Less than an hour into the first level of play we heard “All-in and a call on table 57!” and found that Jason “strassa2″ Strasser (pictured right) was all in preflop with AA against another player’s KK. The other player was calling for the king to come but the board ran out 88358 and Jason’s aces held and he doubled up to nearly 30k.

Michael “inissint” Glasser was also seen scooping up a pot when his KJ hit a flop that contained both a king and two diamonds. Glasser made his flush on the turn and then and jack came on the river. His opponent called a bet holding the KJ but his two pair wasn’t good enough. Another player at the table noted that Glasser was “on a freeroll” after the flop and indeed he was. His stack has grown to around 23k.

Michael “BraveJayhawk” Jensen is off to a very fast start at his table. He has already worked his way up to 50K. When we asked Jensen how he acquired so many chips, he said he picked up 5-6 relatively large pots, but hadn’t had any huge all-ins just yet. He also wanted us to give a shout out for him: Mom Jensen–your son says hi!

Tristan “Cre8ive” Wade was only trying to speed up the game when he called out “player down!” after his table lost a player. Perhaps it was the exuberance with which he said it or the the small space in which it was shouted (Tristan is playing in the much smaller Tropical room where satellites are usually run), but a floor person very quickly made their way over to Wade’s table. The floor person was prepared to scold the dealer for the manner in which it was called out, but when he saw a female dealer, he realized it was Tristan who was the culprit. Wade was warned to be less enthusiastic about the elimination of other player’s and Tristan sincerely apologized, noting he was just trying to speed up the game, not make light of another player’s misfortune.

Garrett “GBecks” Beckman is seated at the featured table outside of the ESPN Final Table Arena with Phil Ivey. One table loaded with P5ers is in the Brasilia Room, where Table 40 includes Bryan “bparis” Paris, Dustin “stelvask” Siegel and Matt “plattsburgh” Vengrin. One table over, we found Shane “shaniac” Schleger, Joe Pelton and Ben “bfineman” Fineman seated together. Here’s a look at a few other interesting table draws as play began this afternoon:

Amazon Blue 23: Zach Hyman, Maria Ho, Jeff Schulman, Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy
Amazon Green 15: Brandon Schaefer, Clayton “clayton_27″ Newman, Kirill Gerasimov
Brasilia 2: Dag Martin “dmmikkel” Mikkelsen, Carl “colson10″ Olson
Brasilia 33: Tracey “xtrACEy” Nguyen, Todd Brunson, Tom “titantom32″ Braband
Buzzios 9: Ian “IanJ” Johns, Christan “KCRUEL” Kruel

• July 7, 2008 -- By the Numbers: 2008 WSOP Main Event
• July 7, 2008 -- ComptonMasta Like Woah
• July 6, 2008 -- Tristan Must Wade ‘Til Next Year
• June 28, 2008 -- CrazyMarco, Roothlus Chip Up