Day 1 Ends Early

As we ease into the WSOP, the initial focus of my posts will be on my experience rather than Untold Tales from the Rio. All in all, today was not a bad day. Not at all. The hardest part for me is learning who players are. I don't really watch much poker on television.

When I arrived at 11:20 the Rio was already a predictable zoo. The total field for Day 1a of Event #2 ($1,500 No-Limit Hold'em) was 2,048 and pretty much all of them were milling in the hallway outside the Amazon Room along with a plethora of spectators, staff and booth girls. I agree with Pauly that the girls manning (womanning?) the Sapphire booth weren't exactly the cream of the crop, and the Milwaukee's Best girls may as well not even have been there. Maybe tomorrow I'll snap a few photos and let you decide.

1,500 additional players are already registered for Day 1b and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if another 500 register by noon tomorrow. That will make top prize something sick. 4,000 runners for a $1,500 event! I'd say the reports of poker's decline are greatly exaggerated.

I snuck into the Amazon Room, set up my laptop at a table in the back corner and made a few last minute adjustments to Skype, the preferred communication device of PokerNews. Before I could say "Tomer Benvenisti" (seated directly in front of our media table) cards were in the air.

Given the size of the field, the first hour was spent trying to figure out where the name pros were located. We weren't focusing on hands at that stage at all. While spotting pros I was also looking for 'color' pieces I could add to the blog. My favorite was a conversation I overheard between Gavin Smith and Josh Arieh as Arieh (a very late arrival) took his seat.

"Josh! I need you to play well this year," Gavin said. "I have you on a team against six of E-Dog's guys and six of Ivey's guys."

Arieh sarcastically responded, "Well, I wasn't really going to try this year. But I will now that you told me that."

At the dinner break, with the field already reduced from 2,048 to 460, half of the team was allowed to go home - including me. To be honest I couldn't believe that it was already 7pm and that I'd been at the Rio for seven and a half hours. That was with six bloggers covering the event. As the action gets more intense and the staff gets stretched thin, I have a feeling the time is going to fly by even faster.

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False Start

The WSOP starts today. Since the only event on the board is the $10,000 pot-limit hold'em world championship, most of us (including me) have the day off. I think this means I'm contractually obligated to go see the Sex and the City movie but I'm still planning to head down to the Rio and take in some of the action. It should be helpful to see Change100 and Mean Gene do their thing before I jump into the fray tomorrow with Event #2 - $1,500 Donkfest No-Limit Hold'em.

I was at the Rio for roughly two hours yesterday. Even though the first event starts today in about ten minutes, there was a decent amount of action in both the satellite room (yes, a separate room for satellites this year) and in the cash games. Everyone's favorite High Stakes Poker whipping boy Jamie Gold was in one of the cash games. If nothing else, the man has proven time and again that he's a total action junkie. I can respect that.

The room is color-coded this year. Rather than have each table assigned a unique number, each table is also part of a grid of colors. That should make things a bit easier. Instead of scouring the whole of the Amazon Room for Table 72, we can look for Orange #12 and have a rough idea of where it should be.

The rest of the night was spent on the Strip with friends visiting from New York. We amused ourselves by watching the (NSFW) Kermit the Frog reaction video to (super NSFW and potentially scarring) 2girls1cup in a cafe at Mandalay Bay and playing games like "Pro or Jersey Girl", "Gay for a Day" and "Will you be my Faceblast friend?" in bars up and down the Strip.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day.

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The Beginning

Today the PokerNews team has a pre-WSOP kick-off meeting. Tomorrow the insanity starts with WSOP Event #1 -- $10,000 Pot Limit Holdem. You can follow all the action on PokerNews and of course I will be filing daily (or as close to daily as I can manage) posts here on RTFT about my experiences.

Even though I've followed the tournament reporting exploits of many of my friends over the last few years, and even though I've been to the WSOP in 2004 and 2006, I have no idea what to expect when I first set foot inside the Amazon Room at the Rio as a member of the PokerNews team. Everything *seems* so intuitive. It's poker. Poker and I have been good friends since I was about 12. It's writing. Writing and I have been good friends since around the same time. Poker writing is also something I know a little bit about.

