With two tournaments on the docket the 2011 World Series of Poker kicked-off on Tuesday at the Rio in Las Vegas with some of the best known poker players in attendance to play on Day 1 of Event #2, the $25k Heads-Up Championship.

Before the $25k Heads-Up Championship began, the WSOP got underway with the $500 Casino Employees Event, which drew a total of 850 entrants, making it one of the largest Casino Employee tournaments in WSOP history. The two-day tournament will see 77 players return on Wednesday to battle for the first WSOP title of 2011 and the $82,292 that will go to the winner.

The real talk of the day was the $25k Heads-Up Championship which attracted a solid field of 128 players generating a prize-pool of over $3 million. The remaining 32 players will be not only battling for the first WSOP bracelet of 2011 –not counting the WSOPC National Championship– and the $851,192 which will be awarded to the winner of the tournament.

Here is a look at the Round 3 matchups scheduled for Wednesday:

David Benyamine vs. Anthony Guetti
Chris Moorman vs. Richard Lyndaker
Dani Stern vs. Jake Cody
Isaac Haxton vs. Jonathan Jaffe
Ashton Griffin vs. Tom Dwan
Daniel Alaei vs. Gus Hansen
Steve Blilirakis vs. Trevor Pope
Matt Marafioti vs. Maxim Lykov
Eric Froehlich vs. Steve Zolotow
John Duthie vs. Carlos Mortenson
Jason Smirnov vs. Darren Elias
Erik Cajelais vs. Nikolay Evdakov
Yevgeniy Timshenko vs. Amritraj Singh
Oliver Busquet vs. Andrew Robl
Kunimaro Kojo vs. Nick Shulman
David Paredes vs. John Juanda

Tags: Carlos Mortenson, Casino Employees, Chris Moorman, Daniel Alaei, David Benyamine, Eric Froehlich, Gus Hansen, Heads-Up Championship, Isaac Haxton, Jaffe, John Duthie, John Juanda, Nick Shulman, poker players, Prize Pool, Smirnov, Steve Zolotow, Tom Dwan, World Series of Poker, WSOP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 11:19 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.