Gus Hansen is up at the Aussie Millions $100k High Rollers while Phil Ivey bowed out.

We’ve long maintained that if The Events of 4/15^TM were to cause a drop in live tournament participation entrants, that impact wouldn’t be felt until this year. There was just enough money in the poker ecosystem to keep numbers afloat until the end of the year. After that, we thought it’d be interesting times.

That belief has mostly held true. Post-4/15, just about every tour or event, with the exception of the Epic Poker League, has met or exceeded expectations.

But 2012 has seen the PCA Main Event witness its first drop in numbers. Now, not surprisingly given it was basically Full Tilt‘s answer to the aforementioned PCA, the Aussie Millions is taking a hit as well.

A total of 153 entered Day 1A of the 2012 Aussie Millions Main Event–down from 238 in 2011. A partial reason for the drop is evident by reading last year’s Day 1A post–the leaderboard was littered by Full Tilters.

This year, the leaderboard is littered mostly with a bunch of Who The Fuck Are Theys.

Brett Watson is the Day 1A big stack with 257,400. He’s followed by Paul Sing with 177,100.

Maria Ho, a woman, is among the biggest surviving names, stacked at 49,600.

Get full Day 1A chip counts here.

Part of the reason for the lack of star quality on Day 1A is that many big names–including Phil Ivey– elected to play the $100,000 High Roller event.

Ivey stopped playing tournaments after he decided to burn down the Full Tilt Poker house with his May 2011 lawsuit. However, with the likely sale of the company to be completed with Groupe Bernard Tapie, Ivey has resurfaced recently, first playing the APT Macau Main Event, and now this. Ivey didn’t survived the day, as he was knocked out in 9th place, one spot shy of the final table.

Continuing his recent good run, Gus Hansen leads the High Rollers final table, stacked at 567,000. He’s closely followed by “Salty” Joe Hachem with 538,500. Hachem earlier in the day announced his new partnership with AsianLogic (more about this on Wicked Chops Insider later in the week).

First place in the $100k will pay just over $1M AUD. Get full final table chip counts here.

Tagged as: 2012 Aussie Millions, aussie millions, Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey

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