While most of the tournament action has been over in Asia with the Asian pacific poker Tour for the past week, most high stakes tournament players are heading to the Bellagio. The Five Diamond World Poker Classic, as part of the World Poker Tour, started its preliminary events yesterday with a $1,500 NLHE event.

The Doyle Brunson named main event will start December 12th (sadly two days after I leave, and return to the frigid northlands) and holds a slightly higher buy in then normal WPT tourneys at $15,000. The champion of course will get to make a round trip back to the Bellagio for the WPT season ending $25,000 buy in tourney as a freeroll. Funny, my freeroll at PokerStars last night didn't pay out over $3,000,000.

Be sure to check out the Poker Prof's daily updates on the tourneys and of course Flipchip's quality photos from the entire event leading up to the beer presentation after someone takes all the chips in the main event.