There are two other tournaments going on tonight at Playground Poker Club, but the $1,100 Deepstack has soldiered right along as the others were getting started. The event is currently in level 11.

There has been a minor change to the schedule – the Tournament Director has decided to wrap up play tonight at the end of the 15th level of play, rather than the 16th level as scheduled. This will give everyone a little more time to rest before coming back tomorrow for the re-start at noon – and it will do so without a drastic effect on the overall time to play the tournament to a conclusion tomorrow.

The players in Event 5 have just taken another break and are back at the tables for another 3 45-minute levels. Entering level 10, Justin Ouimette retains the chip lead though he is followed closely by Fabio Luongo and new leaderboard entry Brian Iseman. There are a few players just 20K to 30K behind, so at this point in the event it’s really anyone’s game!

In case you missed it, during the last session we published the payout schedule for this event – 24 places will be paid and there’s $49,530 up top!

As expected, a lot of the late registrants are among the bigger “names” we expect in the field, and in the past hour or so we’ve welcomed Will Molson, 2014 WPT Montreal runner up Ratharam Sivagnanam, Ami Alibay, Laurence Grondin, and Jean-Philippe Piquette to the tournament. Will Failla has also jumped into the event as total participation closes in on the 200 mark.

The field continues to fill up as the day goes on and a few high profile players have joined the field along with some talented players who may not yet have made a “name” for themselves but are nevertheless players to watch.

• Eric Afriat – Eric is a talented local player who has had enormous success in some of the biggest events in the world, including a million-dollar cash and championship at the WPT Seminole Hard Rock Showdown in Hollywood, FL in 2014.
• Yann Dion – Yann is a fixture at big events here at Playground Poker Club, and has been a fixture at big European events for several years now, achieving a great deal of success on a regular basis. Known primarily as an online wizard, Yann has made a very strong transition to the live game as well.
• André Boyer – André is quite simply Quebec’s first poker legend. He won his first WSOP bracelet in 2005 after more than a decade of published cash results in US tournaments – and then in the summer of 2015 proved that poker is not just a young man’s game with his second bracelet win.
• Carter Swidler – Carter hasn’t made a huge breakthrough in a live event (though he has plenty of small and medium cashes going back years) but he’s been at the absolute peak of online poker for years and is most certainly one of the most prominent online players in history.
• Timothy (TJ) Ulmer – TJ is another online poker legend like Carter and Yann, and has been considered among the best of the best for years, having racked up victories in many of the major online series’ over the years.

In addition to these players there is also a long list of players in the field with more limited profiles but who nevertheless have proven their ability in the past, either here at Playground or elsewhere. Some of these are:

• Noeung Troeung
• Patrick Braga
• Chris Arvanitis
• Gary Lucci
• Lonnie Hallett
• Justin Miller
• Roger Lamia
• Carla Sabini
• and many more…

With 6 levels of late registration available – and an early (for poker players) 11am start time, we expect that at least half if not 60% of the total field will late reg – and some of them will wait until relatively late in the day considering that Day 1 is only scheduled to end after midnight.

That being said, there are already 110 players seated at the tables this morning with a steady stream of players joining in every few minutes. It’s almost a lock to get to at least 250 players in this freezeout event – adding up to a great prize pool!

Now that the huge multi-starting-day, lower buy-in events have (almost) concluded, the Playground Poker Fall Classic presented by Partypoker.net moves into a new phase. Some of the events will feature larger buy-ins, and except for the WPT itself, all of the rest of the events are freezeout tournaments with no re-buy or re-entry permitted.

This phase of the festival gets started in just minutes as the $1,000 + $100 NL Hold’em Deepstack gets underway here in the Playground Poker Club Tournament Hall. This event is a 2-day event that will play through 16 45-minute levels today. The players that survive to the end of the day will return tomorrow, November 11th, at 12pm to re-start the tournament.

Players begin today with 25,000 in tournament chips and play will begin 10-handed. Tournament staff will shift the event to 9-handed play as soon as possible in the day – most likely right after late registration closes. Late registration is available until the end of the break following level 6, which is to say that players may join the event at any time until 4pm today. Blinds in level 6 will be just 200/400/a50 so with a 25K starting stack, new entrants at that time will still have plenty of chips to start with (late registrants in Playground events always start with a full stack).

Good luck to all players today!