While Argentinians and Brazilians are a large portion of the field, the Uruguayan home team is making a strong showing.

It's not the Uruguayans' fault they're outnumbered.

With just 3.4 million inhabitants, Uruguay's population is one of the smallest of the non-island nations in the Americas.

By contrast, Brazil has the second-largest population in the Americas with approximately 200 million inhabitants while Argentina comes in at fifth with about 43 million people.

While tiny Uruguay is flanked by these giants, they've always been able to hold their own.

Uruguay defeated Argentina in the first-ever FIFA World Cup Final and then won their second World Cup after they defeated Brazil in Rio back in 1950.

The little country is known to produce its fair number of talented athletes and poker is no different.

One of the rising Uruguayan stars is Francisco "Tomatee" Benitez.

Benitez took down the $5,000 High Roller in Chile earlier this year and has also been raking in large scores online.

Under the moniker "Tomatee," Benitez has made SCOOP, TCOOP and WCOOP final tables this year.

Tomatee's most recent final table, WCOOP 25: $10,300 NLHE 8-Max High Roller, gave the Uruguayan his largest online score to date.

Tomatee finished 5th in that event and won $178,500.

Tomatee is back at it though and was playing the $215 4-max event on his phone while he was playing the main event here.

Benitez came in later in the day but busted shortly after dinner.

With about 5,000 in the pot on a [3c][6d][2c][5s] board, Benitez bet 3,100 and Julio Belluscio called.

A [Th] came on the river and Benitez bet 7,000. Belluscio quickly raised to 20,000, enough to put Benitez all-in.

Benitez thought, folded on his phone and then thought some more. Benitez made a few more moves online as he thought what to do about Belluscio's bet.

Four-handed online poker is pretty fast.

Eventually, Benitez through in the rest of his physical chips to call.

Belluscio showed [4h][3h] for the turned straight while Benitez showed [ad][Tc] for top pair.

With late registration over, Benitez's shot at winning an LAPT title on his home turf was gone.

Luckily for him though, home is a quick car ride away in Montevideo.

Benitez says he doesn't plan on playing any more live events this week and will focus on the WCOOP instead.

Tomatee is even considering playing the $51,000 8-Max Super High Roller tomorrow.

He'll leave the task of winning the LAPT trophy to his countrymen.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

There's a lot of commotion in the tournament area.

Every now and then, players rush over to one table and there's audible jumble of cheers, groans and sighs.

It's similar to the tournament frenzy during the money bubble but we're still on Day 1a and late registration hasn't even closed.

No, this is something different.

Players aren't flocking to the expectation of money, they're flocking to the expectation of goals.

Boca Juniors is currently playing against Argentinos Juniors in the 2015 Argentine Primera División and one table has a pair of iPads set up so everyone at the table can see the game.

Those familiar with Argentinian need no further explanation for the commotion, but for everyone else, here's a small primer.

Boca Juniors is Argentina's most successful soccer team and is currently leading the Argentine Primera División with 52 points.

Boca's success has obviously garnered the team a lot of fans, several of whom seem to be playing in the field today.

But not every Argentinian is loyal to Boca.

The team's main rival, River Plate, is currently 5th in the standings with 41 points.

There are several River Plate fans in the field too, and they were the ones groaning when Boca scored.

They want Boca to lose. They always want Boca to lose, but today they really want them to lose.

With five games left in the season, both teams are fighting for one of the top two spots. The top two teams at the end of the season will gain entry to the 2016 Copa Libertadores, the most prestigious club soccer tournament in Latin America.

While many of the Argentinians in the field are giving this game a little more priority over poker for the moment, other players are only distracting themselves with more poker.

The WCOOP --or what several people within a one-foot radius of my computer call the Copa Libertadores of online poker-- is currently underway and a few players aren't letting one form of poker interfere with the other.

Back in the prehistoric days before 2012, players had to bring their laptops to the table if they wanted to play online poker at the table.

Then, PokerStars Mobile showed up and changed the game by making it smaller.

Players were able to play on their phone and tablets, making multi-interdimensional-tabling easier than ever.

Shakeeb Kazemipur, who plays on PokerStars as "njåguar" is supplementing his live play with some online poker today.

Kazemipur is well-acquainted with online play. The Canadian player won the Sunday Million weeks before he won his LAPT title in Panama.

