If it's possible to know you're playing badly, it must follow that you know when you're playing well. It's not that Dietrich Fast said as much, he just implied it, both in the stack he bagged-up last night and something he said before he did so.

I was standing alongside his table as play ended last night. I thought I'd check whether my chip counting skills were still up to scratch and set about making a rough guess as to how much Fast had: a stack of pale greens, three stacks of blues, some pale ones and a couple of loose ones on top. All in I figured he had 930,000 and wrote it in my notebook.

Dietrich Fast

Fast then got up to watch the last hand of the day from a safe distance behind his seat. He nodded as he stood beside me, then he looked down at my notepad.

"Your number is wrong," he said, smiling. "It's nine-three-one".

So I was 1K out, but to the grinning Fast this was all part of the game. He was enjoying himself, and it showed.

He's man in form, having flown here from his hometown of Berlin on the wings of a first WSOP bracelet earlier this month. You could say it's reward for the effort he's put in over the past few years. As we mentioned yesterday, Fast is a player who has cut his teeth in side events, and worked his way up to what is now his first €25K tournament.

Today we'll find out how that experience, and his current form, fares at the business end of an EPT High Roller.

Ready to sign up for PokerStars? Click here to get an account.

12:15pm: Two down in the first ten minutes
There was no comeback for Benjamin Richardson, one of the shortest stacks heading into today, as he was the first player out today. He failed to follow the lead of a Day 2 Russell Thomas who made a remarkable comeback yesterday.

Day 3 Thomas couldn't even harness the power of Day 2 Thomas as he was soon out as well.

Yann Dion opened to 50,000 from under the gun and was called by Thomas in the next seat before Klaus Gortz squeezed to 109,000 from the big blind. Dion folded but Thomas called to see a [5c][6h]7s] flop where Gortz checked dark. Thomas bet and called all in when raised.

Thomas: [8s][8h]
Gortz: [9c][9d]

"Oh f%%k, that's not what I wanted to see!" remarked Thomas.

The [kd][qc] turn and river weren't what he wanted to see either

12pm: Shuffle up and Deal
Cards are in the air!

11:55pm: The race to the final table is on
Welcome back to Day 3 of the IPT Malta Main Event. Just 30 players remain and the aim for today is to get down to an official final table of eight. There are four tables remaining and they line up like this at the start of the day.

Day 1A chip leader Alessio Peciarolo also ended Day 2 as chip leader after a huge hand at the death of play, his aces fairing well against the ace-king of Julian Stuer. Those two players bookend the rest of the field and all the players counts can be seen by clicking here.

Cards will be in the air very soon so stay tuned.

Ready to sign up for PokerStars? Click here to get an account.

For full details of the tournaments on offer, and when you can register for them, click here.

Updates provided by Marc Convey, with photos coming from René Velli and Tomáš Stacha.

Day 1b of the P1M Guarantee Main Event has just started here at the PokerStars Live Manila poker room inside City of Dreams Manila. This is the last day one flight so for those unable to attend yesterday's kickoff, this is your final chance.

For a quick recap of day 1a's results, there were a total of 170 entries recorded with 30 qualifying into the final day. Filipino poker pro Jessie Leonarez claimed the leader's position with 240,300 chips, running second was fellow countryman Mike Takayama with 198,600 chips, and in third was Edward Warriner from the UK with 190,100 chips.

Taking a quick glance around the room, several players who hit the rail on day 1a are already battling it out on the felt such as Asia Player of the Year top contenders Ka Cheong Wong, Alan King Lau, and Pete Chen. Other players also back in the field are local player Trifie Montebon, Dave Colclough of the UK, and Irishman Anthony White.

The P1M Guarantee Main Event is a re-entry tournament with a very affordable P5k buy-in. Late registration is available until the end of level 8, which is a total of four hours into the game. It is an unlimited re-entry. For players who qualified yesterday but would like to re-enter today, keep in mind that if you qualify again, only your largest stack will advance to tomorrow's final day.

At the end of late registration, we will be able to determine the total prize pool breakdown for the event, however, in addition to the first place cash prize, the winner will also receive an additional P100,000 MPC package which includes a seat and accommodations to the upcoming ACOP 2M Spadie.

