LAS VEGAS — With more than $9 million on the line, Dennis Phillips didn't want to leave the felt.

The 53-year-old trucking account manager from suburban St. Louis was confident he had his opponents sized up after seven days of no-limit Texas Hold 'em at the World Series of Poker main event in July.

Then play stopped.

"Pure poker playing, I wanted to stay at that damn table," Phillips said. "I finish anything but first and I'm going to feel like it affected me."

Now Phillips has to rebuild his mental dossiers — re-examine those assumptions that gave him a nearly 2 million chip lead with nine players left from a field of 6,844 — and get things rolling again to win a final table playing 117 days after its participants were set.

To Phillips, the opponents might not seem the same when they meet in the final showdown. The upside? He'll also be different when play resumes Sunday at Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

"I'm going to have to start all over again," Phillips said.

The nine men who plodded through the first 99.9 percent of the enormous field this summer have had more than three months to think about the biggest score of their lives, their stake in $32.6 million to be split among them. They each were paid ninth-place money, $900,670, on July 15.

The extra time off makes this conclusion of poker's richest annual tournament different from any other.

The break was designed for two primary reasons. Organizers wanted to build interest in the final table's "November Nine." The players generated extra money and buzz through endorsements and interviews. For ESPN, the break means the winner will be known only a few hours — not months — before the cable network's broadcast.

Organizers say this will fundamentally change the way viewers see the event — they want viewers to tune in to find out who won, not just how the winner did it.

Phillips said he has given more than 140 interviews, threw out the first pitch at a St. Louis Cardinals game and has used the tournament to help him in charity work with the Prevent Cancer Foundation, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the Pujols Family Foundation. He also played and studied plenty of poker, with the aid of a professional coach.

"Things have been extremely hectic. It's all been positive," Phillips said.

But happy feelings about the break are far from a consensus. And nobody — not the players, organizers or followers of the game — quite knows what to expect.

"My life has been pretty miserable, actually. This break has been atrocious, in my opinion," said Ylon Schwartz, a 38-year-old from Brooklyn who has made a living gambling since he first started hustling chess games in city parks when he was 13.

Schwartz called the media a "pain" said people from his past have "come out of the woodwork" to ask for cash. He called the break a "big blunder" that compromises the integrity of the poker tournament.

"You don't stop the marathon at the Olympics in the 25th mile and give them three months to rest and come back and sprint for a mile," said Schwartz, fifth in chips with 12.53 million. "You let them finish and you don't take someone out of their zone."

Phillips, Schwartz and the other seven players agree that regaining focus will be paramount to winning the top prize.

"It's gone, to be honest with you. That rhythm is gone," said David "Chino" Rheem, a 28-year-old poker professional from Los Angeles whom many poker professionals believe is the most skilled player left.

Rheem, seventh in chips with 10.2 million, expects players to be fairly reserved to start, opening up once two or three players have been eliminated.

Kelly Kim, short stacked with 2.6 million or about 2 percent of the chips in play, is expecting players to wait to make moves until he doubles his stack or busts out.

"I don't have any leverage — I know I have to get it in," said Kim, 31, of Whittier, Calif., a professional poker player whom peers described as a smart player who would be dangerous if he wins a hand worth all his chips.

Chips have no monetary value in the game. They are merely used as a measurement of where players stand in relationship to one another. A player is not eliminated until he or she loses all her chips, and someone must collect all the chips in play to win.

At the tournament's current stage, players will have less than 22 minutes of play before blinds and antes, the mandatory bets used to start the action, are increased.

Given that demand and Kim's stack, he has about 11 bets left to make his move. Phillips, the leader with 26.3 million chips, has roughly 110 bets.

The current field, including Phillips and Kim, seems to have four distinct tiers based on chip stacks.

At the top is Phillips and Ivan Demidov, a 27-year old semiprofessional poker player from Moscow with 24.4 million in chips. Next in line are poker professional Scott Montgomery, 26, of Perth, Ontario, and Peter Eastgate, a 22-year-old professional poker player from Odense, Denmark, who holds 18.4 million chips.

Schwartz is next with 12.5 million chips, slightly ahead of 39-year-old Toronto accountant Darus Suharto. Rheem is in seventh place with 10.2 million chips, just 20,000 chips ahead of Craig Marquis, 23, of Arlington, Texas.

Marquis holds nearly four times as many chips as Kim.

The no-limit rules to the game mean players can bet their entire stack at any time, risking elimination in a single hand to improve their position.

The players know that the game is more about mental dexterity than cards on the felt, which in theory are truly random. Winners tend to recognize their opponents' playing styles first and adapt.

"You're always learning, you're always perfecting, you're always trying to improve," said Phillips, who has spent weekends and other spare time analyzing his game and that of his opponents.

Schwartz took the opposite track, disappearing for the week before the final table into the remoteness of Nevada's mountains and desert. His goal is complete mental clarity, like a great golfer on a golf course.

Schwartz acknowledges that money and the game might creep into his thoughts.

"That's the trick. If you really can distance yourself then that's very powerful," Schwartz said. "You're not thinking tactically or positionally or mathematically about anything."

"The way is to be, and that's it," Schwartz said.