While only a few players currently on Uruguayan soil have a shot at winning an LAPT/WCOOP double title this week, countless more have a shot at a WCOOP title this season.

The series will run until September 27th, so check out the WCOOP schedule for a list of the remaining events and satellites to each one.

Players are about to go on dinner break so they'll now have time to not eat and fully dedicate themselves to soccer and online poker.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

Team PokerStars Pro Andre Akkari and Friend of PokerStars Felipe Ramos have both taken a seat here in Uruguay.

Both players are also far cheerier and fresh-faced than anyone should be after being in transit for the past 30 hours.

Not many people would make a 30-hour journey to attend a tournament in time, but the Brazilian red-spade duo had a few incentives.

First, they were headed in this direction anyways. Brazil is right next door and São Paulo is just a quick two-and-a-half hour flight away.

Secondly, they had a good reason to stay where they were. The two were in a castle with supermodels and celebrities.

No, that's not a metaphor, hyperbole, euphemism or any other literary device.

The Brazilian duo literally spent the last few days in a Spanish castle coaching a Portuguese Victoria's Secret Model, Sara Sampaio; soon-to-be-star of Star Wars: Episode VII, John Boyega; and Brazilian soccer superstar, Neymar Jr.

They were coaching the stars for PokerStars' The Duel.

The filming was done at the Peralada Castle in Catalan.

Olha que incrível este lugar! Set para a filmagem de hoje. #PokerStars What amazing place!... https://t.co/5FBkDk2YBx

— andre akkari (@aakkari) September 17, 2015

Bicho pegando no Poker Room em Girona depois de um dia de gravações! Action at the Girona Poker Room... https://t.co/cgAurlXaGQ

— andre akkari (@aakkari) September 17, 2015

It wasn't the first time Mojave and Akkari have coached people in poker. Both players have helped Neymar with his game and both run poker training schools in Brazil.

Mojave's program focuses more on teaching beginners the ropes while Akkari's students tend to be more experienced and are looking to go pro.

While both players enjoy teaching, they prefer to lead by example.

For them, that means winning.

Both players have accumulated a number of victories and results, but one that's eluded them both is an LAPT victory.

The two are looking to change that today, but if that doesn't work out, they wouldn't mind taking the next LAPT title in their hometown of São Paulo in November.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

It's another beautiful spring day in Punta del Este, but a couple hundred people will try to spend all of it inside the Conrad Hotel's convention center.

It's a goal that they're all forking over at least $3,300 to try and achieve.

Day 1b of LAPT8 Uruguay is about to start and while it's the final starting flight of the tournament, players have the opportunity to rebuy as many times as their bankroll will allow.

While a few of the Day 1a bustees will take a another shot today, we're expecting a lot of fresh faces.

There are 31 faces we're not expecting to see in the field today though, they're the 31 Day 1a survivors.

Leading that pack is LAPT6 Peru champion, Patricio Rojas, with 133,100.

Rojas nearly made the final table again in Peru this season but was knocked out on the bubble. Now he has another chip lead and will be looking to make a different final table in a different country.

Team PokerStars Pro Leo Fernandez also made it through the day as well as Renata Teixeira, Oscar Alache, Ale Braga and LAPT7 Player of the Year, Horacio Nicolas.

Those players will be able to enjoy the brisk but beautiful spring day while everyone else tries to join them for Day 2 tomorrow.

Yesterday saw 91 entries and we lost about two-thirds of that field after 10 levels of play.

All those eliminated are welcome back for another shot though and tournament staff is expecting a far bigger field today. Once again, play will consist of 10, one-hour levels with a 15-minute break after every two levels.

Then, after level 6, players will get a 75-minute dinner break.

Late registration will stay open throughout the dinner break but will close once level 7 begins.

But for now, players will start play with 20,000 chips and 50/100 blinds.

Cards are about to hit the felt and they won't stop until long after the sun goes down and we have our official LAPT8 Uruguay field.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

The percentage of women in the field has been slowly increasing as the day's progressed.

At the start of the day, women were just 2.2 percent of the field.

Now the field is 5.7 percent female.

There were no additional female entries throughout the day though, there's just been a persistent duo of LAPT regulars who've made it to the last level of the day.

Aside from their gender, the two remaining ladies also share the same nationality.

