We are back at the PokerStars Live Manila poker room at City of Dreams Manila awaiting the start of day 1a of the P1 Million Guarantee Main Event. This will be the third and last edition of this event for the year. Buy-in for the event is P5,000. This is a re-entry tournament so players can get back in the game if they find themselves on the rail early. Players should be happy to know that in addition to the first place cash prize, a P100,000 Macau Poker Cup package will be awarded to the eventual winner.

The previous P1 Million Guarantee Main Event winners were Rey Concepcion (May) and Wally Sombero (July), well-known poker veterans from the Philippines. Let's see if they will make their way to the felt today and try to bag another one.

The P1 Million Guarantee series began two days ago with a P200,000 NLH side event. There were a total of 168 entries with fifteen of them seeing the money. By the end of the night, it was heads up between two local players, David Erquiaga and Danilo Munoz, after Ka Cheong Wong from Hong Kong was eliminated in third place. Erquiaga would eventually get the best of Munoz to claim the first win of the series and the PHP70,500.

Last night saw another local winner, Alvir Innocentes. Innocentes bested a field of 123 entries at the P300,000 NLH side event and took home the PHP78,000 first place cash prize.

Among those who made the money in the first two events, local player Antonio Abesamis was running hot and impressively saw a profit in both. Abesamis placed 7th in the first event and 5th in the second event. We will surely keep an eye on him if he attends the main event today.

Another player seeing the money this series was King Lun "Alan" Lau (Hong Kong) who is currently in second position at the Asia Player of the Year 2015 leader board. Only a very small margin of points separates him and first position player Ka Cheong Wong (Hong Kong). Fourth position player Yang Zhang (China) also cashed, however fifth position player Pete Chen, from Chinese Taipei, was not so fortunate.

We will be posting updates of some of the action throughout the day so stay tuned!

Good luck to all the players!