More from @JustinBonomo (who is one of 89 out of 201 players remaining in the $40k NLH):

Oh man. Same thing if you fold out of turn. Even if its an accident, automatic 1 hand penalty. Wsop always makes the craziest new rules.

Click here for the latest $40k chip counts.

The $40k NLH is movin’ along … 111 left out of 201. One of the guys near the top in chips, @JustinBonomo, says:

Just broke 500k, but can’t believe new rule. Any card ACCIDENTALLY exposed is a 1 hand penalty. Dealers are instructed to always enforce it.

I tend not to like the absoluteness in the hands of a dealer, but then again, it is just one hand.

Click below to see who’s still alive and who’s busted:

(Chris Moneymaker is winning.)

More…

It was a fun run following @johnharristtu in event #1, and things were looking good as they got deeper and deeper into the money. He maintained an above- to about-average stack throughout the day getting very few good cards — he saw Kings once and pocket 10s — and he was even willing to risk it against the chip leader (at the time), Cesar Chavez, sitting to his right, by three-betting him with a hand as small as Q-J to tell him to stop stealing his blinds and other hands he was raising with.

But in the end, John Harris lost three races in a row to finish in a Laodecian 25th place. OK, so maybe Laodecian isn’t the exact right word for expressing this WSOP dealer’s lukewarm feelings after cashing for $2,475, but hey, I’m just trying to use it in a (poker) sentence. Meanwhile, while Harris presumably replays all sorts of situations in his head trying to figure out where/how he coulda done better, we all know it was a great first WSOP go … and are pretty pleased to see the patch-wearing players we’re paying extra attention to start off in the black:

Buy-in: $500
Cash out: $2,475
Net: $1,975

His final hand: all-in with J-10 vs. 5-5; flop was A-10-5, K on the turn, 7 on the river.

In a case of subtraction by addition, the last two players to register for the 40th Annual $40k NL holdem event cost the eventual winner almost $135,000. Going by the WSOP’s payout structure, the winner would have taken 26.5% of the prize pool, or $2,025,000. However, the last two entrants pushed the payout into another bracket, as the winner takes down 24.5% of the prize pool–$1,891,000. The players are currently on their dinner break, to return at 8:30pm to play a few more levels tonight. 150 players remain when play resumes, some known names who don’t have to worry about returning: Daniel Negreanu, David Benyamine, Annie Duke, David Williams and John Juanda. The top three on the leaderboard: Antonio Esfandiari, Justin Bonomo and Chris Moneymaker, who have increased their 120,000 starting stack to over 400,000 so far.

The other tournament taking place, the $500 Casino Employees event, is also on a dinner break with 17 players remaining, with a winner to be crowned tonight. Andrew Cohen is the current chip leader with over 360,000 in chips. Team Pokerati member John Harris was knocked out in 26th place to take home $2,475.

Follow the players progress at www.worldseriesofpoker.com, and I’ll be back in the morning with more discussion on what day it really is at the WSOP. a recap of today’s events.

The final numbers for the big $40K NLHE event were released just after the first break of the day:

Number of Entries: 201
Net Prize Pool: $7,718,400
First Place Prize: $1,891,012
Total Spots Paid Out: 27

The vast majority of big names seems to be here – Scotty, Phil, Jesus, Annie, you get the picture. But one player who was specifically invited by Jeffrey Pollack to come to the WSOP anytime to play any event was not in the field. President Barack Obama evidently had more important things to do than spend the day at the Rio, despite his ownership of a new personalized WSOP jacket. Pollack talks about it about around the 3:45 mark on this Raw Vegas video from the May 27 “Sucking Out on the Rivers” charity tournament hosted by Annie Duke.

Watch Annie Dukes Sucking Out On The Rivers Charity Poker Event on RawVegas.tv

[Speaking of Duke, is there a reason that her opinion about things like American Idol matter so greatly now? I'm not sure I like understand the trend.]

That’s right. I’ve got picks. I didn’t participate in any official draft or betting pool, just chose players to watch this year and listed them here. That makes them official, Pokerati-style.

The purpose of picking a team of players at the 2009 WSOP is that it gives me a variety of players to stalk follow and track results. Some of them are well-known on the poker tournament circuit, while others are just beginning to make their marks and may not garner much publicity from the major media outlets. Here? They’re all stars because I dub them so. I’ll be trying as best I can to keep up with them.

Daniel Negreanu – While some argue that he is not particularly focused this year due to the health of his mother and other factors, I contend that the grind will lock him into place at the WSOP and that he will be looking to score big to bring some extra smiles to his mom’s face.

Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier – He is a given. He has been on fire for several years and will undoubtedly be a force at the Series as he looks to add a WSOP bracelet to his list of serious poker accomplishments.

