Vinnie Vinh is Alive and Twitching at the 2007 WSOP

Vinnie Vinh, the all-but-dead poker player who went missing after being among the chipleaders on Day 1 of the $1000 Rebuy NLHE event, was seen yesterday playing the $2,500 short-handed NLHE event at the 2007 WSOP. Looking like a Vietnamese meth-jacked Shane MacGowan on a very, very bad day but with better teeth, Vinh has managed to outlast more than 800 players to make it into Day 2 with 73,800 in chips. Hoyt Corkin, at 270,800, is the chip leader with 42 players left. Other big names still in include Steve Wong (233,300), Mimi Tran (121,500), Erick Lindgren (101,400), Terrence "You're Not Johnny" Chan (80,100) and Erik Seidel (43,900).

We didn't get to see much of Vinnie Vinh playing yesterday until the end of the day but we heard he was in top form. PokerListings.com's Martin Derbyshire reported the following about Vinh after officials told him to remove his iPod when play was down to 15 tables:

Vinh spent the entire night arguing with the dealers, WSOP staff and other players around him every chance he had about anything he could think of at the time. Players from other tables even got up to ask him to shut up, but nothing worked. Many felt the best decision might be to give Vinh an exception to the no electronic devices under 15 tables rule and give him his iPod back. At one point he picked up a hand and was screaming "Shoot it up," grabbing his arm, making a needle like motion and pumping chips into the pot.

When we saw Vinh, he looked pathetically frail, about Nicole Richie size at her thinnest. And while nothing that remarkable happened as he sat in his seat shaking his leg 100 miles an hour and occasionally twitching, he did seem irritable and restless at times, occasionally getting up and walking around the table nervously.

While we don't want to suggest that Vinnie Vinh is a meth head we will say that the symptoms for a meth head include increased alertness, paranoia, decreased appetite, increased physical activity, writhing jerky, irritability, aggression, anger, panic, paranoia, and repetitive behavior patterns.

And this pretty much sums up what Vinh was displaying yesterday.

So yeh, he probably is a meth head.

UPDATE: And he likely smokes it . . . based on what he told Gutshot.com late last night (Go here and scroll down to just above the photo of Vinh with Stu Ungar in the background).