The Real Rail

Today was a long day on the couch. With Avs and Nuggets playoff games and Paul's heartpounding run in the third biggest poker tournament of all time, it was pretty much impossible for me to do anything other than change channels and hit the refresh button on pokerwire.com.

Tomorrow I'll be making trip #7 to Las Vegas, arriving in time for the war-room brunch and all the action. The chip count now looks like this:

1 James Van Alstyne 4,235,000
2 Roland De Wolfe 3,325,000
3 Carlos Zambrano 2,985,000
4 Victor Ramdin 2,685,000
5 Joeseph Bartholdi 2,350,000
6 Paul Wasicka 2,245,000
7 Erica Schoenberg1,735,000
8 Simon Moussa 1,695,000
9 Vanessa Rousso 1,575,000
10 Cliff 'Johnny Bax' Josephy 1,255,000
11 Davidson Matthew 1,200,000
12 Espen Saltnes 1,130,000
13 Claus Nielsen 940,000
14 Gary Maresh 905,000
15 Valentino Morella 525,000
16 Chad Brown 485,000
17 Patrik Antonius 450,000
18 Men 'The Master' Nguyen 375,000
19 Surinder Sunar 120,000

The top four there are certainly all top players, along with the bottom four. The Fish finds himself in the pack which consists of nonames except for Bax. I won't name names or point fingers but discussions with Paul have made it clear that some of the middle of the pack players are not as skilled as he is.

This is a great opportunity. It's probably not a once in a lifetime kind of shot since he's playing so well these days, but even Phil Ivey only makes a deep run in half of WPT Championships. To have a real chance at winning a world championship and becoming a millionaire - I'm sure Paul won't ever forget this week. I won't either.