Departure day approaches for the WSOP.  I leave on Sunday morning at 11:45 a.m. on a direct flight on Southwest and arrive in Las Vegas at 12:50 p.m.

Optimally, my week rolls out like this:

I arrive safely at my hotel and try to avoid the crowds on my way to my room.  And the crowds are substantial, I am told.  Vegas has apparently been invaded by (1) vacationers who have finally gotten over their fears of catching any Vegas COVID mutations and (2) degenerate gamblers who just don't care if they get sick.

Which one am I?  Well, I am still a little anxious about the idea of Vegas COVID.  Imagine the kind of stuff that could cross-pollinate with the coronavirus in that environment:  pork flu; Hepatitis F; a flesh-eating STD given to a cocktail waitress by a Russian oligarch getting a full-body blood transfusion at the Sands; some kind of radioactive goo smeared on the dice at the craps table by a visiting alien in town to catch his cousin Wayne Newton.  

So I must be Category 2: a poker player so obsessed with playing cards that I'm willing to literally risk death sitting in a room full of random, mostly unmasked people at a poker table with eight people and a dealer who, in the course of the day, will have touched each other's chips and cards over and over and over again.  

In poker parlance, however, the pot odds are not bad.  Having been jabbed and boosted, I'm more likely to drop dead from getting hit by some flying object thrown by Daniel Negreanu after a bad beat than I will from Vegas COVID.

Of course, the longer I stay there, the greater the risk becomes.  If I stay the whole ten days it would take to win the bracelet, I could look like this by the end of the tournament:

 

But as I have told my risk-averse wife, this is a chance I'm willing to take. 

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After settling into my room, I will then go down with my money to the registration cage in the Bally's casino lobby to buy my ticket to the tournament.

  
It's worth pointing out, by the way, for those of you who are not regular visitors to Sin City that people in Vegas are pretty nonchalant about carrying around large sums of cash.  It's just a reflection of the environment - while carrying $10,000 on your person is a magnet for trouble pretty much anywhere else in the world, in Vegas, it's just walking-around money.  As my friend Steve told me, I've got to worry more about the drive from home to the airport than I do walking from my hotel room to the casino cashier.
 
(Steve was only half-joking: if I get stopped for an improper lane change on Telephone Road by a deputy constable and he or she decides on a whim to bring a drug-sniffing dog to the scene, I have to hope that not a single one of the hundred dollar bills in my car was used to sniff blow from a belly button in a bathroom on Upper Richmond and that the cash doesn't have traces of barbecue sauce that the dog likes, because if the dog alerts, neither I nor the money will leave that scene, except in a sealed evidence bag.)

There will undoubtedly be a long line to register for the tournament.  In years past, I've waited until two or three in the morning to avoid the lines, but I'm intent on getting a good night's sleep this year, so I'll probably have to wait a couple of hours to get my seat ticket.  That's okay - it will probably be reassuring to see the kind of people entering the tournament.  It's like I used to tell my law school interns - if you're worried about passing the bar, just go to docket call sometime and check out the kind of people who passed.  If I have any anxiety about the tournament, I'm sure it will pass when I see the hordes of dead money standing in line, just like in every poker tournament I've ever played in.

I'm then going to relax in my room and work some crossword puzzles.  Fun fact: as of today, I am on a streak of solving 244 straight New York Times crossword puzzles.  Ah, the joys of semi-retirement!

I'm then planning on having dinner with my personal trainer Art and his family, who will be in town for a vacation of their own.  I have no doubt that Art will advise me to eat right and exercise during the tournament.  He's right, of course, but this is one of those times where his mantra - "Health before wealth!" - might have to give way to a competing sentiment - "Just win, baby!"

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On Monday morning - July 4 - I will get up at 8:00 a.m. and go down to the Bally's gym to do a quick workout.  Then a healthy breakfast, work the Monday crossword, and iron my white dress shirt.  Properly attired, I will then go to the tournament room at about 10:15 and get a feel for the new room.  

This will be my first time playing at Bally's.  The WSOP events I have previously played in Vegas have all been at the Rio, a casino with a louche feel, the kind of place with carpet that looks like a million cheap drinks have been spilled into it and a drop ceiling that's been weathered by a billion individual clouds of cigarette smoke.  It's the kind of casino that feels like its corporate masters have forgotten it's still there.  All of the slots are out of date - I swear you'd probably be able to find machines there based on shows like Knight Rider, Petticoat Junction, and the Brady Bunch - and the casino's half-naked blackjack dealers have that kind of listlessness you see in the people running carnival games in shopping mall parking lots.  Like: "You have 13.  Hit?  Stay?  Frankly, just do what you want.  I don't care either way - I'm just here until I can get the fan belt on my RV replaced and can leave this hellhole with my pug for a better life doing Reiki therapy in Coeur d'Alene."

Then at 11:00, the tournament starts.  You start with 60,000 chips and blinds of 100-200 (and a 200 big blind ante) for two hours.  I've been studying my Harrington poker books, which emphasize being aware of your M, which is the number of orbits around the table you have if you do nothing.  At the beginning of the tournament, your M is 120, which means that on a nine-handed table where the blinds are constant, you could play 1080 hands before running out of chips.  That means you have time to wait for decent hands or decent situations.  There's no pressure in Day 1 to chase mediocre hands to stay alive.

