A Few Fragments

Happy Friday, peoples. I don’t usually post photos of myself on the blog, but since I was feeling a little scattered I thought I’d share this one taken of me last week during a visit to a modern art museum. Look toward the top there -- you can see my hat.

I am still following with interest that PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, Day 3 of which begins just a few minutes from now. PokerNews’ live reporting and the PokerStars blog are the places to go to keep up with the happenings down in Nassau. Additionally, for some behind-the-scenes shenanigans I see notre ami Benjo is submitting trip reports from the Bahamas over at Tao of Poker, the first of which appears here.

Looks like somewhere around 280 of the original field of 1,529 are still alive. The top 224 spots pay, so the money bubble should be bursting sometime early this afternoon.

Among those still alive is Victoria Coren who returns to a below average stack today. Sought out Coren’s name in the list of remaining players because I just posted a review of Coren’s excellent memoir For Richer, For Poorer over at Betfair, if you’re interested. Also, am going to be posting an interview with Coren over there soon as well, to which I’ll alert you here once it is ready.

Praz Bansi -- like Coren a Brit -- sits atop the leaderboard at present, followed by the Canadian Marc Etienne McLaughlin. I remember McLaughlin from his deep run at the 2009 WSOP Main Event where he finished 30th.

Other notables near the top of the leaderboard include Nasr El Nasr, Eric Froehlich, Matt Graham, Dario Minieri, Amnon Filippi, and Joe Cassidy. Ton of other familiar names still with significant chips, too. Looks like this here inaugural North American Poker Tour event is getting off to a good start.

While we’re feeling all fragmenty and whatnot, today seems like as good a day as any to say I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 298411

Okay, I’m gonna sign off now to go follow the action. And to try to pull myself together.

If you’re wanting to read more you might check out the comments on my post about Poker Table Ratings from Wednesday, “Keeping Track of Those Keeping Track.” Definitely an interesting debate, I think, over what should be allowed in online poker as far as “data mining” or hand tracking is concerned and what should not.