There are also two side events on the schedule tonight. At 7pm we have the Flipout event with a P2k buy-in. For every table of ten, one hand will be dealt face up to each player and the winner of each table will advance to a finals where they will play for the pot.

At 10pm, there will be a Deep Stack Hyper Turbo Freezeout event with a P10k buy-in. Players begin with a 15,000 starting stack and blinds go up every 10 minutes.

Good luck to all the players! We will be posting day 1b updates throughout the day so keep an eye out on that for a good read on some of the action today.

7:45pm: Wyrzykiewicz on fumes
EPT11 Malta Main Event eighth-place finisher Remi Wyrzykiewicz has fumes for chips after a mistimed four-bet doubled up his opponent Benjamin Richardson.

The action folded around to Wyrzykiewicz on the button and he raised to 20,000. Richardson was in the big blind and three-bet to 55,000 before calling all in for 261,000 after Wyrzykiewicz shoved.

Wyrzykiewicz: [jc][jh]
Richardson: [ks][td]

The board ran [8h][4d][as][5s][js] to make the Australian a set. Wyrzykiewicz sat with a lowered shaking head and 17,000 chips.

7:25pm: Day 2 is moving day as well as bubble day
The bubble was taken care of before the break, Matas Cimbolas the unlucky player to bust.

The same fortune cannot be said for Russell Thomas and Yann Dion. The former entered Day 2 as one of the shortest stacks with 20,600 to his name, less than ten big blinds to play with. He never gave up though and now around 540,000 chips.

The latter has a big smile on his face now. Dion came back with more than twice Thomas but slid all the way down to two big blinds before he staged a remarkable recovery and has climbed up to 386,000.

Both are behind a top five of:

1. Julian Stuer (Germany), 975,000
2. Henry Broens (Netherlands), 858,000
3. Alessio Peciarolo (Italy), 830,000
4. Giuseppe Polichetti (Italy), 702,000
5. Pedro Lamarca (Spain), 687,000

Ready to sign up for PokerStars? Click here to get an account.

For full details of the tournaments on offer, and when you can register for them, click here.

Updates provided by Marc Convey, with photos coming from René Velli and Tomáš Stacha.

He was referring to the poker-player jet express -- a succession of them, actually -- presently making its way from Berlin to Malta. As Nick Wright mentioned earlier, numerous players will today be trading the WSOPE for the EPT as the festival in Germany winds down while this one gets into full swing. The €25,000 High Roller is the carrot dangled to get the game's biggest names to the airport.

Luca is indeed now in the field as is a small contingent of Polish players, including Piotr Franczak and Jose Carlos Garcia. They were seen in the casino lobby with Dzmitry Urbanovich, but the defending champion is yet to take his seat. (He almost certainly will at one point, though.)

The new contingent also includes Stephen Chidwick, whose friend Kevin MacPhee is chip-leader back in Berlin. One assumes Chidwick would have been railing his mate had this event not intervened. But one also assumes that MacPhee will forgive Chidwick's absence. These are the sacrifices one makes given the nature of their career.

Not all of the new players are especially familiar on this side of the Atlantic. They include, for instance, Justin Liberto, who has a string of cashes over the pond including a World Series bracelet earned this summer. But he has never to our knowledge played on the EPT. He won a live satellite to earn his passage into the tournament.

Similarly Rasmus Vogt and Smain Mamouni prevailed from a super satellite and are among the less familiar players involved. There's also a number of Chinese players who have been persuaded to Malta -- Quan Zhou, Huidong Gu and Yingui Li -- while the likes of Sean Winter and Chris Hunichen, both familiar in the US, also make rare European forays.

Everything about EPT Malta is on the main EPT Malta page. More specifically, all the hand-by-hand coverage of the €25,000 High Roller is on the €25,000 High Roller page and everything from the IPT Main Event is on the IPT Main Event page.

Begin plotting your own bid for EPT glory by downloading the PokerStars client and having a crack. Follow this EPT event via the EPT app. There you will get all the latest news, chip counts and payouts. You can download it on Android or IOS