The first-ever PokerStars Championship Panama is off and running with big names and locals alike making their presence felt.

The Main Event started yesterday with Day 1A and 103 players buying in – a number that will be significantly higher today.

From that first bunch 43 players survived the day with Moscow Wolverine Igor Yaroshevskyy the man to beat for now, bagging a healthy 219,400 chips.

In second place, however, is the celebrity of the day — former UFC champion Tito Ortiz with 182,000.

GPI Player of the Year David Peters has made the Top 10 as well as Steve O’Dwyer, Jason Koon and Julian Stuer.

Further notable survivors are WSOP champion Ryan Riess, Byron Kaverman, Anthony Zinno, Davidi Kitai (with the smallest stack) and Jessica Perez Borrego.

Jason Koon

Not Everybody is Phil Taylor

If you follow Darts you’ve probably heard of Phil Taylor. When he qualified for his first Darts World Championship in 1990 he took his savings and bet on himself at 125/1, odds that placed him in the group of total outsiders.

He won the event and the rest is history. Taylor is now a 16-time Darts World Champion.

Maybe Massimo de Mario was inspired by Taylor as he tried something similar in the PSC main event. The 20-year-old de Mario is a German player of Italian descent and his successes at poker tournaments are correspondingly low.

His two cashes, however, are a 10th place at the WSOPC Oktoberfest last October and a 22nd place at the PSC Bahamas in January.

Reason enough for him to bet on himself at the PSC Panama. He put $50 on himself to win at 350/1 and $50 to make the Top 10 at 34/1, giving him a chance to win an extra $20k if he succeeded.

Things didn’t quite work out. He busted in Level 4 of Day 1 at the hands of EPT and WSOP winner Davidi Kitai. Not everybody can be a Phil Taylor.

PokerStars Championship Panama Top 10

Igor Yaroshevskyy	Ukraine	219600
Tito Ortiz	USA	182000
Jason Koon	USA	175500
Martin Kus	Canada	146800
Luke Graham	USA	140300
Vicente Delgado	Spain	138000
Marcelo Filartiga Villalba	Paraguay	127600
Steve O’Dwyer	Ireland	117000
David Peters	USA	116100
Lokesh Garg	USA	108900

No Country for Old Chips

The permanent sound of rattled chips is the same at the PSC Panama as in every other live tournament.

Welcome back, chips.

In fact, we’re sure if there was an interactive option to rattle the chips in online tournaments, it would be omnipresent there, too.

But the look of the chips is different from what it was in the old days of the EPT – or you could also say, it’s strangely familiar.

After they’d changed the chips for the last seasons of the EPT it looks like they now brought the old ones back.

But really, they were never gone. These are the chips PokerStars always use in the Americas.

Come back to the PokerListings news section for more in the coming days of the PokerStars Championship Panama. Check here for a few fun facts about Panama and tune in here for daily live stream coverage of the Main Event starting Thursday.

*Any mention of a bonus or discussion of such terms is not in relation to the province of Ontario.