By Eric Ramsey, Poker News

Lake Tahoe is in the midst of it’s heartiest November storm in nearly a decade, but that hasn’t kept the players away from the poker room this weekend. A very respectable 246 runners plodded through blizzard conditions (or walked downstairs from their suites) to get themselves registered for Day 1 of of the World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event. After 16 short levels, just 51 of them survived to bag up chips and return for tomorrow’s moving day. It’s the cowboy-hatted Dan Black who’ll take the big stack into Day 2 with his count of 329,500 leading the pack as they round the first stretch.

If the weather and road conditions did dampen anything, they may have kept some of the more notable pros from making the trip up the mountain to put up their $1,500 buy-in. Chris Ferguson, for instance, is still the face of this event after taking the title in 2007, but “Jesus” clearly left home without his snow chains this weekend, rendering him unable to return for a second go at this Circuit ring. Still, there were plenty of familiar faces interspersed with the locals and the satellite winners in the field. Andrew Malott, Jason DeWitt, Aaron Kanter, “Captain” Tom Franklin, two-time Circuit winner John “Cowboy” Land, and two-time WSOP bracelet winner Howard “Tahoe” Andrew all came out to play today, though all of them had fallen out of contention by the time the bags came out just after the bewitching hour on the West Coast.

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