Bubble play in the event brought the tournament to just 4 minutes before the first break of the day. That 4 minutes was plenty of time for Michael McKinnon to add another 160K or so to his stack, making him the clear chip leader at the beginning of in-the-money play. Johnny Verhoeven is the only other player with over 500K, and following them, there are just 3 players with over 400K stacks, including Piotr Wielopolski and master accumulator Jonathan Bussières.

When 60 places in a tournament pay, that means that the player in 61st place is the bubble player – the last player to go home empty handed. Play in the Strangers in the Night event was down to 61 players remaining when play went hand-for-hand – something done to ensure everything is fair and equitable during a critical moment in an event.

On the 4th hand of hand-for-hand play, there was a hand that developed quite slowly on Table 58, which is one of two table that thick with deep stacks at this point in the event. We missed much of the hand as there seemed to be nothing too remarkable going on until the river, but on a board reading it seems that Omar tried to bluff the river holding – only to be quickly called by Michael McKinnon who held more than just a bluff-catcher: .

Michael increased his stack to over 660K while Omar left the Tournament Hall with nothing but some fine memories of a tournament well-played.

Jason Fernandes started today with a top stack and lost a few in the early going – but now he seems to have turned things around. His elimination of Tony Lei in 64th brings his stack back up to around 320K, which is a good thing on a table just bursting with big stacks.

Tony shoved all in holding – not a hand likely to bust Jason’s – and the board runout just confirmed what Tony knew the second he saw his opponent’s hand: .

The bubble is approaching quickly and one player in particular took the requirement to accumulate chips very seriously – Johnny Verhoeven is already coming up on 600K in chips – and he reports that to be somewhat down from just a few minutes ago…

There are now 65 players remaining, so the bubble is just around the corner and could even be reached before the end of this level, even in spite of the fact that the pace of play may decrease somewhat.

Several players have made marked increases to their stacks through the early going including Ricky Shamshoum, who is now playing a stack approaching 500K deep, and former Event Blogger Piotr Wielopolski, who started with just about 88K today but has added a clean 100K through the first 50 minutes-plus of play today.

Some of those chips were gained in a recent hand against Tanvir Ahmed. We caught up with the action as the river was dealt on a board that read . Tanvir opened the action with a bet of 17.5K, only to face a raise to 42.5K from Piotr, playing from the button. Tanvir tanked – and as is often the case, he was very verbal during his thought process, wondering why Piotr had flatted the preflop raise to 7K, musing as to whether he’d flopped a set, as well as several other mumbled declarations.

Finally, Tanvir folded and Piotr dragged a nice pot.

Day 2 is underway in the Strangers in the Night event, and about half-way through the first level to be played today, there have already been 10 eliminations – so the pace is very much as we predicted earlier today.

Here are some photos of the field to start the day.