Wicked Chops Poker Is Your LA Poker Classic News Headquarters

Wicked Chops Poker is on the ground in Los Angeles to report on the WPT L.A. Poker Classic Main Event and is gearing up for a week of unprecedented coverage of one of the tour's premier events. Held at the Commerce Casino, a longtime fave of the Entities, this year's LAPC Main Event is anticipated to draw a record field with a prize purse in the $7 million range, which is even a lot by our standards. And we're stupid rich.

Starting tomorrow and through the week, expect countless posts around the clock chronicling all the action at the tables, the gossip away from the felt, up-to-the-minute chip counts, photos from the tournament floor, in-depth interviews with your favorite players and maybe even a video blog or two.

And if we don't deliver any of the above we promise to deliver at least one post a day or maybe one post every other day. Or every other other day. And maybe our reports won't actually be from the Commerce but instead our beach place 25 miles away (photo above), after we wake up from nights of ensued bedlam. At around 4 pm. Because seriously, who do you think we are? That Owen Laukkanen guy?

Nonetheless, we did make it to the Commerce today, where the WPT held a press conference announcing that . . .

. . . Antonio Esfandiari would be the new face of the World Poker Tour. Esfandiari, who became one of the WPT's 84 millionaires when he won the LAPC back in 2004, will be used to promote the WPT in all areas of its business, from ClubWPT to its international ventures in China, Europe and elsewhere. Expect more on the WPT's signing of Antonio Esfandiari when they drop a press release on Monday.

After the press conference, one of the entities had lunch with WPT prez/founder Steve Lipscomb, where we talked about the state of poker, China and the 2008 Olympics and the WPT's new poker stats initiative. We also may have talked about the chicken.

Finally, before heading back to the beach because the sun finally came out, and we haven't seen that darn thing in awhile, we checked out the cash tables where we saw a lot of Asians and David Williams and Michael 'The Grinder' Mizrachi donning RawVegas.tv hats surrounded by a lot of Asians and Barry Greenstein raking in some nice pots in a room full of a lot of Asians.

We also spotted Crispin Leyser, who surprisingly didn't punch, or slap, us.

Finally that chick from the the 2p2 "Who is this Girl?" thread, otherwise known as Diane Nguyen (at right), was there too, not looking quite as hot as she did at the WSOP this summer but give us a few days surrounded by a bunch of smelly, sloppy Commerce-ers and she'll look Josie Maran hot. Maybe even Megan Fox hot. The Commerce is magical like that.

All righty. It's tacos and tecata time. See you here tomorrow. Or Sunday. But definitely Monday.