It seems as though records are made to be broken. That is a tired cliché, but so is the tiredness of claiming that something can never happen again. We may have been guilty of implying such when describing the carnage that was day four at the main event, but nothing came close to what happened on day five. At the start of the day there were 407 and at the end of the day there were only 185. The pace of play was extraordinarily fast because of the eliminations with less than two minutes on average between each successive elimination.

At the end of all of the carnage, Warren Zackey was standing at the top of the leader board with nearly 5 million in chips. The amateur from South Africa plans to be very conservative on day six in an attempt to conserve his chip stack, although he by no means has an overwhelming lead on number two at this point. In fact, all of the players in the top five have at least 3 million chips in their stack and therefore could take a huge bite out of Zackey with a single pot.

Day five was a day that saw us bid farewell to two of the three former champions still left in the field. Dan Harrington, the 1995 champion, was eliminated on this day. The same holds true for 2005 champion Joe Hachem who was knocked out before the players started bagging their chips this day. Peter Eastgate, the defending champion, managed to survive with a chip stack of just over 900,000, leaving him with the hope of repeating in two absolutely ridiculous fields.

Another interesting piece of information from this day is that Phil Ivey survived. Even though Ivey is not among the chip leaders anymore, he did manage to bag nearly 1.4 million in chips at the end of the day’s play. That means that one double up tomorrow could leave him in the top ten. A chip-rich Phil Ivey is one of the most frightening sights in poker, so everyone will likely be praying that such a thing does not happen early on in day six action.