Vegas Beckons, a Single Glossy Fingernail Emerging from Behind the Folds of a Crushed Velvet Curtain, All Things Possible and Impossible at the Same Time
I remember precisely when the strangeness of the World Series of Poker became normal to me.
It was when pushing ten one-hundred-dollar bills through a cashier's window at the Rio All-Suites Casino to enter the Seniors Tournament for the third time did not feel like an irrevocable loss of an obscenely large amount of money to play in a poker tournament I had little chance of making money in, much less winning.
As I had done before, I fanned the Benjamins in front of the cashier and watched her gather them together, hand-count them, and then run them through a mechanical currency counter, and then begin inputting my information into the WSOP database, the money resting lightly there, still in reach, still refundable, no harm to me and the family corporation, available for more productive uses like wheelbarrows or new tires or vet bills or one thousand entrees on the McDonald's Dollar Meal menu. I could just take them back and fly home and play within my means at the neighborhood game with my friends, plus or minus a hundred dollars every other week.
This had been how I felt the previous two years. I had read enough poker books to know what I really was. I was Dead Money, a schnook throwing money into the pot with no hopes - no hopes - of getting any of it back. Sure, the WSOP was now paying 15 percent of the field, up from the 10 percent the tournaments rewarded in the past, but who was I to assume that I was in even that rarified air? I hadn't come close to it in the two years before.
But there was something different for me that year, that third year of the WSOP. For some reason, that year, the thousand dollars was just ... money. It was just the price of play.
I did not take the money back from the cashier. I did not think twice about it. She finished her ministrations and three white tickets popped out of a desktop printer, one for her, one for me, and one for the dealer in the tournament. My seat ticket to the Seniors Tournament.
The money then disappeared into the drawer, she pushed over my ticket, gave me a no-eye contact professional smile and a terse "good luck," and was already looking over my shoulder to the next person in line. I understood. There were so many of us to process before she could return home to her family, a normal place where money was still real and meaningful.
But it was not my money. I was playing for thirty people in Houston who were financing the trip and the game after I won my ticket in a months-long poker league. There were no take-backs, so I was able to consider the money as abstractly as one would a cranberry casino chip, here briefly, then gone into the recesses of the casino's vast vault, as if it had never existed, exchanged for a bag of magic beans that might grow into an enchanted beanstalk (or probably not).
I played the Main Event twice, did not cash either time. One time due to a very bad beat, the next time due to a doomy vibe at the table that I could never quite overcome. I've given up on that dream for now, and have retreated back to the tournaments with which I am comfortable - the Seniors and the Super-Seniors.
I have been staked by some of you reading this. At present, here are my investors (by pseudonyms for their protection):
Seniors
The Trainer 10%
The Trainer's Favorite Client (besides me) 5%
My Running Buddy 10%
Jenaissance Faire 1%
The Beer Guy 1%
My Doctor 1%
Super-Seniors
The Trainer's Favorite Client 5%
My Running Buddy 10%
Jenaissance Faire 1%
The Beer Guy 1%
My Doctor 1%
I have been a pretty good bet in the past. The Trainer, the Running Buddy and the Beer Guy have backed me in the past and seen good returns. But, as the investment prospectuses warn, past performance does not guarantee future results. As I told JenFaire yesterday, I still have to play the game.
How do I feel right now? I just got over a bad cold, but it should not recur in the dry desert heat. My shoulder hurts now and then, but poker is not a test of physical strength, so with a few Advil, I will be fine. My hair is a mess, but I am going to the salon today and will come out looking better than I deserve to look.
My game is on an uptick, mostly. I won the local tournament a couple of weeks ago, and I have been playing a lot online with higher than average success. I told one of my poker buddies last night that I am mentally aligning myself to WSOP style, which is to play very tight early, aggressively attack with my favorable hands, and fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, even if I think I have a good chance to win a hand on a draw. These very large tournaments are all about survival, outlasting the impatient, punishing the impulsive, spending the day in the shadows of my hole, waiting for unsuspecting victims to stumble in to be eaten.
I just re-read that last sentence. Yikes. It makes me sound like some kind of soulless predator.
Well, yeah. That's what this game is. You show them pictures of your grandchild, you argue with someone from South Carolina about the best style of barbecue, you tell tall tales about past girlfriends and poker hands, and then you send them packing, dazed by their sudden change of fortune, as you scoop up what used to be their chips. I imagine it's the same at bridge or canasta tournaments, but with much less outlaw style. No one gives a canasta champion a nickname like Amarillo Slim or Texas Dolly.
I will be in LV for eight days, maybe longer if the Poker Gods allow. The plan, as in years past, is to live-blog the tournaments, which has been a pretty good way to keep me focused and paying attention to the players and my own tendencies. These tournaments never disappoint with material about the personalities at the tables, the ups and downs of my play, and the side action away from the games.
For example, I plan to spend some time in the meditative confines of the bingo halls, where vast amounts of money are gathered and redistributed to senescent gamblers with walkers and oxygen masks, passively monitoring adapted iPads keeping track of their bingo cards, while sipping their two free vodka and cranberries in a room quieter than a small town library. It is the perfect antidote to the low roar of conversation and clacking chips in a poker room, and the generic Eighties tunes (think the club mix of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger") barely audible over the slot machine cacophony on the casino floor. By contrast, the bingo hall is like floating in a sensory deprivation tank, hearing nothing but the caller intoning "B-7. B-7" over and over, as you begin to hallucinate the fluttering ball itself hovering over the room like a weather balloon marked B-7, B-7, B-7, then - popping! - as the next number is announced.
But more on that later.
I leave on the 16th, with an unspecified amount of cash in hand, with my best poker buddy Bert on a Southwest flight, the two of us rooming at the Paris together, where we will push a thousand dollars through the cashier's window once again to play with other old men, each with dreams of rings and unfathomable money, one of whom will be right, the rest of us not so much.
To be honest, it may be the blogging that is my favorite part of this trip. I write for a living, but not like this. I get to stretch my muscles a bit, discover some insights that I would probably otherwise miss in the dreamy passage of my life in semi-retirement, and generate contemporaneous accounts of new improbable poker stories.
You will get to see Bert eat vast amounts of breakfast, grown men get roasted by Carrot Top, and our Houston contingent descend on the WSOP like Aldo Raine's Inglorious Basterds, collecting Nazi scalps and generating fear and loathing amongst our adversaries.
Fun! See you again soon.
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