Terrence Chan – Not only is he a friend of friends of mine, but he caught my eye when he won two PokerStars SCOOP tournaments on the same night a few months ago. It was impressive, and with his motivation to do well this summer, his momentum/skill combo might be enough to get him there.

Kara Scott – She recently placed second in the 2009 Irish Open main event, and her list of tournament successes is growing consistently. Add to that a relationship with a certain poker pro, with whom intimate discussions of flops and raises can only help. And after a deep run in the 2008 WSOP main event, I look for her to do well in numerous events this year.

Luca Pagano – My favorite Italian player has also had some significant finishes, though 2008 was a better year for him than 2009. Even so, his game has been improving, and he appears due for a big finish this summer.

Jonathan Dull – His record shows that he has accumulated nearly $455K in his career. The young player has potential, but how did he make my coveted list? He is my dentist’s nephew, and my dentist is awesome.

Dwyte Pilgrim – The guy is on fire. Over the past year, he came onto the poker scene and began tearing up WSOP Circuit events, posting 13 cashes overall over the past season, many of which were final tables and one – Harrah’s Rincon – championship victory. Seems he does well in any tournament with WSOP in the name.

Whitney Blanton – Not only is he a faithful Pokerati reader and patch-wearing “preferred player”, but also he’s my Facebook friend and has been having a good poker year. He hopes to bring a WSOP bracelet back to Texas this year, and providing he gets out to Vegas soon to play some events, he has a good chance.

For good measure, in addition to my top eight players, I will add Mekhi Phifer as a bonus pick. What fun is stalking without the man who feared my very presence at the 2008 WSOP? (Just kidding; security was never actually called.)

Play officially began for the 40th World Series of Poker as Phil Hellmuth and Jeffrey Pollack bellowed the immortal “Shuffle Up and Deal” for event #1, the $500 Casino Employees tournament. A smaller than expected field of 866 entered the Amazon Room to take part including known names such as Bellagio TD Jack McClelland, Marsha Waggoner, and two-time bracelet winner Pat Poels. Play ended when the money was reached at around 1am PT with 81 players (including Team Pokerati member John Harris). The chip leader going into today’s play is Cesar Chavez (not to be confused with Cesar Chavez) with nearly 110,000 in chips. Those players will return at 2pm to play down to the first bracelet winner of the Series.

The first open event at the WSOP also has the highest buyin for a no-limit holdem event. Event #2, the 40th Anniversary $40,000 NL Holdem starts at 12 noon. Players will start with 300 BBs (120,000 in chips), so don’t expect too much action on day one of the four day event. What will be highly anticipated is the number of entrants for this event. Most are expecting around 225-300 to try and get themselves on the ESPN final table on Sunday afternoon.

My first over/under prediction didn’t go so well, as I was over 200 off and was below the WSOP Staff Guide’s projection for the Casino Employees event. I’ll try to get myself to 1-1 by stating that the field will be well over the 150 projected by the WSOP, with a final field size of 237. More updates to come as the day progresses.

Playing the nightly 11pm $200NL @ the WSOP. There hasn’t been a field this soft since the PartyPoker days. Come play these! Yes!

The $500 Casino Employee’s event is well underway — done with more than half the field — and our guy @johnharristtu is still alive and well:

@ second break, 380 left, my stack is about 6600. Avg is 6800

The event had 866 runners, down slightly from last year’s 930.

Top 81 will get paid this year ($974 minimum), with a guaranteed $7,782 for making the final table, and $83,778 to [John and his backer, woot!] the winner.

The advice I just texted him so I can theoretically stake a claim on any of his prize money to help get him there:

UPDATE from Harris:

Dinner break, @ 15400, Avg is 12990, 200 left

Lookin’ good, playin’ strong … now it’s time to get lucky — and by “lucky” I mean not get unlucky.

Additional WSOP-tagged tweetage here.

UPDATE from Harris:

4th break, 101 left, 25k, avg is 25700, blinds going to 500/1k with 100 ante

Anyone else get the sense that Harris is playing fundamentally sound textbook tournament poker?

Pokerati Preferred Player Cashes!
Friggin’ fantastic! This makes “our guys” 1-for-1 so far. (Maybe Harris’ first good decision was not beer-bowling with us last night.)

In the money! Stopping for the night @ 81 players, I have 54k avg is 35k

Tune in tomorrow to see just how deep dealer John Harris can go. I’m thinking like probably first.

Day 1 of the World Series of Poker is a misnomer, really. Much of the Amazon Room is still being put together, as is the ESPN feature/final table area, and the media room was dark (well, awfully bright, actually, but without staff to hand out press passes). Many of the hallway displays were still being constructed or had not yet even arrived, and cash games were still being played in the Rio poker room in the casino. However, pre-registration was open as promised, and satellites were in full swing in the Convention Center area.

