Lisa Wheeler, president of Greasie Wheels, a poker consultancy that specializes in charity events, says that actually, numbers are not up across the board at charity tourneys in Las Vegas and elsewhere, though thanks to a handful of players, they aren’t hurting like all get-out:

Though attendance is down, and charity poker tournament coordinators are constantly looking for creative ways to stimulate participation, poker players continue to be extremely charitable. Many who have experienced success over the years have often donated even more. It balances out the ones who are less able.

The All In for Cerebral Palsy charity tourney ran last weekend at the Hard Rock … and as any event-planning fundraiser can tell you, it’s been a little unnerving in 2009 wondering if people will actually show up to support your cause.

This was a $500 buy-in event (with $200 rebuys, an auction, and silent auction to boot) … and in the end turned out to be an arguably successful second-annual event — raising more than $58k for the One Step Closer Foundation while bettering its inaugural bar of $44k. Some 91 players competed for an $18,500 prize pool — including yours truly, who was in on a freeroll, but couldn’t resist making a tax-deductible, charitable donation to keep playing at a fun table with a PPA friend, Dennis Phillips, a CP-suffering beneficiary, and Ken Davitian (the fat naked guy from Borat) … especially with Davitian and another actor (whom I recognized but couldn’t name) being the weakest players yet having the biggest stacks as the rebuy period was coming to a close.

Alas, QQ sometimes is < AK just minutes before the break. I shook off the tilt by wandering around with a (shaky) camera to give you a glimpse of All In for CP and the Las Vegas rounders who seem to continuously show up and spur donations via fun-times feelgood poker when called upon:

Here’s a better look at the new Aria poker room in CityCenter … with Aria photos and info coming from Flipchip at LasVegasVegas:

photo: Flipchip/LasVegasVegas

24 tables.

Games being spread in the opening days:

1/3 NLH
2/5 NLH
5/10 NLH
4/8 Mixed (Badugi, 2-7, Razz, Stud 8, O8)
100/200 PLO

Photo: Flipchip/LasVegasVegas

NOTE: According to @LasVegasMichael, while this room was absolutely packed throughout the evening, the games totally died by morning, with only two 1/2 tables, and some heads-up 2/5 going on shortly after sunrise this morn.

Perhaps to be expected on an overall slow Vegas weekend, in a room without a loyal following yet, with most of the players being just passersby?

The ARIA poker room, at CityCenter, along with the rest of the casino around it, is now open for business. Here’s a picture of last night’s festivities, celebrating the addition of 4,000 more hotel rooms to the relatively unoccupied Strip:

photo: Scott Harrison

The AP reports some guy named “Daniel” was the first person to sign up for action — putting his name on an interest list for 1/2 no-limit hold’em two hours before ARIA opened for business at midnight.

Now that all the multibillion-dollar pomp and circumstance is over (ha) … low-stakes Vegas pokerers may want to head to the Hard Rock, where we’ve got a Pokerati 1/2 game (nlh/plo round of each, w/ automatic run-it-twice) getting underway tonight at 7 pm. #MoreFireworks

UPDATE: The Pokerati Hard Rock game made a full table … even has a very brief wait for seats, but broke by 11 pm. Everyone was headed to Aria … where there supposedly “like 37 tables!” all full with a $1/$3 waiting list some 30something deep. I guess people really like new shiny things.

RE-UPDATE: Here’s more on the Aria, with specifics about their poker room, from Gaming Today:

The entire race and sports books is located in its own wing near the north entrance of ARIA, which also features the casino’s poker room.

Poker Room Manager Adam Altwies has created a beautiful room with 24 tables, 18 of them located on the main floor, with five in a high-limit alcove and one reserved for an exclusive VIP room.

The room is designed so players have plenty of elbow room, with comfortable chairs and food and beverage service available.

A nice touch is the Genesis-Bravo reservation system, which allows the poker room to summons the guest through a text message to his cell phone, rather than using some of the pager-type systems.

After a delay when an original schedule was “leaked”, the 2010 WSOP Schedule is now online with 57 bracelet events. The WSOP starts with a doubleheader on Friday, May 28th with the $500 Casino Employees Event starting at 12 noon, followed by the $50,000 Players’ Championship, which will be an 8-game mix (HORSE, NL Holdem, Pot-limit Omaha and 2-7 Triple Draw). The final table will consist of No-Limit holdem only.

The full schedule, with structure sheets are now online at the wsop.com site.

For other details regarding the 2010 WSOP:

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Here’s this week’s episode, with a report from the WPT Five Diamond Classic, a Mike Sexton interview, and other stuff. Per usual, parts 2 and 3 appear on the next page:

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From EGRmagazine.com comes word that lawyers from the state of Kentucky filed a motion add additional US citizens and companies to the list of 141 domains the state has been attempting to seize since September 2008. This is an interesting development since a decision from the Kentucky Supreme Court is expected soon from the October hearing appealing KY’s Court of Appeals decision to prevent the seizure. No names or companies were mentioned in the motion, requesting a hearing on January 20 before Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Wingate, who granted the request for seizure. More details as they become available.

ESPN.com’s Andrew Feldman and Bernard Lee co-host the last Inside Deal episode of the year, discussing the news in the poker world over the past few weeks and a visit from 2009 World Champion Joe Cada. The good news is the web series will continue in 2010.

