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The first day of action at the PokerStars European Poker Tour London is now over, and an initial starting flight of 280 runners was reduced to 162 by the end of the day. Tournament organizers are expecting at least 500 additional competitors on Day 1b, the Main Event’s final starting flight.

The name currently atop the leaderboard is Lukasz Golzyt, who earned over 211,000 chips. Hot on his trail are Sandor Demjan, Lev Marymsky, Raul Paez, Umberto Vitagliano and Mustapha Kanit, all of whom handily survived the day with chip stacks ranging from 120k to 152k.

Several notable professional poker players hit the rail early on, including John Duthie of Team PokerStars, Dave “Devil Fish” Ulliott and Guillaume Darcourt. Xuan Liu and current WSOP final table competitor Phil Collins dropped from the runnings as the day went on as well.

A number of big name pros survived the day, albeit in some cases with smaller chip stacks. This includes Fatima Moreira de Melo, Mickey Petersen, Arnaud Mattern, Darren Elias, Nick Binger, Sebastian Ruthenberg and Jake Cody.

Barry Greenstein is perhaps the most notable player to hold a highly competitive chip stack. He’ll enter Day 2 with just under 74k chips. The legendary Doyle Brunson handily survived the day as well, closing out action with 45,200. Amazingly, this is Brunson’s very first foray into a European Poker Tour event. The field was undoubtedly excited with Brunson’s decision to attend, as plenty of young up-and-coming pros decided to ask for his autograph and have their pictures taken with the Godfather of Poker.

Day 1b will follow the same format as Day 1a: eight levels of play, 15-minute breaks every other level, and no dinner break. Once Day 1b begins, we’ll have a rough idea of the total prize pool as well as the cash reserved for 1st place.