Another charity tournament that I didn't enter

I played at the Venetian today, partly because the big NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) is in town, and I thought that was a likely spot its attendees would congregate, but also because I knew that Jennifer Harman's annual charity tournament for the SPCA would be there, which might be fun to watch.

They had staff and/or volunteers from the SPCA there with a bunch of adoptable animals, cleverly taking advantage of the publicity to try to place a few, as well as show the public what sweet critters they have there ready for homes:










Maybe I'm just stupid, but I thought that that might have actually been Cab Calloway there, until I got home, looked him up, and discovered that he died in 1994. So probably not.




Louis Anderson took a turn posing with a doggy to try to help get it adopted:




As usual for such events, there were a bunch of celebrities. There was a protracted "red carpet" thing going on. I took a couple of quick breaks from my poker game to snap a few shots, but I didn't have the patience or interest to stick around from beginning to end. Frankly, I can never figure out why those things take so long. Should be about 30 seconds per celebrity, 60 tops. But they turn out to be like traffic congestion--going slow for no apparent reason. People are just standing around waiting for their turn to step in front of the camera, and there's no obvious reason they're not going, but everything just goes in slow motion anyway.

Here's Robert Iler, "A.J." from "The Sopranos" (best drama ever put on television).




And here's Holly Madison, Hugh Hefner's ex-#1 girlfriend. Whatever oddities and flaws she may have, she certainly knows how to smile and pose.






There were a few fake celebrities, too, though I'm not clear on what their purpose was, when there were plenty of real ones to grab public attention.






And, of course, there were poker celebrities.

Erik Seidel:




Tom McEvoy:




David "The Maven" Chicotsky:




Tiffany Michelle:




Andy Bloch, with a cat named Corkie (as per his Twitter feed):




And, of course, Jennifer Harman. I have no idea who the others with her are, but they seemed to be connected to some organization that was donating a bunch of money to the SPCA:




Jimmy "Gobboboy" Fricke was there, but not as part of this event. He was at the final table (day 2) of yesterday's Deep Stack Extravaganza. My cash game, oddly, was in the tournament area, right by the elevated platform where they had the final table going on. It seemed that nobody was paying any attention to it. I tried taking a picture, but it came out blurry because I didn't use flash and had it on telephoto, and right after I snapped it they asked me not to take pictures in the "gaming area." So it looks like a stalkerish photo, even though that's not what I wanted the result to be.




Lots and lots of other poker and non-poker familiar names/faces were there. I made no effort to catch them all. Just got you a sampling.

There were a bunch of cool things available for bidding through a silent auction. A couple of examples:






That's all I have to tell you about it.