The NBA has long been in line with the NFL when it comes to publicly opposing betting on their games — especially since one of their refs got so deep into it with shady non-legal sports-betting types that it may or may not have jeopardized the purity of his calls.

However, it turns out that busting bad guy Tim Donaghy has had the NBA taking a closer look at sports betting and seeing some new realities … perhaps.

While the league’s seemingly softening stance gets Las Vegas excited about the possibility of having its own franchise some day (the NFL still says no way, not never!) the discussion has now been opened up in the sports betting world for the possibility of “nationally legalized gambling” on the NBA.

I don’t even need to waste your time pointing out how obviously connected this is to anti-UIGEA efforts, right? Good to see the big-league sports media embracing PPA talking points … and at least one big-league honcho open to changing a long-held anti-gambling position.

Click here to read SI’s discussion with David Stern on where fully legal gambling may or may not fit in the future.

Perhaps inspired by Wicked Chops’ telling him to please stop, Jeff Madsen apparently has rented 8 Mile and/or got laid this weekend:

ALT HED: Poor Girl

Man, 2009 sure has been a year full of lawsuits, no? People seem to need money these, and I suppose they gotta find it somewhere … and that may or may not alter their perception of who really owes what to whom. Beyond the frivolous, sometimes the big guy screwed the little guy, other times the little-guy with big-money poker dreams (but little experience in poker) defrauded backers and/or customers, and other times plans just didn’t work, and the parties can’t seem to agree on what they agreed on.

In this situation, Guardian Gaming is suing Montel Williams and the International Team Poker League in federal court over a $300k apparently investment gone awry.

The plan called for a team tournament concept attached to live casino events and a (new) online poker site. I dunno … sounds to me a little like the Poker Bowl meets WorldPokerParty.com, maybe with a dash of Sports Legends Challenge?

Without looking too deeply into the Montel case, we can tell you:

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Unconfirmed … but that’s the word we’re spreading, based on possibly drinky information from a semi-reliable source, a presumably reliable source, and a plausibly reliable source.

The status of PokerPages has been up in the air ever since they announced they’d be closing up shop effective Oct. 31. That day passed and they still kept publishing — and even sent two reporters to cover the November Nine. But no original content has been put up on the site since Dec. 3. Everyone was expecting some sort of sale, and now that has apparently gone through.

PokerPages, of course, is one of the oldest poker information sites on the internet – having reported on tournaments since 2000 … and having built a massive tourney/player/results database in the process.

What PokerStars plans to do with a site they haven’t yet told many people they’ve bought (or intend to buy) remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the transition from NeverwinPoker to Donkdown seems complete — with the old NWP forums successfully transfered over to their new home. Donkdown is now a Bryan Micon and Todd Witteles (aka “Dan Druff”) joint, with no more Tony G or Dustin Woolf, who is now the lone face for his namesake site.

Speaking of forums … 2+2 honcho Mason Malmuth has sued Dutch Boyd (and a guy named Anthony Scocozza) over domain squatting issues.

Oh, and our once-superbeloved PokerBlog.com … yeah, they’re apparently gone. For at least the past week, visiting the site gives you this message:

Fatal error: Table ‘./pokerblog/cache’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT data, created, headers FROM cache WHERE cid = ‘variables’ in /home/pokerblogcom/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66

R.I.P. Yeah, seems kinda appropriate. PokerBlog was/is a PartyPoker operation … but now they seem to be focussing blogging efforts on their more official company blog.

UPDATE: PokerBlog is back. Looks like we can expect some WPT coverage there.

Speaking of the M Resort … Wow, not sure how all the #WPBT bloggers in town missed this (ha!) … the lighting this weekend of the biggest (cut) Christmas tree in the USA. Seriously, it was going on right down the street and yet the idea of going South for free hot chocolate and Christmas caroling never came up once!

The 109-feet-tall, 11-ton White Fir from Oregon may be the biggest bush in town, but I guess it’s still not large enough to be seen from inside the Imperial Palace Geisha bar.

See how this recent addition at the very bottom of the Las Vegas Strip stacks compares to other arboreal monster stacks here.

This (long) weekend’s #WPBT festivities are coming to a close … and as I type the poker bloggers are gathered for Sunday football at Lagasse’s Stadium in the Palazzo. There some of them are experiencing, for the first time, what many say is the future of gambling: handheld, semi-portable real-money action.

A new-ish device, “eDeck”, lets you gamble Blackberry/iPhone-style theoretically from anywhere, but currently within the confines of three Las Vegas casinos — the Venetian, Palazzo, and M Resort. Global Gaming Business Magazine named it Best Table Game Product or Innovation for 2009. And none other than Doyle Brunson has been pimping it:

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Another in a long line of poker related songs comes from Phil Bellante who’s hoping to parlay his appearing on ESPN.com’s Poker Edge podcast with Phil Gordon and Andrew Feldman into a few sales of his song “All In”. Here’s Phil performing his song live at the Adams Avenue Street Fair in San Diego back in September:

You can get more info on a website dedicated to the song as it appears it’ll be getting exposure on other poker programming in the coming months.