The World Poker Tour Bellagio Cup VI, this year a $10,000 buy-in event, initially pulled 243 players from the World Series of Poker excitement happening down the street at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino, in the hopes of earning a WPT title and a significant top prize.  That many players would assure entrants of a grand prize worth over $800,000, however interestingly enough, this year organizers decided to go for even more and left registration open all the way to Day 3 of the tournament.

Many top players, after getting eliminated from this year’s Main Event, chose to join the proceedings in progress at the Bellagio- as organizers had apparently hoped they would- and by the end of registration Tuesday, not only had the total number of entrants swelled to over 350 but the field was also able to boast such new arrivals as Tom “durrrr” Dwan, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Andy Bloch and Phil Ivey.

Ivey, despite starting severely short on Day 3, was still able to do what Phil does best and chip up, lasting not only longer than all the other aforementioned late arrivals but even making it to today’s final table- though with a relatively short stack of 1,595,000.

At that WPT final table- his record 9th- Ivey will join fellow well known pro Justin “BoostedJ” Smith, who with 2,100,000 in tournament chips is currently in third place overall and has a good chance of besting his score at this event last year when he took third for $464,870, leaving the title and the $1,187,670 first prize to the eventual champion Alexandre Gomes.

Other players at this year’s Bellagio Cup final table include Eric Afriat (620,000), Robert Akery (1,980,000), Moritz Kranich (2,750,000) and chip leader John Caridad (5,120,000).

The final table of the Bellagio Cup VI begins today (7/15) at 4 p.m. PDT.  For live updates, chip counts, photos and videos straight from the final table visit www.worldpokertour.com, the official website of the World Poker Tour.