Renata Teixeira and Ale Braga both hail from Brazil and are both looking for another LAPT cash.

Braga has four LAPT cashes and is considered to be one of Brazil's top-three female players.

One of the other players in that coveted top-three is seated just one table away from Braga.
Teixeira became the first female player to get heads-up for an LAPT title earlier this season and is now 4th in the LAPT8 Player of the Year race.

While it took eight seasons before Teixeira to get heads-up for a title, another woman matched her finish the very next tournament.

In LAPT8 Panama, Ukraine's Olga Iermolcheva got heads-up against Canada's Shakeeb Kazemipur.

It was a long heads-up match and the lead changed several times but in the end, Kazemipur came out on top.

For the second tournament in a row, the LAPT was denied its first female champion.

Poker --especially in Latin America-- has typically been a man's game, but this season has strongly challenged that notion.

According to Teixeira, there are also more women playing poker in Brazil than ever before.

It's not a matter of if anymore, it's a matter of when that percentage will go up to 100.

Both Teixeira and Braga are hoping that day will be next Tuesday.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

After players came back from their 75-minute dinner break, they were greeted with 300/600 blinds and a closed registration desk.

The total number of entrants for LAPT8 Uruguay Day 1a is now officially 91.

While it's not the largest field to grace the LAPT, it's far from the fiercest. This has led many people across Uruguay to dub this the "Joe Pesci" of tournament fields.

This petite, tightly-wound field is now down to 51 players but will only get more aggressive as the tournament goes on.

Several of these players have been there and know what it takes to get back there

One of those players is Dr. Mario Lopez.

No, the Dr. isn't a poker nickname, Lopez is a medical doctor with more than $1.4 million in tournament earnings.

Lopez's largest score came just a month ago, when he won the largest-ever Estrellas Poker Tour Main Event.

Lopez defeated a field of 3,292 players that event to win $451,107, his largest cash to date.

But the doctor isn't a one-trick pony; before that victory, Lopez already had nearly $1 million in live tournament earnings.

Lopez had a few six-figure scores on the Argentinian poker circuit and then got another when he won LAPT7 Chile last year.

The second-largest chunk of change Lopez was more recent.

Just a few months ago at the World Series of Poker, Lopez 2nd in the $1,111 Little One for One Drop and won $399,455.

Up until that WSOP, no Argentinian had won a WSOP bracelet. Just a few weeks before Lopez's runner-up finish, Ivan Luca won a $1,000 NLHE event to become the first ever Argentinian to don a WSOP bracelet.

Lopez came close to making it two.

Another fierce Argentinian in the field is reigning LAPT Player of the Year, Horacio Nicolas.

Nicolas has been in every LAPT field this season. Part of Nicolas's POY prize was a buy-in to every event this season.

Amos finished Season 7 with nearly 600 points more than POY runner-up, Amos Ben (Ben, the Season 6 POY, was actually fighting to defend his title).

While Nicolas only has one main event cash this season, he's currently well-above average with nearly 80,000 chips.

Side events brought Nicolas to the top of the leaderboard last season, but now he's hoping to make his first deep Main Event run.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

Oscar Alache scored his first tournament cash just two years ago but quickly rose to become Chile's fourth highest-earning player.

Alache is just a few thousand dollars shy of breaking the $500,000 mark and is currently leading the LAPT8 Player of the Year race.

"It's a hard race," Alache said. "And I obviously want to win but I feel I've already reached a prestigious score that I'm proud of.

"But hopefully it goes well here and I can get the title in Brazil."

Aside from the events here in LAPT8 Uruguay, players can collect POY points in the Grand Final in São Paulo in November.

While poker has been exploding in Brazil and growing quickly in Argentina, Alache said there hasn't been much growth in Chile.

"There aren't as many players [in Chile] as in Brazil or Argentina," Alache said. "I think Chileans still just associate it with casinos and not as a game of skill."

Alache says he hopes he can help change this view.

"I don't want really want to be a poker celebrity," Alache said. "I just want to help people understand the game more and see that you can make it far if you try."

As Alache said, Brazilians and Argentinians have already realized this en masse and are flocking to the game.

Several of them flocked here to Punta del Este, which is conveniently sandwiched between the two countries.

Some players from the Argentinian contingent include Jose Ignacio Barbero, who became the first player to win two LAPT titles after winning back-to-back tournaments in LAPT3 Uruguay and LAPT3 Peru.

