The buy-in: €50,000. The players: a suite of the richest and fiercest poker beasts from across the world.

In all, the cage collected 91 entries, the equivalent of €4.55 million. By the point the night was over, fewer than 60 players of the starting 73 remained, and the king of this Spanish poker jungle was none as opposed to Germany's Julian Stuer.

Sitting on a stack of 1,350,000, Stuer had bettered the typical stack by greater than three times.

It was, in a word, wild, and it's nowhere near over. In fact, it's barely even begun.

Julian Stuer

A sightseeing tour of Barcelona isn't any small undertaking. On a bus, it may possibly take the simpler a part of a day. On foot, it'll take days and plenty of water. The beach and marina are only the start. Architecture of each sort is around every new corner. There are cathedrals, graveyards, skyscrapers, bazaars, and tapas joints so far as the attention can see.

If you do not feel like walking around with blistered feet the following day, however, the closest sight to look outside the casino is the Barcelona Zoo. A two minute walk will give you everything from brown bears to buffalo, cheetahs to chimps, and penguins to porcupines, inquisitive about the low-cost of €19.99. They're animals, kings of the jungle, masters of the savannah, monsters of the tundra, all collected in a single place for the amusement of the viewing public. Over the process a warm afternoon, you'll study the entire animals and get a way for the way they could act but for the entire "living life in an enclosure" thing.

At the zoo, a bear clutches its lunch between two huge paws and fights its container for each bite. A MASSIVE hippo sits just below the water, just waiting to damage the outside and pounce when the time is true. A curious chimp sits on a tree stump scratching his head on the crazy people watching from the opposite side of the fence.

If you look closely enough, you can begin to peer some parallels between the wild kingdom around the street and the beasts of the eu Poker Tour €50,000 Super High Roller. The tournament is a wild kingdom in itself. Here, the EPT has assembled the best curiosities in poker, the carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores and, in a draconian little bit of cruelty, unleashed all of them on one another. Some pop out swiping, others lay in wait, and still others scratch their heads like apes who can't quite figure all of it out. It's poker's zoo, and it's amazing.

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As the day began, the workers announced that each one the folks who had paid their €50,000 to get in would have free access to the snack bar. It seemed a small concession (no pun intended) for the folk who had publish the cost of a good car for an opportunity at a large win. While some indulged, most maintained an appetite for the primary course.

Feeding time

In reality, on this zoo the beasts feed themselves. They sow their field with €50,000 and hope there's a lot more to harvest on the end of the day. For quite a lot of people, that suggests buying in additional than once. Turkey's Akin Tuna (insert your fowl or fish joke here) bought in 3 times within the first eight hours of the day. Others (including Ivan Luca, Mustapha Kanit, Anton Astapau, Vladimir Troyanovskiy, Guanfei Zhu, Sam Greenwood, Max Silver, Christoph Vogelsang, and Daniel Dvoress) bought in twice.

Meanwhile, Jason Mercier is here together with his family and hoped to complete the day with a beastly stack. Instead, he busted earlier than the tip of the night after flopping two pair but getting outdrawn at the turn. He still has the choice to re-buy before the beginning of play tomorrow should he feel like forking over €50,000 for around 40 big blinds.

Jason Mercier

On our visit to the zoo, the lions and tigers stayed deep of their caves and didn't venture out into the sun. It was the similar today for Daniel Negreanu. He woke today feeling ill and didn't make it to the casino for the Super High Roller. Earlier he suggested he would still occur and register before the beginning of play tomorrow. His intention, he said, was to "crush it anyway."

For folks who showed up and managed to survive, listed here are some notable counts from the rest field.

Jean-Noel Thorel - 1,075,000Fedor Holz - 1,150,000Timothy Adams - 877,000Adrian Mateos - 566,000Juha Helppi - 565,000Markus Goeller - 565,000Erik Seidel - 552,000Nick Petrangelo - 496,000

If you would like to appear back through all of our live updates today, you are able to do that by clicking this link: EPT13 Barcelona: €50K Super High Roller live updates.

You can find the entire chip counts for Day 1 of this event over within the black box at the right of this page. We'll update that link once the tournament staff provides the counts to us.

Sunday brings Day 2 of the Super High Roller, where play and our coverage will begin at 12:30pm local time. Barring to any extent further illness, we predict Negreanu to enroll in us then.

Meanwhile, coverage of the Estrellas Poker Tour Main Event (live updates here) will pick up at noon for Day 3 of that tourney.

Join us then for full coverage as both events work their way all the way down to a last table. Until then, goodnight from Barcelona...and beware of the bears.

Want us to report on you at a live event? Click here to get a PokerStars account and begin your campaign today. Brad Willis is the PokerStars Head of Blogging. Follow him on Twitter: @BradWillis.

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