Latest Diary Post

There are numerous ways to detect the imminent arrival of the World Series Main Event: The opening of poker lounges in busier corridors at the Rio, a longer line of reporters at the media desk collecting credentials, and the slow to a crawl of hotel internet services as online tables...more

Every six-max table at the World Series of Poker always has seven people around it, and when they're ten-handed, there will always be 11 chairs. Even when the November Nine assembles to play down to a Main Event multi-millionaire later this year, the ESPN crew will draw up ten seats...more

In the highest echelons of sports - be it football, baseball, soccer - no team is ever so dominant that they can rest on their laurels. Coaches and owners are always out to improve their teams regardless of standing, and fans are always gripped by the gossip surrounding transfers and...more

Back in January at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas, a young player approached media row and said: "I've busted. I know I have to tell you." He was wearing a Team PokerStars Pro patch on his shirt, beside a small Belgian flag. The reporters thanked him, heard the...more

Covering poker tournaments these days means a lot of international travel, and as a happy corollary us reporters can get to see cities that otherwise would be out of reach. The single most memorable sight from my six years on the road remains the peerless 360 degree vista over Rio...more

There's enough deception inherent in poker to ensure tournament organisers play it pretty straight when issuing official information. A six-max event has six players per table, nothing sinister about that, and the "eight game" event has eight games in it. Do keep up. Yesterday at the Rio, all the chatter...more

In Europe and Latin America, the world has always stood still for what we call football. If the national team is playing in a major tournament, you can forget about a quiet drink in London or Buenos Aires and you'll wait an age for your room-service in Rio. For perhaps...more

Late in the 2008 World Series of Poker, Humberto Brenes had a question. He had just been eliminated in 77th place of a $1,000 no limit hold 'em event, earning $7,776, but the money didn't seem important. "How many cashes do I have now?" he asked me. He seemed to...more

When 15 players returned yesterday afternoon to begin the final day of event #41, the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha Hi-low Split-8 or Better, all eyes were focused on two players: the Team PokerStars Pro Barry Greenstein, and the "poker brat" Phil Hellmuth. With 11 WSOP bracelets, Hellmuth has more examples of...more

The early hours of the World Series yesterday - and by "early", I mean before 5pm - were all but bereft of Team PokerStars Pro action. Everyone deserves a break and the Team took something like a mass holiday. Only Barry Greenstein and Team Online's Mandy Thomas were required to...more

Back in the old days, if you wanted to get the news out, you hired a fat man with a bell to stand on a street corner and shout about it. We moved from there through carrier pigeons, newspapers, radio, television and then the internet. And then Twitter didn't just...more

Bill Chen is many things: mathematics whizz, double WSOP bracelet winner, author and long-time Friend of PokerStars. But did you hear the one about Bill Chen, Wedding Planner? No, thought not. Yesterday, Chen showed up for day three of the $3,000 HORSE tournament at the World Series in a pristine...more

You need to make sure of one thing when you're walking through the main corridor outside the Pavilion Room during World Series of Poker time. (Well, perhaps two things, but you should always have your zipper done up in public no matter what; that's not site-specific.) No, the principal concern...more

More than $2.5million in tournament winnings tells its own story, but there are still some out there who refuse to read the script. Team PokerStars Pro Vanessa Rousso has a hell of a game and has a glittering record to back it up, yet I'm still taken aback by those...more

It's been a special privilege to pen this WSOP Diary over the past month, and hopefully we have inspired some of you to try and come to Las Vegas to take part in the WSOP Main Event. If that's your goal, you have only this weekend left to do it...more