But when it comes to tournament reporting I'm just a rank rookie. I've never stepped into the batter's box in a major league ballpark and actually had to hit a major league slider. There's a huge difference between hitting that slider at AAA Scranton and doing it at Yankee Stadium; a huge difference between writing about some short 10/20 LHE cash session at Foxwoods and reporting on the most prestigious tournament in the world from the center of the gambling universe for an actual media organization where I will have to maintain some standards of professionalism.

Last night I spent a few quality hours with The Best Shortstop in Greenland at a bar in South Point. We were tossing back extremely reasonably priced draught Newcastle Brown Ales (but not too many since I had to drive home - *that* will take some getting used to). Gene's a very amiable guy and it was relaxing to shoot the shit about anything and everything on one of the last few free nights we'll have over the next seven weeks.

I asked Gene, as a veteran of the WSOP reporting scene, to give me one and only one piece of advice with which to frame my WSOP experience. He scrunched up his face and stared out over the casino floor as he searched for a response. Then he smiled, turned to me and said, "No matter how crazy things get over the next seven weeks -- relax."

I'm going to be a batting champion if all it takes to hit that major league slider is to relax. Relaxing has never been a problem for me.

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Grand Canyon and Gas Finale

"The Castle Aaaaaaaaaagh. Our quest is at an end!"
--King Arthur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

We finally made it to our new home sweet home in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday afternoon. My cat clearly loves having about three times the space she's ever had before. For my part, it feels great to finally be some place permanent again.

The Castle Aaaaaaaaaagh is pretty nice if you overlook the odd taste in furnishings and the ring of vinyl 45s that are glued to the top of the walls in the kitchen. After spending $240 on groceries (stocking a bare cupboard ain't cheap) and $200 on sundry household items that were lacking, we're starting to settle in a little bit.

It was a long trip but I'm glad we did it. I'm especially glad CK had the idea to squeeze in a day at the Grand Canyon this past Saturday. Neither words nor photos can accurately capture the awe-inspiring feeling of seeing this ginormous, six million year old, ten mile wide, five thousand foot deep canyon. I even managed to convince she who hates walking to do a six-mile hike into the canyon -- three miles down and three miles back up. Here she is at the trailhead:


And then at the three-mile marker about a third of the way down the canyon to the river:


That's my fleece and cap behind the sign. CK's obviously not in the photo but I assure you she made it (I was surprised too). What was *not* surprising was that my rather aggressive pace on the climb back up winded her inside of ten minutes. I dubbed it "The Revenge of Marlboro".

At one point we thought Bayne might be trying to find us:


CK kept a sharp eye out for him in the hopes that we could duck him if necessary. Unfortunately Bayne, Chad and Dawn Summers cornered us on a very narrow section of the trail and the jig was up:




The black one is Dawn. Naturally. I was shocked that they all allowed a fat, lazy tourist to get on their backs but I guess everyone has to pay the rent somehow.

Our total time down and up, including a break for lunch, was about 4 hours. Four hours of fresh air, sunshine, rain, snow and hail. Four hours of fantastic views. Four hours of little discoveries. Four hours of fun. We would have been quicker but CK aggravated an old frisbee injury in her knee (she could write a book just on frisbee injuries). The last three quarters of a mile was painful for her and my idiot self forgot that I had some maximum strength Tylenol in my backpack for just such an issue. Doh.

All in all I highly recommend a visit to the Grand Canyon. It is *amazing*.

***

Now what you're all really wondering about. The final tally on gas.

In total there were 54 guesses submitted. The median guess was $531.59. The average guess was $550.76. Including the trip to the Grand Canyon, we traveled a total of 3,463 miles. We needed 158 gallons to cover that distance, averaging 21.9mpg. CK and I are both speed demons and our fuel economy suffered for it.

The average price we paid per gallon was $3.885. If you had asked me before the trip what I thought we would come in at, I would have said (3,275 miles / 25mpg) = 133 gallons times $4 per gallon plus a 10% fudge factor, or about $585. In actuality, the final total came in at $615.32. Looking over the spreadsheet of entries, there were several guesses that were close and deserve honorable mention:

Bayne - $604
CMaso - $609.15
Donkette - $625.50
Rybka - $626
Iggy - $626

But there can be only one winner, and that winner is Atlanta-area blogger Butch Howard! Butch guessed $614.06, just $1.26 shy of the total. Butch, I'll be contacting you via email to arrange to get your prize to you.

Thanks to everyone else who submitted entries. You gave me something mundane but fun to keep track of during our massive sojourn across the country. And after crossing the panhandle of Texas last week, I have a whole new outlook on mundane but fun activities.

