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Oh yes, it’s this Thursday.

The 2010 NBA Draft is this Thursday and the great amount of talent and depth this year could make the NBA Draft surprising and unpredictable.

We all know John Wall SHOULD go no.1 overall. After he gets drafted, everybody else can either go no.2. On that note, here are just some of the bright young talents out there who can make an impact for any NBA team once the season gets going again.

First we have Evan Turner, a 6-7 junior swingman from Ohio State. The scout who is skeptical of Wall believes Turner should be ranked as his peer. “Wall and Turner are Nos. 1 and 1a. Turner is going to be an All-Star. I have great faith in that. His size, his approach, his style of game — all are suited to the pros.”

“You can see he’s a guy who enjoys playing,” the scout continued. “His ability to improve his shooting will control his greatness. He’s like Oscar Robertson. He can have that type of impact. Oscar wasn’t a guy people worried about when he went behind the pick and launched the bomb — you almost preferred him to do that — and that’s how it is with Turner.”

Next we have Wesley Johnson, the 6-7 junior forward from Syracuse. “Wesley Johnson has been the surprise of the year,” one scout said. “He has a lot going for him — size, skills — and he’s the reason behind Syracuse’s 18-1 season. He has the potential to be very special, and I’m told he has a good basketball mind. At the end of the day, he can be a 20-point scorer, a good rebounder and a passer.”

“He’s probably the best athlete in the draft,” a team executive…

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Having started to cover tourneys in a variety of places, I can say that we are especially well provided for in terms of our working conditions in the Atlantic City Casino, where I am this week helping cover LAPT Lima. And I’m not just talking about those helpful signs above our work stations.

First off, the LAPT, PokerStars, and Atlantic City Casino folks are all extremely supportive and looking out for us at every step. The wireless network by which we access the internet is very fast and reliable, too. And we enjoyed what I thought was a fairly incredible meal at the casino buffet during one of our breaks. Another one of those sample-dozens-of-things-without-necessarily-noting-what-they-were type affairs, with just about everything being equally tasty.

The running of the tournament has gone well thus far, too. There were 40 tables set up for play yesterday — 20 filling the main poker room, and 20 more taking up most of the outer area there on the second floor of the casino. They were ready for 400 players, maximum, and ended up seating 384, which came close to breaking the record (398) for entries in an LAPT event.

At one point during the day I went through to see where everyone was from, and counted 33 different countries being represented. Probably two-thirds or more are from South America, but there are a number from the U.S., Europe, and even a couple from Asia.

As was the case at the start of the EPT event in Kyiv, it was a bit of a challenge early on identifying folks. There were a few familiar faces — particularly the PokerStars pros who were there — though there were many with whom I was previously unfamiliar.

Of course, we had a lot of fun with one particular PokerStars pro, Maria “Maridu” Mayrinck, who for a short while early in the afternoon was wearing a disguise. But being a shamus, I was able to see through it, and so got our photographer, Carlos, to snap some pics.

Eventually we learned several new names and had a lot to report. Working alongside Reinaldo (writing for the Stars Spanish language site) and Sergio (writing for the Portuguese site) helped, as did working together with the PokerNews guys, Marc and Rick.

Speaking of PokerNews, Lynn Gilmartin was there yesterday, having arrived Vegas with a story about being delayed in Houston. Like me, she’d had an extra six hours or so added to her trip and hadn’t gotten to Lima until five a.m. or so. It was the first of a few coincidences that marked the day.

The other two happened about the same time, about halfway through the day’s play. Just as the fifth (of eight levels) began, I got messages of support regarding a tournament I was apparently playing against Vicky Coren. She had tweeted that she was “Heads up! Just me and Seamus the blogger left” in a Stars tourney. Shortly after, she tweeted that Seamus had won.

Alas, it was a fellow named Seamus McCauley — also a blogger — and not me who took down the sucker.

