by Vanessa Rousso

As the inaugural PokerStars WCOOP $10k buy-in event looms large, I feel like I did as a kid in the days leading up to Christmas. On September 7th at 2:30 p.m ET, Poker Stars will launch WCOOP Event 5, a $10,300 buy-in with a whopping $2 million guaranteed prize pool. With that kind of guarantee, you can expect at least 200, players in the running. Never before (to my knowledge at least) has there been an online poker tournament of this scale--rivaling some of the most prestigious live big-buy-in circuit events.You can rest assured that many of the world's top pros will ante up for this first-of-its-kind event. So even if you can't afford to play, you won't want to miss the action from the sidelines. PokerStars will be running WCOOP livestream radio broadcasts on the 7th to cover this event in addition to a highlights show on pokerstars.tv on the 8th.

As for me, I just arrived in Barcelona for the EPT Barcelona event, which begins here on the 10th of September, only to realize that if I intended to keep up with the daily WCOOP events (which I wouldn't miss for anything), I would have to completely switch up my sleep schedule. This is because the events are scheduled for 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. EST daily--which translates to 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. in the time zone that I am in! So it looks like I won't be getting to bed until 6:00 a.m. or so, in order to be prepared to go deep in the WCOOP events. Luckily for me, the EPT events here happen to start unusually late in the day (3 p.m. for the main event and as late s 9 p.m. for some of the prelims). This means that my night-owl sleep schedule will jive well with playing in some of the live events I plan to play in the coming weeks as well.

With that, I'm off to get some dinner...or, would that be breakfast? :) Best of luck to all of you that plan to join me in the upcoming WCOOP madness, and feel free to stop by my table anytime!

Vanessa Rousso is a member of Team PokerStars.