The Final Region

Welcome back inside lovely Harrah's New Orleans for the last stop on our Live Reporting tour before the show heads to Las Vegas. Today is the start of the $10,000 Southern Regional Championship, the fourth and final of these big ticket made-for-TV events. In October, Jim Anderson won the Midwestern Regional in Hammond, Indiana, and Chris Bell won his first gold ring two months later at the Eastern Regional in Atlantic City. In March of this year, Ali Eslami bested a tough final table to capture the title of Western Regional Champion. That bring us to today with one more Regional Champ to crown.

And this one's shaping up to be some pretty good value. With our starting time less than 20 minutes away, we've got just 36 players registered so far. The window is open until the first break on Day 2, though, so that number will continue to tick upward for the next 26 hours or so. In the end, we'd expect to see somewhere around 120 players, though the line shifts pretty drastically depending on who you're talking to.

Either way, it's going to be a solid field. We've already seen Shannon Shorr (fresh off his deep run in the $25,000 WTP Championship yesterday), Todd Terry, Jon Aguiar, David Baker, and a few of the other usual suspects. They'll be happy to know that at least eight seats were given away yesterday in mega-satellites.

The doors are open, and the players (we're up to 37 now) will be trickling into the room shortly. There are still flights and hotel rooms available and plenty of time to get down here and play this event. If you're not lucky enough to have $10,000 burning a hole in your pocket, then just sit back, get cozy, and enjoy the tale of these four days.

Don't wander away; the Southern Regional Championship waits for no one!