Players were anxiously getting their game on in the satellite room, looking to be some of the first to win their WSOP event seats via the mega-satellites. And there were a few excited faces walking down the hallway after having purchased their first WSOP seats. But the hallways were relatively empty, as they will not be again for the next 50 or so days.

Today is Day 2, when Event 1 allows the casino employees to get their games on before the madness begins. And that will lead us to tomorrow, which is officially noted as Day 3 but will offer up the first of the much-anticipated big WSOP tournaments – the $40K buy-in NLHE (Event 2) – as well as the first final table, which will award the first WSOP bracelet of the year to a casino employee.

Here’s an argument against Barney Frank’s efforts to legitimize American online poker that I certainly didn’t see coming:

Lifting the Online Poker Ban Could Cause a CO2 Emissions Boom

Playing poker online is a time consuming venture—playing tournaments can take hours, and the programs make it extremely easy to play in multiple rooms while surfing the web between hands in different windows. In other words, it encourages parking yourself and sitting in front of the computer for hours.

As Pablo pointed out in his piece on the impact of internet use, computers generate between 40-80 grams of greenhouse gas emissions simply by being on (given the user gets his electricity from a coal-fired power plant, as most Americans do)—now imagine some 10 million more computers on for hours longer than before. It would add up to hundreds of thousands more tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks, Brian, for the link — despite all the trees you plausibly killed in the process!

I hate this video … but it is what it is — bowling for dollars with Pauly and Jen:

Just to keep track of the prop betting that we’re willing to publicly acknowledge here’s how it’s broken down so far:

$60 from Dan -> Jen (for G’s to Gents payoff)
$30 from Jen -> Dan (for bowling, two games at $15 each)
$40 from Dan -> Pauly (for bowling, two games at $20 each)

Pending
Dan <-> Jen: $20 over/under on 300 teams at the Dream Team Poker event
Dan <-> Kevin: $100 that his team of ESPN fantasy scrubs can beat 6 of the 11 official selections

As Kevin points out, today is the $500 casino employees event … and Pokerati’s got one of our guys in the seats: John Harris, whom will be making his debut as a poker twitterer here:

http://twitter.com/johnharristtu

Should be interesting. John’s a good player who has taken his game quite seriously over the past year+ … and he’s been playing on a backer’s money in his efforts to build a bankroll (while making a living as a WSOP Circuit dealer). There’ve been lots of ups and downs along the way, a few needle-moving tournament cashes, and overall he has grown his wad … but that process has been a slow grind to say the least. A big score here would go a long way toward helping him to step up to a level where he could do some real damage (or get his ass handed to him and get sent back down to the minors).

Here’s to hoping he can go deep — or at least last until after the UEFA Champions League final so we can patch him up appropriately and get a picture for the Team Pokerati photo album!

BTW: Though this will become more relevant as more events move forward, you can click here to follow all the twitterings of all Pokerati peeps together.

At noon today, the World Series of Poker officially gets under away with the first event, the $500 Casino Employees tournament. Yesterday, the Amazon Room officially opened for registration, cash games and satellites, especially the first of two $1,570 mega-satellites for Thursday’s $40,000 NL event. An early report of someone who paid the full $40k yesterday afternoon said he was the 14th to register.

What will hopefully be a daily feature is attempting to outguess the WSOP by doing mythical over/under bets on the field size for each WSOP bracelet event. The WSOP Staff Resource Guide has made projections on the number of entries for each WSOP bracelet event. Last year, this event took place towards the end of the WSOP with Jonathon Kotula, an employee at O’Sheas on the LV Strip, winning $87,929 in besting a field of 980. The Resource Guide set the projection for this year’s Casino Employees’ event at 1,023. I say take the over, as closer to 1,100 will be ramming and jamming their way to tomorrow’s final table. Live coverage of this event will be minimal, but any other news that comes out from the Rio will surely be reported by someone on Team Pokerati, so check back this afternoon for more news.

Air Force One just landed at McCarren airport. The President is headed to Caesar’s Palace, for apparently what is a semi-controversial “junket” fundraiser for Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). We can not, however, confirm the rumor that he is in town to give the WSOP Stimulus tourney a $1 trillion overlay, nor that he plans to satellite into a Venetian Deep Stacks event.

Poker players arriving in town for the WSOP (via delayed flights) are twittering about it.

@Ali_Nejad has a pic of the motorcade.

LOL: Evelyn Ng and Erica Schoenberg just got done with their bikini photo shoot (with Tiffany Michelle) for Knockout magazine, and they’re all pissy about being stuck in traffic on the Strip — presumably unaware of why things are extra-congested on a Tuesday afternoon.

UPDATE: @JeffreyPollack is off to meet @BarackObama right now. Pre-emptive conclusion: good for poker!

UPDATE: President now headed to the Caesar’s Palace poker room. (Seriously.) via @Andy_Bloch.