WSOP - T-1

LAS VEGAS -- One more day until Larry starts to play. We finally figured out the best way to drive over to the Rio and park. And then we found a pretty good vegetarian restaurant in Las Vegas's Chinatown section, right nearby.

We've thought a lot about what to eat and where to eat once Larry starts playing since we're vegetarians and kinda picky. It turns out that the Rio convention center has been set up to sell more than Red Bull and beef jerky (although they do have those) for the poker masses. This is a stamina event, after all, so the convention center must know that people seemingly do want to eat well.

Not much fried food, if any. Quesadillas and noodle dishes and sandwiches and sushi. Bottled waters and Naked juices. And there's a smoothie bar, too, with smoothies made from fresh fruit, not flavored mixes. A bottled water is $5.

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When we arrived at the Amazon room today at around 1 p.m. -- the room where Larry will be playing tomorrow (and the room where the featured table resides) -- the first thing that hit me was how quiet it was. In that enormous room with hundreds of poker tables and thousand of players and press and lookie-loos like us, the only sound was the clicking of poker chips. It was still the first round, with no antes yet and the blinds just 50/100. So people were still just settling in.

But at 2:00, it was time for a break. One of the craziest parts of this whole thing is that everyone has a break at exactly the same time. For those 20 minutes, as a couple thousand players who have been sitting for 2 hours rush out the door, the line for the men's room is all the way down the hall, and it's almost impossible to get through a sea of mostly 20-40-something-year-old guys.

That makes me think about the women who are playing. My rough eyeball estimate is about 3/100 players are women. Not nearly as many as my estimate of 25/100 of players wearing hats.

And the room isn't cold. It's really comfortable, so my theory about hoodies as a way to ward of the cold isn't true.

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We were out in the hall just after the break. Most people had gone back in. All of the sudden, we heard the national anthem being played in a different room where other WSOP tournaments were going on (there are many more smaller tournaments during the Main Event). Turns out that the winner of one of those tournaments was from the U.S. So it's kind of like the Olympics:  they play the national anthem of the winner's country.

Some random photos:

Not quite featured tables, but 3 set up for viewing.

A really lousy photo of Scotty Nguyen. He was playing at the table next to where Larry will be tomorrow.

WSOP -- Found It!

LAS VEGAS -- After an uneventful trip (which to us is eventful), we drove over to the Rio to look around. We parked in exactly the wrong place, so we were as far from the action as possible. But we got there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The featured table. Only a couple rows of seats. From watching on TV,  it always seemed like there were more.

Featured table. Pius Heinz, last year's winner, in the center. He was short stacked but made it through the first day.

 

Finally, On Our Way

PITTSBURGH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT -- There's a new eatery at PIT. Created by Michael Symon, it offers some great fries and tomato/blue cheese soup (vegetarian even).



The waitress asked where we were going. When we told her Las Vegas, she told us a story:

She had put $20 in a slot machine at Rivers Casino, and she won $850. She called her husband and said, "I won $850!" He said, "I thought you were at work."

A Distraction from Thinking About Poker

PITTSBURGH (STILL...) -- Here are some drawings created by my 6-year-old friend Lila R. I especially like the dog's wistful expression. Lila's dad is pictured in the glasses underneath the fish.

 

Las Vegas Before Cell Phones

PITTSBURGH -- Still in Pittsburgh. Mentally preparing for WSOP and the craziness that is Las Vegas.

I've been thinking about a trip we made there maybe 20 years ago. Back before everybody had a cell phone.

Larry and I were attending the Design Automation Conference in early June of whatever year it was, and one evening we decided to go to Treasure Island to see Cirque du Soleil. Larry would get there on his own in his motorized wheelchair, and I would meet him at a designated time and place. I took a cab and walked into the Treasure Island casino just in time to hear my name being paged. Really. "Please go to the security office." First of all, they can actually page people? But then, omg, what was going on.


I found the security office, and they had a message for me, a message that Larry had left them by calling on his shoebox-sized cell phone. I have a flat tire and I'm stranded. He was near a small casino down the street from Treasure Island. I started running. Out the door, down the "street" toward the place that I could see in the distance. Well, anybody who has ever been to Vegas knows that nothing is close by. As I was running, I saw a sign that said the temperature was something like 112. 


Finally, I got to the place, and a young couple walked up to me. "Is your husband the guy in the wheelchair?" Yes, what happened? They told me that they were walking past him, on their way to a billiards tournament, when they realized that his chair wasn't moving. He was stuck in the direct sun. So they immediately pushed him into the shade and got him some water. And then they somehow tracked down the only wheelchair cab available in all of Las Vegas at that time. Larry was back at the hotel, safe and sound, although still immobile. Thankfully, we always traveled with extra parts.


I hope that I said thank you as I hailed a cab. Back at the Hilton, we were taken into the bowels of the building where a workshop was tucked away, a whole different life than what went on upstairs. One can only imagine the types of things and ways that things get broken in a Las Vegas casino. There was a group of guys whose job it was to fix things, and it only took a few minutes to change the tire.


To the couple who saved Larry from heat stroke -- a couple from Canada who said, "We watched all the Americans walk right past you" -- thank you again. I hope you won your billiards tournament.

WSOP Million Dollar Buy-In!

PITTSBURGH -- We're not in Las Vegas yet, but as we're packing and getting ready to leave on Saturday, we've been watching ESPN's coverage. The tournament they covered yesterday was a doozy.

Forty-eight players each paid $1 million to play in the the Big One for One Drop tournament, just one of oodles of events during the WSOP annual whoopty-do in Las Vegas. But for this one, the winner earned a whopping $18,346,673! The largest prize ever in any sport. Players included businessmen, philanthropists and professional poker players. Details on how the hands played out at http://www.wsop.com/tournaments/updates.asp

A portion of the proceeds from this tournament went to the One Drop Foundation. Founded by Guy Laliberté (who also founded a little organization called Cirque du Soleil), "the foundation's mission is to fight poverty worldwide by supporting access to water and raising individual and community awareness of the need to mobilize so that safe water is accessible to everyone." http://www.onedrop.org/en/default.aspx

But it was David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital (a hedge fund) who really showed what generosity looks like. Before the tournament started, he announced that he would give ALL OF HIS WINNINGS to an organization called City Year, an education-focused nonprofit organization based in Boston that works with public schools to prevent student dropouts. Einhorn came in third. His winnings? $4.352 million!!!

WSOP Time Shift

PITTSBURGH -- We're going to start shifting our time, staying up later, getting up later, so that by the time we get to Vegas on Saturday, we will be on West Coast time. A lot of players are already playing in satellites or other WSOP events, so we don't want jet lag to drag us down.