2008 Irish Open Underway in Dublin

Sometime between looking at Audrina Patridge's Playboy audition photos for the hundredth time and looking at Audrina Patridge's Playboy audition photos for the two-hundredth time (link), we remembered that Day 1a of the 2008 Irish Open was underway at Dublin's Citywest Hotel in Ireland, the homeland of two thirds of the Entities that comprise Wicked Chops Poker.

Billed as Europe's oldest and largest poker tournament, the €4,200 buy-in event has drawn a pretty decent field of pros from the Emerald Isle, the UK and North America including Doyle Brunson, Barney Boatman, JJ Liu, a woman, Pascal Perrault, Ram Vaswani, Alan Smurfit, Mike "Timex" McDonald, Marc Goodwin and hometurfers Andy Black, Ciaran O'Leary and Padraig Parkinson.

Also present are Roland de Wolfe and Sorel Mizzi, who placed 2nd and 3rd, respectively, at last year's Irish Open, which was won by local Marty Smyth.

Finally, David "El Blondie" Colclough, the Silda Spitzer of poker, is among the field.

For live reports, Owen Laukkanen is once again all over the action like these two friendly lesbians on each other, except nowhere near as hot. Check out his reports here.

PaddyPoker, the host, is also live blogging the tourney, although we're kind of creeped by the one reporter who drank Doyle's beer after he walked away. Check their blog out here.

Photo above of Audrina Patridge, if you didn't guess.