Always an exciting time of the year for poker players as the World Series of Poker (WSOP) gets under way at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. This is the 39th annual running of the tournament and one that has a little twist this year.

55 events are set to be run, with the $10,000 buy-in main event in July the big finale… but this year we have to wait a little longer to find out who wins. Controversially, things have changed, once the final table is confirmed, things stop for nearly 4 months before we get the final table played live on ESPN in November.

On one hand, it’ll add a new dimension as all players at the final table (including the ones no one had heard of before), get a chance to secure sponsorship deals and really hit the big time before being shown live in front of a prime time audience, but on the other hand… the flow of the game will totally change, any reads players might have on one another will be nearly invalid by the time the final comes around. What if one of the players gets sick and can’t make the new time?

Whatever view you take, it’ll be exciting. Plenty of stories will emerge from the events - Gamblz will be covering as much as we can here on the website, via Twitter and we’ve just created a room on FriendFeed. As always, the more you can join in on the conversation the better - add your thoughts in the comments section on any post, chat away on twitter or discuss and share things you find via our FriendFeed room. If you have no idea what Twitter or FriendFeed are, check out our welcome page for an introduction.

FreindFeed is a social network aggregator - it’s also a great place to start conversations, especially now that they’ve added ‘rooms’ to their feature list.

A FriendFeed Room is kind of like a forum/message board in that it keeps track of threaded conversations from a specific group of users… where it differs from a regular forum though is that there are many more ways that you can interact with it and integrate it seamlessly with your other online activities.

For instance, applications can use either the room’s RSS feed or gain access via the FriendFeed API to make use of this information in many different ways - you can read content via the FriendFeed website, or desktop applications such as Twhirl or AlertThingy along with all your other lifestream content (blog posts, twitter messages, flckr photos, StumbleUpon recommendations etc.) posted by your friends from the one location.

Think of it as a ‘forum with flexibility / RSS aggregator’ and a way for you to keep up with everything that is important for you.

Sign up for a free account with FriendFeed and head over to the Online Gambling Room, join the group and post an introduction. It’s a great place to discuss everything happening on Gamblz.com and to join in on the conversation. The room is moderated (by me), so hopefully we can cut back on the spam - if you see something that’s inappropriate in there, let me know (direct message or @ reply via Twitter is a good) and I’ll do what I can to keep it tidy.