It's official: the World Series of Poker Main event has begun. The Grandaddy of ALL NLHE tournaments all over the world has kicked-off and the numbers are insane.

The Main Event, a $10,000 buy-in NLHE freezeout tournament, officially registered 8,773 pariticpants, ultimately creating a MONSTER pot of about $87.7 Million Dollars. Day one had to be divided into 4 days where about 2000+ players play down to about 800-900. As of right now, they are on day 2A, which combines TWO day one finishers until about 700 are left.

Several big name Pros have already been eliminated. Gus Hansen, Dutch Boyd, Micheal Mizrachi, Jen Harmann, Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, and many others were unable to wade through the minefield that is the main event, alive. It's either they got really unlucky like hellmuth who had his JJ run into QQ and KK run into AA, or they just dont want to waste three days of their time and then get busted out of the money eventually. They make more money in the few hours playing in the high stakes cash games than struggling in the tournament.

And now, (drumroll please), the numbers are in; the official payout schedule of the WSOP 2006 main event.

873-820th- $14,597
819-775th- $15,504
774-721st- $16,493
720-667th- $17,730
666-622nd- $19,050

and so on and so forth...

63-55th- $123,699
54-46th- $164,932
45-37th- $247,399
36-28th- $329,865
27-19th- $494,797
18-16th- $659,730
15-13th- $907,128
12-10th- $1,154,527

12-10th place is guaranteed at least $1.1 million! Wow.

9th $1,566,858
8th $1,979,189
7th $2,391,520
6th $2,803,851
5th $3,216,182
4th $3,628,513
3rd $4,123,310
2nd $6,102,499

What a crazy payout huh! $3.2 million for FIFTH place! SIX million for SECOND!
And the craziest part of all...

1st $12,000,000!

Twelve Million Dollars. Twelve Million. The biggest ever prize in the history of sports and gaming. An amount of money that will last a lifetime to the lucky bastard who takes home the prize! Just to give you an idea, $12,000,000 translates to Php 636,000,000. Yep. Over HALF A BILLION pesos.

Can it get any bigger than this? My friend nick and i have had discussions about how POker might be peaking in its popularity and we might start seeing the main event entries reaching a plateau or even declining in the next few years. But then i realized that right now, millions of people are playing online poker with dreams of one day playing in the WSOP main event. Millions of people UNDER 21 are killing the online poker rooms and making six figure incomes. They can't wait to turn 21 and take a shot at the Big prize. I believe now that th pots are only going to get bigger in the next few years, and the peak of poker popularity is yet to be achieved.

When are WE going to represent the country in the WSOP main event?