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Welcome to the Southwest

Why aren't we flying? Because getting there is half the fun. You know that.
--Clark W. Griswold

So far on this trip we've spent about $4,272 on gas, I lost over $500 playing paigow in Tunica, and I had to physically restrain CK from throwing my iPhone out the window for having "too much 80s music" on it. We've also spent the last two days traveling across Oklahoma, the panhandle of Texas, and eastern New Mexico. It was flat (except for the parts where we gained elevation). It was windy (all parts). It was boring (all parts). There weren't even any bugs to obliterate themselves on our windshield in a rainbow of sparkling colors.

To say that I was looking forward to the outdoors portion of the trip is an understatement. That was supposed to begin with 9 holes of golf in Albuquerque this morning, a day at the Grand Canyon tomorrow, and golf in LA on Monday.

Unfortunately we forgot to pre-clear this portion of the trip with Mother Nature. Her response:

* pouring rain in Albuquerque this morning;
* up to 4" of snow at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon tonight; and
* a high temp not above the low 60s in LA on Monday.

It figures that I would go to arid country in late May and it would be 47 degrees and raining / snowing. I am thinking back to that Friday night in late January when I initially agreed to this craziness and wondering just how much I had to drink.

UPDATE: It is 5:33pm local time. The temperature has dipped to 37F and it is snowing. We are in the world's worst strip mall sports bar to watch the Laker game. I am looking under the tables for Rod Serling.

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Gas Update!

Last night we made it to Norman, OK (casa de Maudie). We've filled up 6 times so far. The most expensive was at a Shell in Hamburg, PA ($3.799/g). The cheapest was at a Love's Travel Plaza in Jackson, TN ($3.499/g). We've put 77.9 gallons in the tank and have spent a total of $288.26. The fact that this is the equivalent of a coach class ticket from New York to LA is not lost on me.

Some things I have been pondering to this point in the trip. Feel free to provide answers to any of them in comment-land:

* Who were Mason and Dixon, and why is there a line named after them?
* How many crackers are in a cracker barrel?
* Why are aircraft necessary for enforcing the speed limit on I-81? And how do they do it? Do they drop bombs a la Spy Hunter?
* How are you supposed to know how much gas to pump if you have to pay before pumping?
* Who chooses what services go on the blue highway "services at this exit" signs?
* Who is Paula Deen?
* Why are there so many parking lots at the Tunica Grand?
* Does Carrie Underwood really deserve signs along I-40 for winning American Idol in 2005?
* Why does every bridge on the highway have a little yellow sign that says "Bridge Freezes Before Road Surface"? How does this information enhance my driving experience in any way?

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Dueling Banjos

11pm, Sunday night, Tunica. Someone has thrown the doom switch on me at a 4-8 table that I was playing for shits and giggles, so wandering down to the Asian games pit and playing some $50/hand paigow seems like the thing to do. There is a tiny, wrinkled, white-haired woman sitting next to me. She's "in her cups", swilling down bottles of Budweiser. We start talking and she tells me, almost proudly, that she is down $1,000. Playing paigow.

She's very unhappy that I'm not playing the fortune bonus and asks if it's ok that she play my fortune bonus on her money. I agree because I don't really care -- I never play the fortune bonus under the theory that the house edge is too huge to justify playing it.

[Amusing side note here: One of the things I learned on Sunday is that hitting a royal flush in paigow pays 150-to-1. If you're playing the fortune bonus. My royal flush in clubs paid me fuck-all.]

Because the casino requires that I have to be the one to place the bet on my fortune bonus spot, in between each hand the old woman slides me $15. It becomes crystal clear to me how she could be stuck $1,000 playing paigow.

"Where are you from?" she asks.

"New York City."

"New York City! How about that. We're from Arkansas! What do you all think about Mrs. Clinton up there?"

Now I am actually prepared for this question. Before leaving New York, I read something somewhere (2+2 maybe) that claimed that most of Arkansas thinks Bill and Hillary Clinton are gods. Never, under any circumstances, should you say anything negative about the Clintons to someone from Arkansas. The problem is I'm not the best at lying. So I equivocate a little bit and say that she's ok, but I'm not her biggest fan.

"We hate her," the old woman states emphatically.

"Really? I thought everyone from Arkansas loved the Clintons."

