We're into the final level of the evening, with blinds at 600-1200 and a running ante of 100. Of the 209 players who started today, 69 remain, with an average stack of 30,289.


Frederik Hostrup just raised his arms in the air to declare himself the first player to reach 100,000 in chips - and who am I to rain on his parade. He's right.



The night has closed in, the 57 remaining players have departed into the darkness and Day 1A at the PokerStars EPT French Open is over.




After a late-night swing on table two, it seems as though John "Texas" Hewston (71,875) might have taken that table's chip lead from Frederik Holstrup. The Dane's stack has dwindled since the last check. He's still got plenty, but not so many that he can't fit them all in his end-of-day envelope. Instead it's "Texas" (who isn't from Texas but in actual fact is British) who has that problem.


The Swedish duo of Patric Mortensson and Henrik Olander, as well as Dane Theo Jorgensen (110,000), will probably also feature near the top of the official list, alongside the battling Brit, Ram Vaswani. The home contingent is rightly behind Claude Cohen, who has more than 115,000 and might be the chip leader, as well as Michel Abeplassis (31,000), who have both made up for the departure of both Robert Cohen and Pascal Perrault.


Roland de Wolfe, WPT Paris champion, went out shortly before the lights, hitting top pair with his king-ten but watching in despair as his adversary's four-flush made five on the end. David Pomroy, third placed finisher in the EPT Dublin event, followed him out, his ace-king outdrawn by ace-queen.


Kiril Gerasimov, the fearsome Russian player, remains in the field, as does Torstein Iversen (52,000), from Norway. More British players of note include John Falconer, Ross Boatman and Johnathan Dempsey. Bambos Xanthos, the London-based Cypriot player, is still in the bunch, while Mark Naalden (36,000), from the Netherlands, doesn't quite have the monstrous pile he finished with in Copenhagen, but he is alive.


Of the qualifiers, let's hear it for Danny Ticer (21,475) and Ken Johnson (33,000), both from the United States and both coming back on Friday, as well as Malcolm Gorse (21,975), who's FPPs continue to stretch to a whole lot of poker.




reported by Howard Swains at Pokerstars