Among those who will be returning to the playing hall at midday local time are several familiar names from the poker community, including the WSOP 2012 Main Event champion Greg Merson.
For his achievement, the American has the privilege of seeing his likeness displayed on the wall of the Horseshoe Event Center.
Merson’s status as a former champion also meant he was guaranteed a stint on the feature table with the heavily reduced field, and alongside him was none other than Will Kassouf.
Now, Martin Kabrhel has made most of the non-poker headlines throughout the WSOP 2025, but Kassouf knows a thing or two about riling up his tablemates with his own brand of “speech play”.
Merson found himself sitting alongside the loudmouth Brit for some time at the end of the day, and even came off a little worse over the course of a few pots, but he’s still in with a serious shout, ready to wield a stack of around 80 big blinds when play restarts.
Reporters grabbed a quick word with the American when play ended and he said:
“It’s been nice, smooth sailing. I’ve been running super hot. I didn’t do well on this feature table, but I started the day with 560,000 and I ended it with 1.5, so it was a good day.
“I think just the ability to switch gears based on what your table draw is and what your chip stack is, and understanding the true marathon of the tournament. Like, I literally just lost a million chips in the last hour, but it doesn’t matter. Not getting too attached to where you were. Taking it one hand at a time is a bit of a cliche thing to say, but it’s very true.”
Merson also had some words to say about Will Kassouf and his polarising personality at the table. Incredibly, it’s almost a decade since Kassouf spent the 2016 series winding up mostly everyone who sat at his table during that series.
Merson said that his polarising kind of entertainment is good for the game, pretty much in the same way that Phil Hellmuth’s blow-ups can be.
But if either of these two is going to win that $10,000,000 prize money, they’ve got to fight through an awful lot of skilled players.
Names that some readers might know are Eric Afriat, winner of three WPT titles. He has 2,710,000 chips and will be a tough opponent for anyone. Adam Hendrix with 2,550,000 is another.
One less familiar face is René-Charles Angelil, son of Canadian singer Celine Dion. He also had 2,550,000 chips to bag up.
As we move down the chip counts we see some big names that will terrify their tablemates.
Poker Players Championship winner Michael Mizrachi bagged up 2,270,000 and Stephen Chidwick 1,940,000. Isaac Haxton is right behind them with 1,915,000 while Viktor Blom still needs to chip up a little to threaten the top of the leaderboard with only 1,455,000.
There is still plenty of exciting action to come in this tournament with all these names left in the mix. The four mentioned just above are elite players who will be extremely difficult to deal with.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings because the action is only going to heat up even further now that we’re in the money.
World Series of Poker Main Event Top Ten Chip Counts
| Place | Player | Country | Chip Count | Big Blinds |
| 1 | Harold Lam | United States | 4,195,000 | 210 |
| 2 | Jeremy Kottler | United States | 3,725,000 | 186 |
| 3 | Julien Mariani | France | 3,600,000 | 180 |
| 4 | Kohei Arai | Japan | 3,585,000 | 179 |
| 5 | Benjamin Williams | United States | 3,550,000 | 178 |
| 6 | Arsenii Karmatckii | Russian Federation | 3,445,000 | 172 |
| 7 | Ramon Pessoa | Brazil | 3,400,000 | 170 |
| 8 | Michael Hawker | United States | 3,400,000 | 170 |
| 9 | Mounir Tajiou | Sweden | 3,250,000 | 163 |
| 10 | Luke Chung | United States | 3,180,000 | 159 |
