For those of you in the non-betting category the World Series of Poker has started and will run from May 27 to July 16 in lovely Las Vegas. As usual the rooms are packed with the hopefuls and the hapless vying for a total of 61 bracelets..

The official site is an interesting hodge podge of good and bad. Live reports from the ongoing events are nice, a link to Twitter feeds is always a positive and so is live video of events. Links to Facebook and a mobile app are great. But where is a general event news link? I am not just talking about past results- how about who has left the tournament, who did not attend, etc…? It might actually be there but it is not easy to find.

Also there appear top be a number of new events including a re-entry event and the $1 million buy in tournament, as well as more tables on the Rio’s floor for the main event which will mean a faster overall tournament.

As in past years the event will be broadcast by ESPN, starting July 3, but as yet does not have a prominent position on the sites web page, you have to look under the More Sports section to find it. There is one event that ESPN is doing on its own that I did not realize had been ongoing- a Fantasy Tournament.

Over the years I have been in a number of different fantasy leagues, baseball, football, NASCAR and one year golf but I have never been in a fantasy poker league, and yet not only is there one but it is in its seventh year.

This Fantasy leagues is however a closed one, which I suspect may change a bit if ESPN decides it wants to do a bracketed tournament of some type like it does with March Madness, for instance, but it still makes for some interesting watching for poker aficionados.

There are ten teams, and the owners of the teams select 8 players and during the course of the tournament they can add/drop one player during the course of the tournament. Many of the team owners are probably well know to poker fans since there are a fair number of pros.

The professionals include professional poker players Daniel Negreanu, Dwyte Pilgrim, Eric Baldwin, Josh Brikis and Bernard Lee. There are two from ESPN, Gary Wise and Andrew Feldman while the remainder of the field is comprised of Bluff editor-in-chief Lance Bradley; Chops from WickedChopsPoker; and PokerNews contributor and 2010 fantasy poker champion Chad Holloway.

Players on teams score points for a variety of actions including finishing in the money, making a final table and finishing first, with additional points being earned on higher buy-in games. I think that this is an interesting way to follow the World Series of Poker and I am a bit surprised that I have not noticed it before.

I am also surprised that it is not more heavily hyped by ESPN as a draw to its site. There are plenty of poker players spending a great deal of time online and this is a way to draw them to ESPN’s site.