The first bracelet event, the $500 Casino Employees NL Holdem event drew a field of 721 entrants, with the final 72 hitting the pay window, the winner getting just over $70,000. Although Team Pokerati’s John Harris was unable to take part, Shaun Harris from Las Vegas is the current chip leader (105,200) with about 90 players remaining. At the time of posting, they’re currently at level 9 and play will conclude at the end of level 10 or the final table, whichever comes first.

The $50,000 Players’ Championship drew a smaller than expected field of 116 players. First place will get about $1,560,000. The early chip leader is Daniel “djk123″ Kelly (285,000) eliminated Dan Shak. You can follow the action in both events over at www.wsop.com, where the full entrant list should be online shortly.

I’ll be back in the morning with the preview of tomorrow’s first 1k NL event, with over 3,000 players registered already. And for those with Twitter, be sure to follow @pokerati, @taopauly, @wsop, and @pokernews_live for updates.

This could turn out to be quite the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa thing, with less Creatine. Daniel Negreanu and Phil Ivey could be going back-and-forth at the very top of the Hendon Mob leaderboard for all-time tournament winnings.

Ivey just re-passed Negs by finishing 2nd in the Aussie Millions $100k event.

Here’s the all-time leaderboard (not yet updated).

[via WCP]

BTW, I’m pretty sure the winner, Dan Shak, was not the same guy who helped send Beth Shak on her renegade red-carpet/no-carpet milf path. If so, he sure has aged since the divorce:

UPDATE: I could be wrong. I was confusing Dan Shak with Bill Gazes, one of the other milfly departeds in poker:

Edit: Here’s the official chip counts:

Sunday brought another three-level day to the WSOP, with just 185 players remaining when play resumes Monday afternoon at 12pm. The current unofficial leader is Warren Zackey, who’s listed from Honeydew, South Africa with 4,977,000 in chips. The most notable name at the top of the leaderboard is 2007 WSOP POY and member of Team Pokerati Tom Schneider at 3,168,000, good for 4th place. More notables, with their unofficial chip counts: Noah Boeken (2,4000,000), Eugene Katchalov (2,1000,000), Ludovic Lacay (1,685,000), Fabrice Soulier (1,450,000), Bertrand Grospellier (1,400,000), Blair Hinkle (1,100,000), Joe Sebok (1,100,000), Joe Hachem (1,000,000), Peter Eastgate (927,000), Blair Rodman (890,000), Joe Serock and Prahlad Friedman (760,000) and Kenny Tran (700,000).

Notable eliminations: Kevin O’Donnell, Mickey Mills, Cornel Cimpan, Kara Scott, Dan Shak, Nick Binger, Bobby Baldwin, Kevin Saul, William Robertie and Can Kim Hua.

Hopefully the official chip counts will be coming shortly, and Pokerati will be the 5th place to find them. Follow Pokerati also for Dream Team Poker updates, when they return from dinner break.

The final Day 1, as Dan noted is already over 2,500 entrants with players now being registered into Buzio’s. The first three days had players seated at nine-handed tables, but is it possible they’ll have to start today ten-handed to accommodate as many players as possible? There’s still six hours to find out the answer to that question.

Back to Day 1c, 1,106 players will return Wednesday afternoon to join the Day 1d survivors for Day 2b, playing 4 two-hour levels. The day 1c chip leader is Joseph Cada, with 187,225 in chips. Other notables with chips: Jeff Lisandro (146,950), Tuan Le (110,000), Justin Bonomo (103,425), Alex Bolotin (92,500), Pat Poels (87,200), Adam Junglen (80,475), Terrence Chan (67,075), Dennis Phillips (63,325) and Dan Shak (55,200). To see the complete list of chip counts, click on this link.

To see how they squeeze in all those players, check out Pokerati during the day, and be sure to follow the updates from www.wsop.com, Pauly, and Pokerati during the day.