Day 1A of the 2008 WSOP Main Event is officially in the books. A total of 1,297 players hit the felt including a number of the AP/UB online qualifiers.
Brendan "moe86" Mahoney was shocked to find out that his starting table, Blue 7, was chosen to be played out on the ESPN featured table. Mahoney then found out that sitting directly to his left would be none other than the "Prince of Poker" Scotty Nguyen. Brendan said that he was very nervous at the beginning of the day because he doesn't play in live tournaments very often. He said that he folded for the first few orbits trying to get a feel for the table but that he eventually became more comfortable and believes he handled himself well. He also noticed that the online players play differently from the live players. When he found out that the player in the nine seat at his table was Darrell "Gigabet" Dicken, Mahoney exclaimed "So that's why he was three-betting so much!" Even with players like Dicken, Nguyen, and Anna Wroblewski sitting at the table at one point, Mahoney was able to end the day with 37,625 in chips, nearly double his starting stack. He and Scotty also seemed to become fast friends and posed for a picture together after play ended for the night.
Shannon Shorr was able to make it through to day 2 after being short stacked for a large part of the day. At one point Shorr was down to only 7.3k in chips but he waited patiently and picked his spots carefully making well-timed preflop raises to pick up blinds and antes and eventually chipping back up to around 26k.
Also surviving day 1A were Tom "vaniljvodka" Pyl, Ryan "SgtJoeRoberts" Vanderhoof, and Michael "DblupM0j" Johnson who accumulated 114k in chips.
Casualties of the day included Jon "apestyles" Van Fleet and Sean "WestTexasMan" Rice. Rice got all his chips in with AJ against another players AQ and was unable to catch up.
Although the total number of entrants for this year's Main Event is yet to be determined, many believe that this year's registration will surpass last year's total of 6,358 players. Almost every event in this year's WSOP has seen an increase in the number of players and it seems like the Main Event will continue that trend.