To his left is another staple of Argentinian poker, Team PokerStars Pro Leo Fernandez.

Fernandez has an LAPT title of his own after he won LAPT5 Panama and came close to another major victory after he finished 2nd in the 2011 PCA High Roller.

While several of Fernandez's countrymen are in the field, his red-spade brethren have yet to take a seat this tournament.

In fact, they're probably seated about five miles in the air somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

Both Team PokerStars Pro Andre Akkari and Friend of PokerStars Felipe Ramos are currently on their way from Barcelona and will play tomorrow.

There's no lack of Brazilians though.

Among them is Bruno Politano, who brought a sea of yellow and green to Las Vegas after he made the 2014 November Nine.

Politano was the first Brazilian player to make the November Nine but chances are good he won't be the last.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

While the Conrad hotel is hosting it's first LAPT, several of the seats are filled with familiar players.

One specific pair of players looks like they can't get enough of each other.

For the second consecutive LAPT, Brazil's Renata Teixeira and Chile's Oscar Alache are seated right next to each other on Day 1a.

But this is far from the first time the two have played against each other.

LAPT veterans might recall earlier this season, when Teixeira and Alache went heads-up for the title in Chile.

Regardless of who won, there was going to be a footnote added to LAPT history that day.

With a guaranteed second-place finish, Teixeira became the highest-finishing woman in LAPT history with a shot at becoming the first woman to take down an LAPT trophy.

Alache on the other hand was fighting for his second LAPT title. After winning, Alache became the third player to win multiple LAPT titles.

The two haven't slowed down since their bout and both are in the top 5 players competing for this season's LAPT Player of the Year.

Alache is currently leading the race with 674.62 points while Teixeira is in 4th with 541.01.

The majority of Alache's points came from his victory in Chile, but he added another 172.08 points in Panama with a victory in a $600 Freezeout and a 58th-place finish in the Main Event.

Then Alache finished 5th in the $5,000 High Roller in Peru for another 156.68 points.

That's the tournament Alache found himself seated next to Teixeira on Day 1a, a coincidence that everyone's ecstatic happened again.

While the two are currently even in chips, Teixeira is trailing Alache in the POY race by 133.61 points. The bulk of Teixeira's 541.01 points came from her runner-up finish in Chile and --just like Alache-- she scored another pair of points in Panama.

Teixeira finished 6th in the $1,100 NLHE Re-entry for 101.32 points and picked up another 41.23 points when she finished 5th in a $600 Freezeout.

Teixeira then picked up another 92.45 points in Peru when she finished 9th in the $1,100 NLHE Re-entry.

Their results are so similar that we'd be convinced they're the same person if they weren't seated next to each other all the time.

But they're not, we know they know they're not. We think.

One is a bubbly Brazilian woman quickly climbing the country's poker ranks while the other is a stoic, bearded Chilean player approximately 2.2 Teixeiras in size.

One thing they do match up in is poker skill.

We'll see which one can make it further this event.

Photography from LAPT8 Uruguay by Carlos Monti. You can also follow the action in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Alexander Villegas is a freelance contributor to the PokerStars Blog.

It's no secret that PokerStars calls the Isle of Man its home, and now it's time to play PokerStars' grandest home game of the year. The people of PokerStars are welcoming all comers to the Isle of Man October 1-4 for the UK & Ireland Poker Tour's stop.

Situated along the Irish Sea coast and just down the road from PokerStars HQ, the UKIPT's Isle of Man stop is hosted in the beautiful and historic Villa Marina. The £440 buy-in event has two flights, and you can re-enter once per day, so you have a chance to fire four bullets if you need to!

For the next two Sundays, you can win seats online. PokerStars is running a five-seat guarantee satellite with a £100 buy-in this Sunday the 20th and next Sunday the 27th.

Want to qualify? Click here to get a PokerStars account.

The UKIPT already has seats reserved for Liv Boeree, Chris Moneymaker, Jake Cody, and Jen Shahade, the latter of which will undoubtedly be a popular face at the Isle of Man International Chess Tournament and combined poker and chess event.

As if that wasn't all enough, every player in the Main Event will get a Manx National Heritage pass to explore all the heritage sites on the island for free.

For full information on the festival, visit the UKIPT Isle of Man page.

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