The $25,000 buy-in World Poker Tour World Championship at the Bellagio, arguably one of the most prestigious events on the poker tournament calendar, began yesterday with 117 initial players and nearly 50 more late entrants by the end of the night’s play.  Thanks to the eagerness of so many top players to try their hand in this important event and the Bellagio’s new philosophy of allowing players to register through the first eight levels of play (about the first day and a half), Season Eight’s WPT World Championship seems assured- like it's previous incarnations- of a multi-million dollar prize pool and a first prize certain to turn heads and gape mouths.

The 161 players that have begun this event so far represent some of the biggest poker talents on Earth like Phil Ivey, Christian Harder, Justin Bonomo, Scotty Nguyen, Eric “basebaldy” Baldwin, Jennifer Harman, Carlos Mortensen, Jonathan Little, Prahlad Friedman and of course PokerRoad Radio’s Gavin Smith, who happily like the others mentioned, is still in the hunt after Day 1 but is unfortunately sitting with less than half the chips of the 100,000 initial starting stacks that will be given to tomorrow’s new entrants.

Other big name players who managed to get themselves into this huge event but ended up in even worse shape than Gavin- busting before the end of the first day’s play- included Kevin Saul, Antonio Esfandiari, Vivek Rajkumar, Jeff Shulman and Annette “Annette_15” Obrestad, finally old enough to enter these big Vegas events for which she’s waited so long.

Last year’s winner of the WPT World Championship, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, earned $2,149,960 for defeating the total 2009 field of 338 players, and although this year’s champion seems almost bound to make a little less than that, it still seems certain that this year’s winner will find themselves with life changing money when the event wraps up on the 24th.

For more information on the WPT World Championship, or to follow the action and chip counts online, visit www.worldpokertour.com.