California Dreamin'

"They call Los Angeles the 'City Of Angels', but I didn't find it to be that, exactly," said Sam Elliot over the opening crawl of the seminal late 90s Los Angeles movie, The Big Lebowski. "But I'll allow it," he added, "as there are some nice folks there." There won't be any angels or nice folks at the Commerce Casino for Day 1 of the 2009 L.A. Poker Classic Main Event that gets underway later today. This will be a bare-knuckle brawl, with each competitor dreaming of a life-changing payday.

It surprises a fair number of people to learn that all forms of poker are legal in California. The truth is that California (and the Los Angeles area in particular) is the poker capital of the United States and has been since the 1970s, when the Oaks Card Club challenged the California Attorney General's interpretation of the gambling laws and regulations on the books, claiming that they did not ban flop poker. An appeals court agreed, finding not only that flop poker wasn't banned in California but also that no form of poker was banned. That ruling created a second "gold rush" in California, as dozens of poker rooms sprang up looking to cash in on the suddenly-legitimized form of gambling.

The Commerce Casino in Commerce, California, about eight miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, is the 800-pound gorilla and undisputed king of California card clubs. With more than 150 tables devoted exclusively to poker, and another 80 devoted to table games like three-card poker and pai gow poker, Commerce is the largest poker room in the world. It's therefore fitting that Commerce should be the setting for the $10,000 World Poker Tour championship event that will unfold here over the course of the next week.

The total number of entries for this tournament is expected to be more than 700 of the most talented and/or richest poker players this side of Hollywood. Get out your poker-celebrity-watching binoculars; with first prize expected to be seven figures, this will be a deep field. Whoever takes home that prize will be in august company. Phil Ivey, Eric Hershler, Alan Goehring, Michael Mizrachi, Antonio Esfandiari and Gus Hansen have all won the L.A. Poker Classic Main Event since the WPT shook up the poker world six years ago.

Action is underway just after noon local time. PokerNews will be live on the tournament floor to bring you all of the action. Stick around!