Scott Diamond

I have so much to tell you all about the past few days so I will try not to ramble on.

First I played in the Friday Night Tournament at Commerce Casino's Heavenly Holdem event. We started with 2000 in chips and by level 4 I had 15,300 chips. There were over 300 people entered and I was playing very good and made some incredible reads. I lost half of my chips with AQ hearts to KcJs I flopped an Ace and runner runner club put 4 clubs on the board. I then hit a set of ten's and my opponent went all in..I called and he tabled AK on a flop of J-10-5 of course the turn was a Q and I left about 80th.

Ok now the fun stuff!!!!!! I mailed Nam Le some fallenheroesla.org patches and a fallen heroes coin to the Bellagio Tuesday Night.

David Rheem who is at the Final table of the WSOP agreed to wear the patch. This was huge, first Kelly Kim and now Chino..truly remarkable and I have to thank again...Nam Le, J.C. Tran and Quin Do for putting the patch on for the whole world to see. Several other players started wearing them, Theo Tran and Chris Bell how I will ever be able to thank these guys is beyond me.

Nam calls me at 9pm Friday Night and tells me he has not received the package so Saturday Morning I am on the phone to the Bellagio who said they would look and call me back. They never did and when I called a third time that day, the Business center was closed.

Since Kelly was wearing the patch and He had some extra one's I was going to call him and ask him to give Chino one. However at 7pm Saturday Night I decided to take a Vacation day and go to Vegas and support Kelly.

I sent a text to him and he replied with, I will get you a ticket and "Wow"

I called Nam and told him I would be there and I took off after getting a Room at the Imperial Palace.

I got into Vegas about 10:30 pm and went to the Hotel and went to bed. I had been up since 3:00am and was beat.

At seven in the morning I was up, showered and headed over to the Rio in pouring rain.

There was already a line of about 300-400 people waiting to get seats inside the Penn and Teller Theatre where the WSOP ME was being held.

Met Kelly as he was heading in and he was really happy I came to support him. If he only knew how excited I was to be there.

I also talked to Chino and he wanted several patches and He put them on both arms. Now the kicker was I brought about 100 patches and they were all gone by the time the FT started shortly after 11:00am.

So many pro's and fans asked me for them and I was MORE than happy to give them out.

The theatre holds about 2500 people and it was full and there were still 300-400 people waiting to get in. The FT was setup on the stage and was very hard to see because of some stands they put around the table for the V.I.P.'s. There were 2 huge big screens and several smaller TV's for all of us to view.

Kelly had about 200 supporters there and Dennis Phillips had close to 400. They were all wearing St. Louis Baseball hats and Pokerstars gave all of them white shirts with logo's to match, the same shirt Dennis was wearing.

There was so much electricity in the air. It was like being at a college football game. Signs, chants,whistles, horns an amazing crowd.

Kelly hung on and took 8th place which was a major accomplishment since he was short stacked. The hand that busted Craig Marquis was in itself tremendously exciting. Craig had 77 and Scott "Luckbox" Montgomery had AQ. Craig went all in and Scott called bringing EVERYONE to their feet.

The flop was 7-A-10, giving Craig a set of 7's. the Ace was in the window and there were cheers until the dealer spread the cards and everyone saw the 7.

The turn was a J and if a King hit the river Scott could win the hand.. It was a long shot, but when the dealer put a K on the river the place went wild and Kelly moved up the pay scale and "Luckbox" did it again.

Kelly had an exciting hand shortly thereafter. He was put all in by Ivan when Kelly was in the BB. Kelly did not even look at his cards and Ivan turned over K-10. Kelly was up hugging his friends and family and when he came back to the table with a huge smile he turned over his cards and saw he had KK..."Kelly Kim" the place erupted!!!! Kelly won the hand after some drama because the cards gave Ivan an open ended straight draw.

Kelly played great, but eventually he blinded down and went out 8th.

Chino went out 7th and I was on the floor right behind him with Nam, J.C., Theo, Greg Mueller the Mizarachi's and Karina Jett. Chino's AK was beat by Peter's AQ and all the dreams the past 117 days of being a champion and a multi millionaire were gone.

I headed home about 7:00 pm and had to get ready to go to work in the morning at 5:00am.

A great trip, Gary Wise was there and we talked for about 5 minutes and just meeting and talking to so many people was very exciting.

Congratulations to the NOV 9, it was a great show and Harrah's was successful in holding the event for 117 days, evident by the huge turnout.

I could talk about so much more, but I do not want to bore you all with my enthusiasm ...so Take care and Be Safe......