For The Good Of The Game

It's the final of the 2006 WSOP pokerthon later today. It’s taken 8 days to get from over 8500 hopefuls and a scattering of absolutely no-hopefuls to the final 9 poker gladiators who are going to battle it out for $12m in dirty US greenbacks. - Nice!

Chip leader is former Hollywood agent / promotions dude Jamie Gold who has over $27m in chips (about 1/3 of the chips in play). Obviously a clear favorite but wait, what’s this?! - He says he doesn't want to be famous so he may just dump his chips when heads up and deliberately come 2nd! - wtf?! - Apparently he doesn't need the money and $6m would be just fine thank you very much! - What a twat!! - If he didn't want to win the fucking thing then why enter? - So I say for the good of the game lets hope he gets cold decked and bad beated early doors and goes out on tilt in 7th or something.

I'm not there to watch and won't be following it at all but I’ll be sort of secretly funking for Allen Cunningham (2nd in chips with $17m) - again for the good of the game. - He seems a decent chap, obviously an outstanding poker player (you only have to look at his record and results to see that) and he plays the game the way it should be played – quietly going about his business, accumulating chips, reading the game and doesn’t brag, boast, shoot his mouth, talk trash or disrespect his fellow players; he’s one of the good guys of the game (like Greg Raymer) and it would be nice to see him take it down. Although if he does it would be interesting to see whether PokerStars will be able to wrestle him from the Full Tilt stable to become one of their World Champ Ambassadors – I very much doubt it this time!

Full chip counts for the final are below – robbed from somewhere, I can’t remember where!

1. Jamie Gold - $25.7m
2. Allen Cunningham - $17.7m
3. Richard Lee – $11.8
4. Erik Friberg - $9.6m
5. Paul Wasicka - $7.9m
6. Doug Kim - $6.7m
7. Rhett Butler - $4.8m
8. Michael Binger - $3.1m
9. Dan Nassif – $2.6m

Good luck all!