Registration is still open in Day 1A of the WPT500 – players have until 5:30pm to jump in to the action – but there are already 235 entries including 37 re-entries. The remaining 152 players in the flight just took their second break of the day, and during the break we managed to compile a ten-player leaderboard while they were away from the tables.

The chip leader to this point is Ian Robillard with 135,000, but he is followed closely by local player Yan Nadeau who has already accumulated 131,000. Play will continue through 8 more 30-minute levels before the players remaining are invited to bag their chips to return for Day 2.

We are almost halfway through the WPT500 Day 1A as level 8 is winding down to an end.  There is still 1 hour and 35 minutes until the end of late registration. There are still 157 of the 224 entries in the hunt.

A $1,000,000 guarantee is going to encourage all levels of player to hit the felts, and so far in the WPT500 we’ve noticed quite a few players in the field that have major championships under their belts and may generally play in much larger buy-in tournaments. At the top of the list is Brian Altman, who has over $2.5M in lifetime earnings and particularly fond memories of the Montreal area due to his WSOP-C Ring victory here a few years back.

Some of the other big-time players we’ve noticed so far on Day 1A: Timothy Ulmer, David Ormsby, Jonathan Bussières, Louis Boutin, Tam Ho, and Ruben Perceval – among others!

Following level 4 of Day 1A of the WPT500, Dominic Coulibaly leads the pack with a chip count of 105K. That’s more than three times the average stack!

When we arrived at table 26, we watched as Kathy Sawers pushed her entire stack into the pot, preflop, from late position. Michael Wang, seated immediately to her left, called.

Kathy turned over and Michael answered with  . Kathy stood up as soon as she noted the pair of Aces.

The dealer then proceeded to flip a . In a show of sportsmanship, Kathy acknowledged Michael’s play as he raked in his winnings.

We only arrived at table 34 when the showdown had already occurred – but it was a pretty huge showdown for this early point in the tournament! The board read: and three hands were also exposed:

Frederick Deguzman:
Jean-Michel Mazingarbe:
Robert Gariepy:

Frederick had flopped a set of Queens to take all of Jean-Michel’s chips in and 24,350 from Robert!