The old woman glances to both sides and then leans forward as if she is about to let me in on a huge secret. I cock my ear a little and she furtively replies, "Blacks!"

Hmm. I just nod politely and give her an "Ah. I see."

"Yep! They're real popular in Niggertown. Well, that's what *we* call it."

I can only imagine that "we" refers to a bunch of 70-year old white people in a little town outside of Jonesboro, Arkansas who proudly fly their Confederate flag in their front yard and drive 40-year old pickup trucks with bumper stickers that read "I HATE NIGGERS". I ponder the wisdom of telling the old woman that my girlfriend is Asian and Jewish. I'm not interested in causing a scene in the Asian games pit (where sympathy will most assuredly be on the side of the genteel blue-hair from the South and not on the young whippersnapper Yankee) but I'm also not interested in condoning such blatant racism. As the old woman drains the last of her Budweiser my elbow, of its on accord, makes a motion towards "accidentally" nudging her chair backwards so it tips over. Do two wrongs make a right? I feel like this case should be the exception to the rule since it would be a neat solution to the problem without creating confrontation but I manage to regain control of my limbs and the blue-hair stays upright in her chair.

She wipes some beer from her mouth with the back of her hand. "Yep, them niggers love Bill and Hillary. It's all niggers really." Her initial apprehension about saying the word "blacks" has vanished completely and the N-bombs are flying fast and furious. People the next pit over now know her views about Bill, Hillary and "niggers". I'm desperate to get out of the conversation.

Another hand of pai gow. She bets $15 on my fortune bonus again. "I'm not leaving until you win!" Right then. Time for a color up. Nice talking to you.

Or not.

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Day 1, My Take

CK's version of the day's events.
My version: We made it to Roanoke VA. She hasn't killed me yet. The day's a success!

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See You On The Other Side

For the last two years I've had a photo of a Santa Monica sunset as the desktop background on my office computer. I originally put it up to serve as a reminder that my goal was to be back in LA. Funny how plans change over time.

Prior to shutting down the work computer for the last time yesterday I wiped all of my personal files from the hard drive. Except that one Santa Monica sunset. Even though we're not headed to Santa Monica, I drew a fair amount of motivation from what the photo represented: change and hope. So I left the photo as the desktop background. Maybe the next person to use that machine will be similarly motivated by it.

(If half my life weren't packed up, I'd dig out the CD with the photo on it and insert the photo here. Ah, to be organized.)

[Edit: Serendipity! Found the CD in my laptop bag as I took the laptop out tonight.]


With that, we're off to a predictably late start -- predictable because neither of us is a morning person. Good thing we don't have anywhere particular to be.

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The Price Is Right

In four short days, CK and I are hitting the road to begin our sojourn across the country to Vegas. My idea is to take lots of photos along the way and to keep detailed records of random, esoteric crap - a travel log, if you will - so that I have lots of writing material. The price of gasoline being what it is, I expect we'll be broke by the time we pull into Summerlin and I'll be attempting to sell my meager possessions to pay for the trip (not that anyone would buy any of my crap).

That brings us to the contest. CK and I are driving a 2004 VW Passat wagon, with approximately 18,000 miles on it, from New York to LA and then up to Vegas. According to Google Maps, the total distance we will travel is 3,275 miles. How much do you think we'll spend on gasoline for the entire trip?

Each person who leaves a comment to this post is entitled to ONE guess. The closest guess will win... something. I haven't decided what yet. It could be as pedestrian as a Mookie buy-in or as ecologically unfriendly as a baby seal skin (hat tip, Ugarles). This is not a Price Is Right-style contest, but in the unlikely event that an overguess and an underguess are equidistant from the final total, the underguess will win.

Have at it. Contest closes at 9pm ET on Friday.

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"Expand the Brand"

There's been a fair amount of discussion lately about Harrah's decision to delay the final table of the Main Event of the WSOP and about whether this is finally the "jump the shark" moment for poker. People have been looking for that moment for several years now, ever since the UIGEA obliterated the Golden Age of internet poker. It's hard to believe that a game that has been played for hundreds of years could ever "jump the shark". If it could, it happened before the decision to delay the final table of the Main Event. It happened the day Harrah's set up the World Series of Poker(R) Platinum Plus(R) Visa(R) Credit Card With WorldPoints(R) Rewards through Bank of America.

