Welcome to Las Vegas

The players home for the next week – The Monte Carlo Hotel

Well, rather disappointingly, Andreas played for several hours and ended up breaking even. That’s good because at least the rest of us don’t have to lend him any cash. However it does mean that Mario will have to wait for the Ferrari he was looking at last night in the Ferrari Shop at The Wynn.

Today the PartyPoker players who will be taking part in the main event started arriving in the hotel and checking in with us to pick up their merchandise goodie bags (which included plenty of branded gear to wear and an iPod Touch for the Palladium Lounge players) and player information.

It was great to see so many familiar faces arrive. Many of the guys have qualified for the WSOP before or attended events like the APT in Manila recently and at times it got a bit like an old school reunion as memories and stories were exchanged with much laughter.

This is the thing with PartyPoker players, they all love coming to places like Las Vegas because they know they will be very well looked after and go home having had a fantastic time. It was very obvious they are all pleased to be in Las Vegas whether it was their first time here or they are an old timer.

For most of our players, today was all about getting here and trying to recover from the long flight, chilling out and maybe having a look around the hotel and the Las Vegas Strip. Some were keen to beat the jet lag by heading straight for the casino floor or the poker room. They will need to be ready for action tomorrow because that is when we will have our player party at not one but two of Las Vegas’ hottest venues, Wet Republic and Tabu in the MGM Grand.