BBT Five Alive

And so the BBT has resumed for one more romp in the sand, this time with some $50,000 of prizes to be awarded, including I believe not one, not two but three WSOP Main Event seats for this year. And it was nice to see that the first event of BBT5 was won by one of the good guys. Congrats to JJ, one of last year's winners of the BBT4 WSOP Main Event packages, who as of Sunday afternoon was not even included on the list of players registered for the Sunday night invitational freeroll tournament.

I was glad to see full tilt rectify that situation shortly before go time on Sunday night with the first event of BBT5, and with the addition of some of the other late names it seems that most of the people I had originally been very surprised to see omitted from the list had found their way in as well by the 7pm ET start time on Sunday night. I remain extremely surprised by some of the names of the people who are on the list for the invitational, but as Al described yesterday on Buddy Dank radio, full tilt went through Al's list of everybody who ever blogged about poker or who ever participated in any of the BBT tournament series, and full tilt picked that initial batch of 50 "have to have's" from the master list. As I mentioned it surprises me greatly that full tilt had actual interest in a number of the people on the initial 50 list in playing in the BBT5 series, but I suppose that is a testament to the value that full tilt sees in bloggers and in potentially funding some people who have written about poker publicly in the past to play some events at this year's World Series of Poker.

The late additions, however, do leave I think one painfully glaring omission from the invitational invitee list, and that is TwoBlackAces. If there is one guy who deserves to be in the invitational and yet who (I think) is still not in there, it's got to be TBA. Not only has TBA been an integral participant in the last few BBT series, playing many if not most of the events, but TBA has also been a fairly prolific poker blogger, especially by today's poker blogger standards. He has fostered a good sense of the community that is left among our group over the past few years, and another important factor is that TBA has demonstrated repeatedly that he can cash in real-life MTTs as well as just about any other blogger out there, so he could stand a reasonable chance of making us all look good should he nab one of the WSOP prize packages available to the BBT5 winners. And lastly, and maybe most importantly, TBA is one of the very few guys in our group who has been consistently out there, not only pimping but even himself playing in all the regular blogger tournaments, even in the past year of all-time low blonkament support following the end of BBT4 last spring. For the past year, every time the Skillz Game had only 6 or 7 entries, TBA was there. When the Mookie had under 20 runners for weeks and weeks on end late in 2009 and early in 2010? TBA was always in there. Whether it's been extolling the virtues of the regular private games on his blog, or showing his support by making an appearance and having a go at the weekly title, twoblackaces has been pretty much as close to a model poker-blogging and poker-playing citizen as we have in our group, and I was very sad to see him not included even in the once-updated or twice-updated list of players in the BBT5 Invitational Sunday night tournament.

Which is why I want to officially offer right here and right now, I would like to offer up three of my five remaining entries into the Invitational tournaments to twoblackaces. Al, or full tilt, if you're out there, if you can't get TBA into the Invitational where he so clearly belongs now because you can't add anyone new at this point to the competition, then I would like to offer up my entry in half of the Invitational tournaments to TBA so that justice can be served. You could actually enter TBA in place of me into those three Invitational events, or for all I am concerned I would happily allow TBA to log into my account and play under my name for those tournaments, with full tilt's blessing of course. But to be perfectly honest, TBA deserves this spot even more than me, and I am more than happy to make the sacrifice myself to make things right.

Someone let me know how to effect this and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is, please.