Four registered trademarks. That's a credit card that packs a punch. Listen to this marketing copy:

The World Series of Poker Platinum Plus card with WorldPoints rewards offers you exclusive World Series of Poker merchandise like poker chips and poker tables, plus buy-ins to World Series of Poker Finals and Circuit Events. [emphasis in original]

Um... yeah. Really? What consumer needs multiple poker chip sets and poker tables? (Other than you, Jamie.)

If it wasn't clear enough that this is a poker-themed credit card, subheadings in the copy really bludgeon the point home: "Here's the Deal", "A Winning Hand", "The Deck is Stacked in Your Favor" and "The Rewards Are All In". Get it? They're poker idioms! The copy goes on to let me know that every purchase I make with this card puts me "that much closer to exclusive WSOP rewards". Thank God for that! Some examples of rewards:

4,000 points - official WSOP baseball cap (so you can look 'legit' at the poker table)
5,000 points - $25 cash back (how is this a WSOP reward? Is Bank of America taking the money out of a special 'HAHAHA here's how much Harrah's raped the players this year' fund?)
10,000 points - WSOP professional 11.5-gram poker chip caddy including 200 chips
13,000 points - $100 gift card
25,000 points - one round-trip airfare to anywhere in the continental U.S. on major U.S. airlines
50,000 points - WSOP $500 buy-in

Points are accumulated at the rate of one point for every dollar spent. For the privilege of spending fifty large, you get a "buy-in" to a WSOP event. I guess that must be a circuit event because last I checked the cheapest buy-in at the WSOP was $1500.

But those are just details. I've already sent in my application form so I can possess one of these magical credit cards as soon as possible. I want my opponents at the Rio this summer to quiver in fear when I casually whip out this bad boy to pay for a ham sandwich. If it's not the mark of a true balla, I don't know what is.

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Kentucky Derby Blogging

Uncle Bracelet, after watching Bob Blackjack lead through 3/4 of a mile only to finish 16th out of 20, says, "Well at least my horse didn't die."

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The Story of the Hand

Mookie funded my tournament buy-in last night after running a caption contest for which I submitted a winning entry. Since I was freerolling (and since CK was leaving this morning for four days), I embraced my inner aggro-donk and tried to either amass a huge stack or bust early.

I managed to do both by busting in the first hour after an early double. The mistake I made on the hand that busted me was one I learned long ago but apparently forgot somewhere in the interim: each hand tells a story. The story of the hand has to make sense. If it doesn't make sense then something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

I opened for pot (280) from middle position with KJo. This is obviously a light raise on my part but my table was somewhat tight (and again, embracing my inner aggro-donk). Iakaris re-raised me from the button just slightly more than a minimum raise to 500. Typically when I see this play I think "big pair". KJo is not a big pair cracking hand but for only 220 more chips (about 8% of my stack) into a pot of 900 I wanted to see a flop.

The flop came down A-T-x rainbow. I guessed that he had to hate that ace. His hand was probably something on the lines of QQ-AA, and with the ace on the flop, AA was less likely. Meanwhile, I had raised preflop first and then called a reraise, so my hand range (from his perspective) could quite reasonably contain an ace. The story makes sense; so far so good.

Here's where it went off the rails: I jammed the flop. If I had an ace, he would expect me to check it to him and then raise/jam, trying to extract some value out of my hand. By jamming first, it looked more like I was just trying to buy the pot (which of course I was). Iakaris took some time to think through it but did eventually make the call with KK. No queen on the turn or river and that's it for me.

Maybe Iakaris would have called a check-raise jam; maybe not. But check-jamming would have told a better story, a story that "made more sense".

The other interesting aspect of the hand is that if I *did* have an ace, jamming it on the flop before Iakaris had acted would have maximized its value precisely because it is less "believable" that I would play an ace in that manner. Sklansky discusses this concept in one of his books by positing an example where you have the nuts on the river and are trying to decide how much to bet. If you bet half-pot, there is an 80% likelihood your opponent will call. If you jam there is a 20% likelihood your opponent will call. If (20% x your jam) > (80% x half-pot) then the EV-maximizing play is to jam, even though it will be called less frequently.

Now in a tournament situation you might be willing to forego some EV for the certainty that you will get some chips rather than none at all. Thus in most cases check-jamming your ace on this flop (assuming Iakaris bets) is the best play. But once in a while playing a hand in an unexpected manner can produce interesting results.

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