Brad Willis reports on the first day of the HORSE...

After an initial slow start during which time we couldn't tell exactly who was playing the $50,000 HORSE World Championship and who was not, we now have a clearer picture of the event.

When registration closed this afternoon, 95 total players had signed up for the event. While not quite the 148 players the event has seen the past couple of years, it still will pay out more than a million bucks to the winner. Sixteen runners will walk away with cash. The eventual champion will bank $1,276,802.

Team PokerStars Pro is represented by some of the top players in the stable. Daniel Negreanu, Greg Raymer, Chad Brown, Alex Kravchenko, and Barry Greenstein are all in action today. They are joined by Friend of PokerStars Bill Chen.

Greenstein is essentially freerolling the event. Having just won $57,000 in the $2,500 Mixed Hold'em tourney, Greenstein is now getting a chance to play the big one without any significant ding to his bankroll. As it turned out, the HORSE event went on dinner break just as he finished on the other final table. As he put it on his Twitter account, "On dinner break of the 50k HORSE, #wsop49. I have 134k from my original 150. Haven't yet played a hand."

Of all the Team Pros in the field, Negreanu went into the dinner break with the best of it. He's up to 195,000 after three levels of play.

All 95 players managed to survive until the dinner break. With five days of play, this HORSE event is in no danger of breaking major news tonight. Slow and steady, as they say.