The WPT is about to wrap up another successful season. Once again the popular poker series is celebrating the end of its season with the WPT Tournament of Champions, a three-day event that features champions from the past year and is already taking place at Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.

Day 1 of the season-ending tournament was played on Thursday at the host casino. It started off with 80 participants but the field was whittled down to just 29 players by the end of the day.

The event came with a buy-in fee of $15,000, but those who won Main Tour Main Events throughout the season had that fee included in their first-place prizes. The WPT also added $150,000 to the prize pool, of which $50,000 would go to the winner to create an overall prize pool of $1.365 million.

The top 10 finishers will leave with a payout, min-cash worth $39,840. The winner will receive $463,375 from the prize pool. However, awards for the big champion would not be limited to the monetary prize. Their victory will also be rewarded with a Hublot Big Bang Unico Titanium Ceramic watch, a JetSmarter membership worth $50,000, and the one and only WPT Tournament of Champions trophy.

The first day of this year’s WPT Tournament of Champions concluded with Dennis Blieden leading the elite pack into the night. The player bagged and tagged 593,000 to lock a comfortable start to Day 2.

Blieden is followed by J.C. Tran with 305,500 and Marvin Rettenmaier with 234,500, but it can be seen that the overnight chip leader has secured quite an advantage over his remaining opponents.

Blieden catapulted himself to the top of the Day 1 chip counts chart after winning a massive pot during Level 4 of play. The player clashed against Andy Frankenberger. The latter went all in with pocket aces to Blieden’s pocket sixes. A [6c][4d][2c] flop and blank turn and river saw Frankenberger hit the rail, while Blieden collected his chips. Later the same level, the overnight chip leader scooped quite some chips from Mike Del Vecchio to further cement his advantage.

Blieden won the LA Poker Classic $10,000 Main Event back in February to claim his first WPT title, a seat into the WPT Tournament of Champions, and $1 million in prize money. The player had cashed in two WSOP events prior to his triumph earlier this year. Talking with WPT staff last night, Blieden said that he has not played tournament poker since the LAPC, but he was running pretty well in the Tournament of Champions and it felt as if he had picked where he had left off.

Unlike many of the other tournament entries, Blieden is not that well known to the poker community. Dwelling on that, the player said that he knew many of his table mates considered him “terrible” and that was why he was getting calls that many would not. He went on to say that he got quite some coolers throughout Day 1 and it seemed to him that every time he bluffed, his opponents would fall, while every time he called, he would win the pot.

Play is set to resume at Aria today at noon local time. The remaining hopefuls will play down to an official six-handed final table. Aside from Blieden, the likes of Erik Seidel, Marvin Rettenmaier, Justin Young, and Darren Elias, who came into the Tournament of Champions fresh off his record fourth WPT win in the inaugural WPT Bobby Baldwin Classic, will also join Day 2 action.

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