The World Series of Poker ended early this morning with the crowning of Jerry Yang as the new world champion, and a new $8 million man. Yang is a psychiatrist, staunch Christian (prayed to Jesus for good cards many a time at the final table), and a Laotian refugee who spent time living in a refugee camp, and knows what being really poor is all about. He seems like he'll make a good spokesman for the game.

The table was pretty crazy. Yang came in 3rd in chips, and ended up knocking out the two ahead of him and one more guy in the first 30 hands or so. He knocked out two more over the next couple of hours, making bad calls, but in context with his massive chip stack relative to the other players, the calls weren't really bad at all. Once it got down to four handed, things slowed down a LOT. Finally one guy got knocked out by someone not named Yang, and they were three handed. Blah blah blah, he had a 5-1 lead headsup and won on a suckout, but considering his chiplead, he was pretty much bound to get it all in no matter what.

One of the guys he knocked out has an interesting story. Hevad "RainKhan" Khan, out in 6th, was once accused of being a bot. Pokerstars noticed his account playing like 30 sit and go one table tournaments at a time, so they froze his account and banned him. He got his friend to film him playing 26 SNGs at once, and Pokerstars apologized and reopened his account. I heard the story and saw the film when it first happened, and then I got to hear it a million more times as he neared the final table over the last week.