WSOP Main Event 2011 - Day 2 in the books, Lamb Leads

RIO CASINO, LAS VEGAS - Day 2b of the 42nd Annual World Series of Poker Main Event has just been completed with two well known players at the top of the leaderboard going into today's rest day. Day 3 on thursday will be the first day that remaining players from all the separate day ones and twos will be sat together.

2,804 players remain from the original 6,865 entrants, meaning the average stack is around 73,500 chips. The top two chipstacks belong to players from day 2b and are the only players to have over half a million chips going into the third day. Ben Lamb (pictured) continues his incredible WSOP heater to go into day 3 as chip leader with 551,600 chips, closely followed by Kevin Saul with 542,200. The chip leader from day 2a is Russia's Aleksandr Mozhnyakov who holds 478,600 chips.

Perhaps the most remarkable story from Day 2b is that of Erik Lindgren, who started the day with just 3,700 chip and managed to build it up to 170,300 by the end of the day, well above the chip average. Patrik Antonius, a live and online high stakes cash game player, sits on 361,000 and will be hoping to make a deep run in this tournament where his best performance is a min-cash in last years event.

Phil Hellmuth, who sits on top of the Player of the Year leaderboard, almost had a disaster on day 2a by not turning up. Convinced he was playing in day 2b, the 11 time bracelet winner had his hotel room in Vegas broken into by security to warn him that he was meant to be playing. Arriving at his table nearly two hours late to his table, he had been blinded down from his already short stack of 11,800 to just 6,975. The Poker Brat retained his composure though and managed to finish the day with a solid stack of 64,900. According to Hellmuth's tweets throughout the day he was never once all-in and called on his way to building back his stack.

With over two thousand players still to be knocked out before the money bubble, the Main Event is truly a marathon not a sprint and even the biggest stacks today could be history by the end of day 3.

The battle to make the November Nine continues Thursday at 12pm Pacific Time (8pm BST).

Chip counts taken from WSOP.com