But you do need to play some hands.  The blinds are not constant, but keep slowly increasing, so that even at this glacial pace, by the end of the day, you will be committed to 1500 chips per orbit.  This means that assuming you still had your 60,000 chips when that last level starts, you would be down to 360 hands before running out of chips.

I have been pretty disciplined in my previous WSOP tournaments in being selective about the hands I play, in a way I am usually not when playing here in Houston.  My butt puckers and I fold hands that look pretty - pairs like 88 or aces like A10 - but that are unlikely to get you anything absent a really friendly flop or having strong position against weak players.  I may have to adjust my play, however, if the table has super-aggressive players who prey on tight players like me.  I'm okay with that - bullies just need to get hit in the face a couple of times before they leave you alone.

Now, if I get through the end of July 4's Day 1, I don't play again until Thursday.  Two more Day 1 flights will play on Tuesday and Wednesday before they start Day 2.  Day 2 is when you have to start making moves, because the blinds and antes get to 1000/2000/2000 by the end of the day, or 5000 chips per orbit.  I'd like to be at a minimum of 200,000 chips by the end of the day if I get that far.  More would be nice too.

If I get through the end of Day 2, I will get one more day off and start Day 3 on Saturday (July 9).  My hotel reservation is through Friday, so I'd have to find a place to stay, as well as a laundromat.  The tournament then goes every day after that until you have a single winner.  People will be in the money by either the end of Day 3 or sometime on Day 4.  I have no idea how many days it will take to crown the champ, but last year, Koray Aldemir bested the last of the 6,550 player field on Day 9 to win eight million dollars.

So that's the plan.  If it goes south for me (as it will for 85 percent of the people who enter the tournament), I will probably enter either Event 68 (the $1000 bounty tournament) or Event 71 (the $1111 One More for One Drop tournament).  But I am planning to make it to Day 2 of the Main Event and beyond, so I'm not worrying about those contingencies right now.

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For the tournament, I bought a pair of bone-conduction headphones, which plays the music into your skull bones instead of through your ear canals.  This means my ears will be open to hear what's going on while I'm listening to some soothing music.  I am probably going with an ambient music playlist to start - Eno, Harold Budd, Sigur Ros - but I may switch it to Rammstein if I have to start getting aggressive.

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Four days till cards are in the air!

The Big Deal

If you follow poker, you know why playing the Main Event is a big deal.

If you don't, there's a pretty good history of the event on the WSOP site here.  

I have a lot of respect for the pioneers of the game, the true poker professionals who not only could master the intricacies and psychology of high stakes poker, but would also be regularly arrested, robbed, beat up, cheated, short-changed, and extorted while on the poker circuit.  

These were not frivolous people.  Look at these old pictures of Johnny Moss and Puggy Pearson, Sailor Roberts, and Doyle Brunson, for example:

No sponsorships, no charming quirkiness, no expensive haircuts (they had no hair to cut!)  These were guys who showed up at a construction site or a used car lot looking for a game right after the boss had handed out the monthly paychecks.  They would then light their cigars and methodically and mercilessly clean out the marks.  

The singular focus of these guys was incredible.  Consider the most famous poker duel of all time between Johnny Moss and Nick "The Greek" Dandalos.  They allegedly played heads up for five months in 1949, with Moss winning between 2 to 4 million dollars by the end.  Although I usually hate inflation equivalencies when you tell stories like this, I can't help myself here.  The two million dollars Moss won in 1949 is the present-day equivalent of twenty-four million dollars today.  No wonder Nick the Greek, when he ended the duel, said the famous words, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go."  

Imagine!  It's like the old days of lawyering, when a lawyer who got offended by what his opponent said would just slug the guy in the face (and the guy who'd got hit would say something like, "That's all you got?")  I got in the profession too late to be a part of that - you slug someone today, you get arrested, sued and disbarred - and I'm not sure that was my style, but you can't help admiring their moxie, just like you can't help enjoying the stories those old poker players would tell about their time on the circuit.

When I play serious poker these days, I aspire to the gravitas those guys seemed to have.  If I'm in a hand, I try to be substantial and kind of dangerous, at least in the poker context.  You want to yap about my play?  You want to try to get under my skin?  Whatever.  Let's play.  Just know that when I'm in the hand, all that talk is just talk.  Here's what I bet.  You gonna call or what?

That's why I wear the suit and tie.  And notwithstanding what my trainer Art hopes for me, my size probably matters too.  At 6-3 and a lot of weight, I can look like one of those big-bellied Texas rounders when I need to.

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The WSOP Main Event became a really big deal when Chris Moneymaker beat Houstonian Sam Farha for the bracelet in 2003.  Moneymaker got his seat by winning an $86 dollar satellite tournament, and he ended up collecting 2.5 million dollars.

