to track these players and more on our Live Counts page throughout the day.

Over the years here at Playground Poker Club we have had the good fortune to build relationships with players who visit from near and far around festival time. This applies to big-name professionals, but it applies just as much to recreational players. And on this Sunday afternoon for the $250 Frenzy we’ve seen an influx of our out-of-town “festival regulars”.

So this is a shout out to some of our friends we’ve seen today: Peter Johnson, Brian Bond, Shawn Martell, Gary Lucci, and Debra Ann Holman, to name but a few.

It’s probably not a coincidence that most of these players have achieved considerable success in events here at Playground in the past, so I expect to see at least a couple of these names repeated often over the next two weeks!

Registration in Day 1e has just hit 243 entries, which makes this the largest flight yet in terms of participation. Registration will continue until 1:15 this afternoon as well, so that number should continue to grow all day.

The significance of this: the prize pool guarantee has been surpassed, and every additional entry today and tonight will grow the prize pool, $225 at a time! And those buy-ins add up – at this rate it’s starting to look like a truly massive prize pool for this tournament!

It sounds kind of like a character from Star Trek, but in fact it’s just a way to identify today’s Day 1e starting flight in The $250 Frenzy. This is the fifth of the six total starting flights in the tournament, and action gets underway in just about 2 minutes.

The Tournament Hall at Playground Poker Club has just been opened to players, and they’re now moving in to take their places at the tables. IDs and tournament tickets are being checked and in just minutes the action will commence. Then play will continue through 14 30-minute levels – and we’ll do it all again tonight for Day 1f!

So far there have been 164 entries that have qualified for Day 2, to be held on Monday November 9th at 7pm. At least 3 of those stacks belong to players who have qualified twice – so to this point there are 161 unique players qualified for Day 2. Considering that the two starting flights today are certain to be the largest in the event, that number should go up considerably though these final two starting days.

Good luck to all!