Day 1a Ends Short of the Money; Dube Leads, Hellmuth's Bracelet Hunting
Mark Dube is the man to catch going into Day 2 of the $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em event after turning his 4,500 starting stack into a tournament leading stack of 160,300 over the course of 11 hours of play.
Dube has already cashed twice at the 2014 World Series of Poker, a 380th place finish in Event #8 and an 84th place in Event #15, and is almost guaranteed to make it three in the money finishes due to his monster stack and the fact there are 178 players returning on Thursday and 171 of those will be paid.
Joining Dube at the top end of the chip counts is Dan Smith, who bought into the tournament at the last possible moment and ran his stack up to an impressive 132,800. Smith was already cruising when he won a massive flip with 
versus 
to boost his stack to 127,500. He then added a few extra chips to his stack during the last few hands of night.
Other notables who punched their ticket for Day 2 include Travell Thomas (88,000), Martin Finger (85,700), Mike McDonald (81,900), Max Silver (80,100), Scott Clements (75,100), Darren Elias (52,400), Brandon Cantu (50,400), Jude Ainsworth (36,400) and 13-time WSOP champion Phil Hellmuth (34,600).
Plenty of big names failed to progress to Thursday’s second day of play. These included Allen Kessler, Barry Greenstein, Dan Kelly, Maria Ho, Dominik Nitsche, Stephen Chidwick, Joseph Cheong, Michael Mizrachi and Jason Mercier.
Day 2 commences at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday and the money bubble should burst within the first level of play. The plan is to then attempt to whittle the field down as close to the nine-handed final table as possible.
It should be another amazing day of poker so make sure you return to PokerNews.com on Thursday afternoon to keep up with all of the action, as it happens, from Event #26 of the 2014 WSOP.