WPT Bahamas: So it begins again

I arrived in Las Vegas last night on my first ever Westjet flight. Not too bad, with leather seats and live satellite TV. It arrived about 20 mins early, but traffic at 10pm on a Friday night in Vegas was terrible and it probably took atleast 30 mins to make the short trek from the airport. Oh, I ran into Steve Paul-Ambrose at the airport who was waiting there for his family to arrive on the same flight I took. Steve was the winner of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure this year and hails from Waterloo. Other than him, I haven't seen any well-known poker personalities so far.

I'm staying at Treasure Island this year - tried to slip the front desk clerk $20 to upgrade, but either she didn't see it (I'm just too smooth) or they actually were full. Ended up with a corner room overlooking the strip on the 34th floor anyway which is just fine.

One neat thing about the poker room here is they actually have the waiting list available on TV. At 6:30am there wasn't much of a wait but I thought that was useful.. and signs poker is quite popular, if you hadn't noticed.

I picked up my goody bag of stuff, shown below. Shirts, hats, jerseys, a nice jacket, bag teddy bear, a baseball and trading cards. Not too shabby. The strange thing this year is that Harrah's decided not to allow .com advertising, so all players sporting shirts from poker sites have either had to wear .net (play money) gear or tape over the .com portion of the logo. So there are plenty of people walking around with duct tape on their clothes.

I went to the Rio to finalize my registration which went fine. I was a bit worried because I heard people were getting their days changed without notice but everything is fine and I'm playing tomorrow as expected.

They had a "poker lifestyle" exhibition which was a small trade show. All the major sites had booths with girls handing out free stuff. I managed to accumulate about 10 lbs of hats, shirts, bags. The biggest score was a 1GB flash drive.

PokerStars had a booth where you could play "Battleship Poker" for prizes. It's basically laptops set up face to face and you play a heads-up match. I was out pretty quickly with AQ vs 74s on a Q72 flop (7) turn and the guy who beat me draw a video ipod for a prize. That would have been sweet.