It was right about then we heard the news that a Dutch man named Joran van der Sloot, once a suspect in that 2005 case in which the U.S. teenager Natalee Holloway had disappeared in Aruba, was now suspected of killing a woman in Lima.

Adding to the weirdness of it all, the woman had been killed on May 30 — the five-year anniversary of Hollaway’s disappearance. Not only that, van der Sloot and the victim apparently met at the Atlantic City Casino, and some of these reports were saying he was in Lima for the LAPT event. Last I heard yesterday, he had fled to Chile and a manhunt was on.

We were knee deep in covering the tourney and so couldn’t really devote much attention to tracking down further details about van der Sloot or the murder. Kind of reminded me of a plane trip Vera and I had taken back in June 1994. We had changed planes in Chicago, then later learned we were there at the same time O.J. Simpson had been. (Recall Simpson had flown to Chicago the night of the murders.)

I imagine we’ll hear a bit more today about the van der Sloot situation, but again I anticipate being occupied with much else. Will certainly be a long day, as the plan is to play down to 24 before we stop. Check in over at the PokerStars blog to follow along.

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I think I might have mentioned something last week about having had plans to interview Kara Scott, the poker player who has appeared as a host or presenter on numerous poker shows, including currently on “High Stakes Poker.” We did get a chance to talk this week, and the interview can now be read over on Betfair.

I asked her about various topics, including how she got into poker and poker TV, “High Stakes Poker,” the recent PartyPoker Big Game IV in London, her joining up with team PartyPoker, and her own play, in particular those two deep runs in the WSOP Main Event she has had over the last couple of years (finishing 104th and 238th).

As was the case last week with Matthew Hilger, I had a lot of fun talking with Kara, especially regarding her experience at the 2008 WSOP. I was also surprised a little about the story of her having trained as a Thai boxer (and that being an avenue to television for her). I guess I had heard that about her at some point along the way, but had forgotten.

There was one question I didn’t ask her which didn’t occur to me until later on, a question having to do with her new affiliation with PartyPoker. She mentioned how there would be some television work there for her with Party — the Big Game IV was an example. I remembered afterwards that PartyGaming had purchased the World Poker Tour last year, so I might’ve asked if she knew anything about the future of that relationship (including the TV side of things).

We also talked a bit about interviewing players, generally speaking — something with which Kara has a lot of experience. Speaking of, I mentioned last week I was thinking of compiling a list of poker-related interviews I’ve done, so here that is:

Dennis Phillips (October 2008)
Barry Greenstein (April 2009) — Part 1 & Part 2
Andy Bloch (May 2009)
James McManus (November 2009)
Victoria Coren (January 2010)
Kevin Mathers (February 2010)
Lou Krieger (February 2010)
Ilya Gorodetsky (March 2010)
Matthew Hilger (April 2010)
Kara Scott (April 2010)

Have other fun stuff coming up over on Betfair Poker in the near future, including involving contributions from some of your favorite poker bloggers regarding the good-gawd-is-it-less-than-five-weeks-away-that-can’t-be-right-I-guess-it-is 2010 WSOP. (Stay tuned!)

Meanwhile, enjoy the weekend, all! Don’t forget the BBT5 continues over on Full Tilt Poker (details here).

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You’ve no doubt heard by now that Liv Boeree took down that European Poker Tour San Remo event yesterday, coming out on top of a huge field of 1,240 players to claim the €1,250,000 first prize. Lot of folks excited about it. Boeree becomes the third woman to win an EPT Main Event, following Vicky Coren (EPT London 2006) and Sandra Naujoks (EPT Dortmund 2009).

Boeree’s win also comes on the heels of Vanessa Selbst’s NAPT Mohegan Sun victory less than two weeks ago. And a month before that, Annie Duke took down the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship — not an “open” event, but still one in which men had only prevailed in the past.

Some object to assigning too much importance to women winning events such as these, arguing that doing so reinforces the significance of a player’s sex and thus suggests another kind of inequality in the way one views women players as opposed to men.

