Howard Swains reports on day 1b of the PokerStars EPT in Barcelona...

Day 1B has now wrapped in Barcelona. What can we tell you about it? Well, we'll start at the top, where there's a familiar face riding very high indeed. As long as you're a fan of Swedish reality TV, that is. Mikael Lundell became a household name in the living rooms of Stockholm when he featured on an early series of Swedish Survivor*. Now he's the probable chip leader at the end of the second first day on the EPT. He has more than 100,000 chips, which should keep him company on his desert island overnight.

Mikael Lundell

But breathing down Lundell's neck is a real EPT heavyweight: Sebastian Ruthenberg, who has been a PokerStars sponsored player for years and then became a PokerStars "Shooting Star" during a promotion to unearth the talents in central Europe. Ruthenberg was an obvious choice and paid back the faith with a bracelet in Vegas this year and a huge pile of chips in Barcelona. He also has more than 100,000.

PokerStars sponsored player Sebastian Ruthenberg

Frenchman Brice Cournut, who had 70,000-odd for about seven hours, is also right up there. He added an extra 20,000 to his stack in the final couple of levels and has about 95,000.

You'll notice that this is probably the first time in an EPT end-of-day wrap that we've got three paragraphs in without mentioning Team PokerStars Pro. Well, after some terrific performances throughout the past few years, this day has been a shocker. Nine started, nine perished. It was goodbye to Daniel Negreanu, Gavin Griffin, Isabelle Mercier, Bertrand "ElkY" Grospellier, Dario Minieri, Luca Pagano, Raymond Rahme, Katja Thater and William Thorson. Mercier went out first; Minieri went out last, but Thorson has the worst story. He got one-outered mid-way through the day, which is kind of tough, if you'll forgive the understatement.

The last of Team PokerStars Pro to fall, Dario Minieri

But tomorrow the field from both day ones converge, when we'll be welcoming back Chad Brown and Andre Akkari, who'll be attempting to slog it out to a final 32 or so. About 110 finished tonight, about 110 finished yesterday, thinning a field of 619 original starters. The full figures will all be known later, once someone calculates it all overnight. But the main statistic is this one: the first prize in Barcelona will be €1,361,000. Try sleeping and forgetting about that.

*They invented it, by the way. And you can thank Holland for Big Brother.