So they are down to the final three at the English Poker Open. Regrettably, Julien Leonard, the Cake player, busted out fourth, winning £51,000. I say "regrettably" because that's 25% of what he would have gotten had he won the whole thing. But it's been a wonderful event and we're already looking forward to the English Poker Open 2010.

Until then, we'll let Robin Hood have the last word:

Here we see Cake player Julien Leonard, settled into seat #3 at the final table of the EPO, ready to strive for the £200,000 first prize. Go Julien!

The final table is about to get underway here at the English Poker Open in Nottingham. The last nine guys who have chips, by seat:

One of these guys is going to take home a bit over £200,000. In fact, here are the exact numbers:

1. £208,367
2. £121,814
3. £73,088
4. £51,290
5. £38,467
6. £28,850
7. £22,439
8. £16,028
9. £12,822

If you're keeping score on the other side of the pond, the British Pound is running at about $1.65.

We've had a blast here, and want to thank the folks at Dusk Till Dawn and RakeTheRake for being wonderful hosts. The people were nice, the espresso delicious, the camraderie top-notch. Be sure to watch the live webcast right here at the Cake Poker Blog to see who takes home over $300,000 this evening.

This scene is from the parking lot of the Dusk Till Dawn club, where the English Poker Open is being held. We didn't stage it, we didn't rearrange so much as an empty Starbucks cup. It was exactly as we found it:

"I'm very sorry sir, your hand is in the muck"

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And now, the other reason I'm coming back to Nottingham:

This sign is on the grounds of the Nottingham Castle, which was first fortified as a stone castle in the 12th century. "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully..." Wil Wheaton, if you're reading this, this is for you.

Liam Flood and Doyle Brunson at the English Poker Open. (Cake Poker Blog Image)

We caught a quintessential poker moment here at the English Poker Open today as European poker legend, Liam Flood, sat down with North American poker legend, Doyle Brunson. Without these two fine gentelmen it's unlikely that poker would have risen even close to the level of global popularity that it currently enjoys.

We have live video coverage of the EPO here on the Cake Poker Blog. Double click on the streaming video in the upper right section of the blog for full screen poker action from the Dusk Till Dawn Casino (pictured below) in Nottingham, England.

The 3-Day $5,300 NL Holdem tournament started today. Expect more updates as play continues from our own Lee Jones on the ground at the 2009 EPO.

The Dusk Till Dawn Casino plays host to the English Poker Open. (Cake Poker Blog Image)

Here's Cake qualifier Mark Davidoff. Note the stylish Cake baseball hat in "rally cap" position. To thank Mark for wearing his Cake gear, we gave him a £50 gift certificate to John Lewis - a major UK department store chain that conveniently enough has a large store just five minutes walk from our hotel. The Cake gear also has an intimidation coefficient - while I was watching Mark, he won two straight pots without showing down a hand in either case.

We're less than an hour away from the start of the English Poker Open here in Nottingham and the Dusk Till Dawn club is filling up rapidly with poker players milling about. We do that well, we poker players. We'll mill about at the drop of a dealer button. For instance, notice the people below.

But have no fear - the staff at Dusk Till Dawn will herd these cats shortly and we'll have bums in seats, chips in stacks, and cards in the air. Stand by for more.

Here we are in Nottingham, England - home of mythic hero Robin Hood. [1] The English Poker Open starts tomorrow, and Cake has a dozen representatives in the $1,000,000 guaranteed main event, thanks to our live event satellites. It's always wonderful coming to interesting places with the Cake players, and Nottingham definitely quaifies. I mean, they've got your basic right-out-of-the-movies castle:

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get over to the castle until after dark, so you'll have to wait a day to get a picture of the full castle. But while you're waiting for that, contemplate this: you see a cross-shaped indentation in the wall to the right of the door. What's it for, and why the shape? First person to email blog@cakepoker.com with the correct answer gets five gold sovereigns dollars put into his leather purse Cake account. Hint: nothing religious about it.

Of course, there is a poker tournament getting underway tomorrow so we had the welcome party tonight. It was like most poker welcome paries, except that there were bad impersonators of Tony Blair and HM Queen Elizabeth II. The Tony Blair impersonator actually got up and spoke, which sort of alternated between surreal and embarrassing. Then I saw HM the Q checking into the hotel, which completed the surreality. I couldn't even bring myself to take any pictures of that - it was just too weird.

Oh, and Doyle Brunson and Phil Hellmuth were there. The real ones, mind you. I didn't take any pictures of them - there's enough pictures of those guys around.

On the other hand, here's one of the Cake qualifiers, Fiji250, and his lovely girlfriend, Alicia. Fiji250 is a chess master, along with being a serious poker player. He got a chess scholarship to college, which I couldn't have even told you existed:

You guys that were in the high school chess club? Take a look at that woman on the right. There's hope yet!

Finally, we present a magic trick. Usually to get two great poker players and two beautiful women into the same picture, you need four people in the picture. Here we kill four birds with two stones: Annette "Annette_15" Obrestad and Liv "Liv" Bouree.

There will be more tomorrow here in Sherwood Forest the Dusk 'Til Dawn club in Nottingham.

[1] And by "Robin Hood", I mean the real mythical figure Robin Hood, not Barry Greenstein.