Chad Brown had been going quietly about his business for two days, keeping his stack intact as scores busted out from the $10,000 World Championship 7-card Stud. From the 142 starters, 16 would be paid, but the Team PokerStars Pro fell agonisingly short in 25th place.

He'd been on a downward slope and then, like Alex Kravchenko shortly before him, fell when his two pair of tens and threes were outgunned by Max "The Pirate" Pescatori's bigger two pair of jacks and fours. Brown walked the plank and jumped into the sea of poker players still swirling around the Rio.

Chad Brown

But while he and Kravchenko have an unwelcome early night, our last surviving Team PokerStars Pro Daniel Negreanu is on a thrilling run. Down to 20,000 earlier in the day, he has now soared to second in chips with 354,000.

Daniel Negreanu

As he just said on his Twitter page: "23 left I have 354k avg is 185k. I'll be out of the other one soon. Oh well haha," a reference to his stack which is being blinded away in the $2,500 No Limit 2-7 Draw Lowball.

Negreanu won't mind that one bit if he goes really deep here, with a final table appearance a real possibility - and the $373,000 first prize and bracelet looming large.

We may have mentioned that Stud can be an action game. Well that's certainly true if you're in a hand with draws and options-a-plenty and the chance to bet all the way to seventh street. But if you're out of the hand it can get rather, well, slow. And, as it's a limit form of poker, the stacks don't rise and fall in the hair-raising manner of no limit or pot-limit events.

That will explain why after level four (yes, that's four hours of play) we have lost only one player. Just one. Compare that to the start of today's $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha event, where an incredible 600 out of little more than 800 starters bust in the first six hours! Or the day ones of the $1,000 no limit event (now on the combined day 2), where a player was busting every 5.5 seconds. I kid you not.

Still, the 141 still remaining in the Stud, now off on a dinner break, have plenty of time to get lost in their own little world as time goes by.

Here's a look at what the Team PokerStars Pros in the mix were up to when I just toured the room:

Daniel Negreanu (24,500): Talking. No surprise there.

Daniel Negreanu

Barry Greenstein (20,000): Looking like he's about to nod off.

Barry Greenstein

Katja Thater (40,000): Drinking a coffee then coming up to stroke this blogger's hair. Which was nice.

Katja Thater

Dario Minieri (21,000): Listening to music on rather large headphones.

Bill Chen (34,000): Tapping away on his mobile phone.

Bill Chen

Greg Raymer (15,500): Watching Phil Ivey getting what looks like a full-body massage.

Alex Kravchenko (37,000): Laughing (yes, it's true) with Tony G, Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson.

Chad Brown (36,000): Sitting quietly. And doing quite a bit of folding (though to be fair, his stack says he hasn't been folding for long).

Chad Brown

All photos © Joe Giron, IMPDI

Team PokerStars Pro Barry Greenstein was waiting patiently for his tournament to get going, long after the rest of the $10,000 World Championship 7-card Stud event had started. Only six had turned up on his table - and two of them were husband and wife Jennifer Harman and Marco Traniello.

Now there's no suggestion these two would ever collude, but one of them had to move, which meant Traniello needed to swap seats with a player waiting for his own table to fill up.

Barry Greenstein

While Traniello walked over, the unfortunate replacement took one look at his new seat, where Harman, David Benyamine and Greenstein sat twiddling their thumbs, and shook his head.

"I don't want to sit at THAT table," he said.

But the tournament director is king, and off he trundled to try his luck against some of the game's most feared names. And it was to get worse - Eli Elezra and Andy Bloch sat down soon after.

The Rio is heaving today, with any fears that the WSOP would get off to a slow start well and truly swept away by a colourful and noisy tide of bracelet hopefuls. There's stuff going on everywhere you look, with action including:

- The $10,000 World Championship 7-card Stud, day 1
- The $1,000 No limit, day 2
- The$1,500 Pot Limit Omaha, day 1
- The Champions Invitational, day 2
- Cash games
- And more satellites than NASA's back catalogue

Add to that the thousands of railbirds and the just plain curious who wander down from the Rio to the Amazon Room and find themselves in a strange new world, and you've got quite a mix.

The $10K Stud event is always select, not just because of the buy-in, but the game itself. Not many play it when Texas Hold'em, and increasingly Omaha are the online labours of love.

So far 120 are registered to play - among them Team PokerStars Pros Katja Thater, Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu (who has taken a shot at every event so far), Chad Brown and Dario Minieri. Then there is Bill Chen, Friend of PokerStars, who has a mathematical brain that suits this game just fine.

They started with 30,000 - three times the buy-in like all events this year - and before long the chips were flying; it may not have that "no limit" element, but it's an action game all right.

Katja Thater

Thater, nestling under a straw cowboy hat and enjoying a level one massage (as is Negreanu and Brown) got her campaign off to a flyer, finding eights full to rake in a 3,500 pot in the first few orbits. But she knows it's a long, and very busy road here at the Rio

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With two of Team PokerStars Pros' most prolific Tweeters in the Stud event, be sure to follow there Twitter updates - Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein.

While you're at it, you can follow us as well over at the PokerStars Blog Twitter page. Be a shame if you missed out.