DAY: 5 (Officially known as Day 2A).

BIG NEWS: Part of the marathon that is the World Series of Poker involves players waiting to get back to the tables after going as many as four days without playing.

The 1,251 players who began Tuesday were competing in only their second session and had not played at the main event since last week. When they sat down they faced a new table that had been randomly drawn.

To win money, they still needed to top nearly 3,000 other players to be one of the final 666 playing no-limit Texas Hold 'em. Few, if any, were thinking about the crown and top prize of $9.12 million.

"It's a long grind fixing to come," said Mark Garner, a 44-year-old investment broker from Little Rock, Ark., who began the day with 194,900 chips, most in the Tuesday group.

"All that was was a good start. It wasn't a finish, it was a start," he said.

STUD OF THE DAY: Hal Lubarsky, who started Tuesday in the top 50 in chips despite being legally blind. Lubarsky uses an assistant, Michelle Murrell, to describe play and read him his hole cards. Under tournament rules, Murrell cannot make any decisions or advise Lubarsky, but she can describe whatever she sees around the table. Last year, Lubarsky became the first blind player to cash at the main event when he finished 197th and won $51,398.

BUSTED OUT: 1998 main event champion Scotty Nguyen, 1996 and 1997 ladies champion Susie Isaacs, poker pros Paul Wasicka and David Grey.

UP NEXT: A second group of 2,378 players will play for 10 hours Wednesday to determine who makes it to Thursday, when all surviving entrants will play together for the first time since the tournament started.

POKER TALK: Coin flip. Also known as a "race," when two players go all-in before the flop and square off with roughly a 50 percent chance to win. At a table of unknowns, one player went all-in with an ace and a queen and another called with a pair of eights. The pair of eights was ahead, but because so many cards could come that would turn the ace-queen into the better hand, each player had nearly the same chance of winning the pot. The eights held, however, and the player with the ace-queen was eliminated.

SHE SAID WHAT?: "Massage is the bomb-biggity." — Marcie Thomas, a massage therapist giving poker professional John Duthie a full-body massage as he played in his second session of action. A handful of massage artists moved from table to table, working the kinks and knots out of players' bodies in hopes of relieving some of the stress of play.