Flown the WCOOP

Eighteen days. A wild, manic ride, it was, live blogging the World Championship of Online Poker for PokerStars. Gonna probably require a day or two to get used to not having to rush home from the “real” job to log on and put in another seven or eight hours writing up the action. Relatively speakin’, just working one job will seem like falling off a piece of cake!

Much as I experienced this past summer when in Vegas helping cover the WSOP for PokerNews, having a great group of colleagues really helped make the experience not just bearable, but genuinely fun, too. Big thanks to April, Drizzdtj, F-Train, Otis, Stephen, the Spaceman, and Tuscaloosa Johnny, all of whom partnered up with me along the way. Want to shout out to the others, too, including those left-coasters California Jen, Change100, and the BWoP who’d come on to take over for us for all those late shifts.

I wrote a little bit a couple of weeks back about the whole idea of live blogging an online poker tournament. On the one hand, it seems a bit superfluous. Anyone genuinely interested in following the action could simply open the tables him/herself. Or, as was the case last night for the Main Event (and for several other events), one could follow the latter stages of the tourney over at PokerStars.tv where they had a “live feed” (showing a feature table) plus audio commentary.

However, I do think what we’ve done here with the live blogs, recaps, and winner interviews is to create a fairly comprehensive chronicle of each of the 33 events -- the kind of thing folks can look back on and consult for entertainment and/or informational purposes down the road. I think the whole ideer this time around was to run it as a kind of “pilot” program, though I’m hopeful the reviews will be good and the Stars folks will see it as a worthwhile supplement to the whole WCOOP experience. (If you haven’t peeked at any of the coverage, here’s the live blog from last night’s Event No. 33, the $5,200 no-limit hold’em Main Event eventually won by ckingusc.)

Will be resuming the usual commentaries and whatnot here tomorrow. Might even try to play a little pot-limit Omaha again!