Day 1 of the first-ever World Series of Poker Europe is in the record books from the Empire Casino in London, England, with the conclusion of Day 1 of the £2,500 H.O.R.S.E. event earlier this evening. As these things go, the first-ever WSOP event not held on American soil was a surprisingly un-European affair, with plenty of big American names making up for the relative lack of homegrown talent in the tournament roster.

Poker and funny telephone booths: staples of the British Empire.

Action began at 2 p.m. Greenwich time in the Casino at the Empire, located at Leicester Square in downtown London. Organizers divided the tournament into two sections: a feature section, played before the public and a bevy of showgirls clad mainly in peacock feathers and fishnet stockings; and a main section, played in what is apparently the larder of the casino basement, with very little space for spectators (to say nothing of befeathered showgirls) and very little fresh air for breathing.

Filling the tables both upstairs and down was a collection of some of the finest poker players to ever grace a Las Vegas cardroom, including but not limited to Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Eli Elezra, Howard Lederer, Annie Duke, Phil Gordon, Allen Cunningham, Erik Seidel, John Juanda, Jennifer Harman and Scotty Nguyen, in addition to a number of young gunners from back across the Atlantic in the form of Scott Fischman, Jimmy "Gobboboy" Fricke and ZeeJustin Bonomo.

The studliest?

Joining the Americans at the tables were European action junkies Patrik Antonius and Gus Hansen, as well as English pros like Marc Goodwin, David Colclough and Joe Beevers. Primarily, however, the field was American, and with good reason: it has been observed that Europeans tend to shy away from Stud-based contests, which make up the majority of the games in H.O.R.S.E., and beyond that, they don't seem to like playing Limit, either (preferring the finesse of deep-stack Pot-Limit flop games).

The disparity in H.O.R.S.E. experience between the Americans and the Europeans was exemplified by Hendon Mobster Beevers, who told his table (which consisted of such sharks as the Hansen brothers, Thor and Gus, Allen Cunningham, Justin Bonomo and Marcel Luske), "I've played one $10 H.O.R.S.E. tournament and that's it. I've never played it live. And I only played it three days ago." Beevers, surprisingly, would survive his tough table assignment and finish the day with $13,300 in chips.

Just realized he's in a H.O.R.S.E. tournament.

Not so lucky would be Marcel Luske and his successors at the Table of Boom, Irishman Andy Black and The Earnest American, Phil Gordon, all of whom found the rail almost as quickly as they found their seats at this most difficult of tables.

Luske would wind up the first player ever to be eliminated from "the Europe's biggest poker tournament" (sic), the victim of a Gus Hansen diamond flush in the face of his own two pair whilst playing in the Stud/8 segment.

Speaking of segments, tournament organizers chose a curious means of cycling through the five H.O.R.S.E. games - instead of playing levels organized by game and by time, as in the World Series, every table would play eight hands of each game before switching to a new game, with the field governed by 100-minute levels that would dictate increases in blinds, limits, antes, bring-ins and completions no matter where each individual table stood in the rotation.

Not sure what to make of the tournament structure.

For the early part of the day, the rather unorthodox play structure was debated and discussed among the professionals, with no real consensus being reached. (Fortunately for Commissioner Pollack, Mike Matusow - conspicuously absent alongside Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu - was not present to lodge any of his trademark vocal complaints.)

The early going would see very little heavy action, with only the likes of Black and Humberto Brenes (who told PokerListings.com he was card-dead and eventually succumbed with two pair to an opponent's trips) notable in their eliminations.

By dinner time, roughly six hours after the start of play, 92 of the original 105 players remained in their seats with ammunition for battle, including early chip leaders Yuval Bronshtein, Johnny Chan, and Robert Williamson III.

Just found out about the free buffet.

Dinnertime would see tournament organizers announcing not only the presence of a free and decadent buffet upstairs (open, thankfully, to the hardworking members of the press), but also the payout structure for the first event.

As mentioned earlier, 105 players paid the £2,500 entry fee, creating a prize pool of £262,500. Fully sixteen of those entrants will turn a profit in this event, with the lowest-ranking earners pulling in £5,250 for three days' work. First place earns £70,875 and the first gold bracelet awarded outside of the United States.

Players returned from a luxurious two-hour dinner break to find themselves smack in the middle of a particularly vicious after-dinner rush, wherein a number of high-profile players hit the bricks within the span of a couple of hours.

The hardest way to make an easy living.

Among the busticatees in the hours following dinner were Todd Brunson, Tony G. (who could then have taken advantage of his being in England to seek out not only the streets, but British rapper and chart-topper The Streets as well), Michael Mizrachi, Dan Shak and Barry Greenstein's chair, which like its Vinny Vinh-affiliated counterparts in Nevada, sat vacant throughout the day as the stack before it was blinded into nonexistence following the Great Philanthropist's failure to show.

Just as the after-dinner rush seemed to subside, a series of eliminations around the stroke of midnight would see the American contingent decimated, as none other than Doyle Brunson, Andy Bloch, Michael Binger, Phil Gordon and Phil Hellmuth each saw their H.O.R.S.E. turn into a field mouse as the Cinderella first day expired.

Has it come to this?

Within an hour, their ranks would be joined by Lederer, Williamson III and Chan as the Americans on the whole looked jet-lagged and outright exhausted by the end of the night.

A total of 51 players would survive the devastation and will return to play tomorrow, led by chip-leader Kirk Morrison ($55,900) and including such notables as Jennifer Harman, Alex Kravchenko, John Juanda, Mark Vos, Annie Duke, Chris Ferguson, Allen Cunningham, David Williams, Jeff Madsen, Barny Boatman and Max Pescatori.

Joining them at the tables will be PokerListings.com, purveyors of fine tournament updates, interviews, articles and topnotch photography, with everything as always seasoned with a healthy dollop of good, olde-fashion punfoolery. Tune in tomorrow at 2 p.m. local time for more from the flip side.