There’s something to that argument, I suppose. But still, it is hard not to recognize the uniqueness of women succeeding in these big buy-in, “big bet” tourneys, especially given the small number of women entering them as compared to men.

By the way, even before Selbst’s win at the NAPT Mohegan Sun, Jen Newell and I chose the topic of women & no-limit hold’em tourneys for our April “He Said/She Said” columns over at Woman Poker Player. There we were separately responding to a chapter in James McManus’s Cowboys Full in which he offers a few thoughts about why men seem “biologically inclined to sign up for” NLHE tourneys.

As we were working on our articles, Selbst won her NAPT title, and so we both ended up making reference to her win. You can see what else we said about McManus’s ideers here: He Said / She Said.

Last week I also wrote a post here called “Women and the WSOP.” There I mentioned how even though 12 different women had won open WSOP events, none had done so in a NLHE event (aside from Annette Obrestad’s 2007 WSOPE Main Event title). In that post I included a list of women who had won WSOP bracelets in open events, with Vera Richmond being the first to do so back in 1982 in the $1,000 buy-in Ace-to-Five Draw event.

Curiously, when people discuss this topic many tend to overlook Richmond’s victory and cite Barbara Enright’s 1996 bracelet in the $2,500 pot-limit hold’em event as the first by a woman in an open-field WSOP tourney. In fact, when it comes to poker history, Richmond is probably better known not for her WSOP bracelet but for her involvement in that story in which Amarillo Slim Preston allegedly said he’d cut his own throat if a woman ever won the WSOP Main Event — another story the accuracy of which sometimes gets skewed.

According to the story, at the 1973 WSOP Main Event, Richmond — who according to this had to have been the first woman ever to play in the Main Event — enjoyed the chip lead for a time, and during a break took the opportunity to tell Preston she intended to win the sucker. Preston (the reigning champ) responded by telling Richmond that if she were to win the tourney, she could cut his throat with a “dull knife.”

The exchange later got retold in such a way as to suggest Preston had threatened to cut his own throat, and that his threat referred to any woman winning the event (not just Richmond). Preston himself later would exploit the apocryphal version of the story, such as in 2000 when both Annie Duke and Kathy Liebert made deep runs in the Main Event, as recounted by McManus in Positively Fifth Street.

(EDIT [added 1:00 p.m.]: Actually there are other problems with this story, including the fact that Richmond didn’t play in the 1973 event at all. Hat tip to Kevmath here, who points us to an article by Susie Isaacs that suggests Barbara Freer was the first woman to play in the WSOP ME in 1978.)

That was about all I recalled about Vera Richmond, too, other than the fact that she always gets described as a “brusque cosmetics heiress” in histories and on the web. There was, however, a reference to Richmond not too long ago on the Gamblers Book Shop podcast (episode 63, 3/19/2010).

There guest Linda Johnson — the third woman to win a WSOP in an open event (1997, $1,500 Razz) — noted how Richmond “never got credit for her win,” referring to what I mentioned earlier about how Enright tends to be more readily cited as the first woman to win an open WSOP event.

Host Howard Schwartz asked Johnson why that was the case. “Well, she wasn’t very popular,” answered Johnson. “She was kind of mean and nasty… spoke like a truck driver, and nobody liked her. And so when she won her event, she never got credit for it, which isn’t right because plenty of asshole men have won and they are in the record books.”

Kind of interesting — and not that surprising — how the story of the first woman to win a WSOP open event appears to involve ideas of traditional “gender roles” as well as (in the Amarillo Slim story) men showing some resistance to the idea of women playing and succeeding.

Times have changed, certainly. The general enthusiasm about Boeree’s win yesterday — from both men and women — is evidence of that.

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You could be forgiven for thinking we were back in the depths of winter on Thursday with three British jumps meetings and an all-weather card at Southwell, but there is some action on turf also at Beverley, and we’ve concentrated on the East Yorkshire track for our three selections.

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