There is no place like home and Michael Mizrachi knows that. Mizrachi finished Day 1 of the Monster World Poker Tour Tournament of Champions as chip leader with a 287.600 stack. Only 66 players were invited to the exclusive tournament held at the Seminole Hard Rock and at the end of the day only 30 would advance.

He is followed by James Romero (276.000), Griffin Paul (214.300), Tyler Patterson (199.300) and Erik Seidel (179.600).

“I think I play really good against good players, I know most of the guys. With good players you can make plays that you can do against great players, but against bad players it might not work out so good,” said Mizrachi when asked about the festival.

Big names such as Mike Sexton , Tony Dunst , Darren Elias , Jared Jaffee , Olivier Busquet , Yevgeniy Timoshenko , Jake Cody , Mohsin Charania and Eugene Katchalov were among the players eliminated from the tournament.

The 66 entries created a $1,090,000 prizepool, with an extra $100,000 added by Monster. Top nine players will take home at least $38,150 for ther effort.