A poker boom ensued, with tons of television coverage and poker celebrities and amateur dead money filling out the giant fields in the tournaments.  That boom has kind of subsided now, but I still expect thousands to pony up the $10,000 for this year's tournament.  They will crown a champion in about ten days, which is like ten dog years of poker, twelve-hour days over and over until only one person is left.

But that's why it's the Main Event.  To win it, you have to be simultaneously patient and aggressive, passive and active, thick-skinned and vengeful.  You have to remember everything, but then let it go and play the next hand and the next hand and hopefully all the hands to the end.

With that much going on, how can you not love this game?

Seven days to the tournament!

I'm back

With respect to gambling of any kind, there are basically two diametrically opposed philosophies, which are respectively held by my wife and me:

Lisa - You can't lose any money if you don't gamble.

Me - You can't win any money if you don't gamble.

Seems like this would be the definition of an irreconcilable difference in a marriage, except that Lisa and I agree on one greater principle:

You should not gamble any more money than you can afford to lose.  Ever.

I first learned that principle playing Guts in college with my buddies.  A match the pot game, Guts tantalized you with potential riches, but the size of the pots often forced you to bet more than you had in your pocket.  Looking down at a pair of kings and at a giant pot, you were already spending the winnings on cases of expensive beer and Chicago-style pizza, and you would declare yourself "in" only to see the one hand you didn't want to see - the dreaded aces - forcing you to admit you were actually light and that you would have to put a humiliating IOU in the pot until you could go to the bank the next day to withdraw funds to settle your gambling debt (because they had not yet invented ATMs yet in those days), unless you didn't have any money in the bank, in which case you went into hiding for a while from your friends until you cashed your next pitiful paycheck from your gig as a columnist for the school newspaper.  

Fortunately, there were no leg breakers among my friends, just a lot of guys giving me the side-eye until the debt got paid.

I didn't do any serious gambling again until one long weekend in 1996 when I travelled to the Coushatta casino with my friends Gary and Keno to play some blackjack.  I took $200 with me and, in an epic run of good luck, turned that into $700.  Gary still remembers me in a blackjack trance, varying my bets, hitting big hands, losing the minimum on other hands.  As gamblers do, I immediately spent the winnings, bringing home a PlayStation 2 and the latest Madden game, convinced that this was just found money, not real, and that there was more money to be collected at the casino when I needed it, because I had a System.

The next year, I brought $400 and again rode the blackjack wave, making $1200.  My System abided.  After all, it's not really gambling if you never lose.

This led to my second life lesson.  

In 1999, my friend Jack Zimmermann asked me to speak at a three-day legal conference at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas.  At that time, I had not been to Vegas since driving through as a kid with my family on the way to California, too young to gamble, but old enough to goggle at the sights.  While we walked through downtown, my dad played some blackjack.  We didn't stay long.  I don't remember whether he won or lost, but he almost certainly didn't have much to bet, especially with my mother standing over his shoulder.

I was looking forward to testing my System in Vegas.  As I was packing for the conference, my four-year-old daughter Sarah watched me count out $700 from a bank envelope.  "Don't tell Mom," I said.  She ran out of the room.  Lisa came in with her and took $400 out of my wallet, along with my ATM card.  She smiled while she did it.

With my remaining $300 in cash, I arrived at the Monte Carlo on Sunday afternoon and went directly to the blackjack table, where I promptly lost $100.  My System did not abide.

I then played $1-2 hold 'em in the Monte Carlo poker room and lost $190 in about two hours.  It turns out that flushes beat straights in Las Vegas too. 

Because I needed my remaining $10 cash for the cab drive to the airport on Wednesday morning, I went to the cashier and asked for a cash advance on my American Express card.

"Your PIN, please," she asked.

PIN?  I didn't have a PIN.  So I retreated to my hotel room and called American Express, confident that if Karl Malden could get them to send him cash to escape bad guys in Asia like I'd seen in commercials my whole life, I could get them to wire me a measly $500 to give me another chance to validate my blackjack system.

"Your PIN, please," the operator asked.

"I don't have it," I said.

"That's not a problem," she said.  "We will mail a PIN to your home address.  It usually gets there in about two or three days."

It was a problem.  I couldn't ask Zimmerman for an advance on my speaker fee - too humiliating.  I couldn't ask my wife to wire me money - this was precisely why she cut my budget.  I didn't know any loan sharks or bookies or even how to meet one, as thrilling as that prospect sounded to me.

So it ended up being the exact opposite of the dream Vegas vacation.  I was alone in Las Vegas with $10 and a credit card for my meals for the next three days, teaching law in a conference room and doing no gambling at all.

I did not return to Las Vegas for fifteen years.

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In the 2010s, I started playing serious poker when my friend Bert told me about a poker game he regularly attended, playing with guys who had nicknames like Candy Man, Roncho, Helen, Sheriff and Floppy.  They played tournaments every other Tuesday along with every fifth Tuesday in a month, and kept stats, and had a big Christmas tournament every year where your starting stack of chips corresponded with your performance over the course of the year.  It seemed illicit and secretive and clubby and I desperately wanted to play too, but I didn't know anyone other than Bert in the game and he seemed reluctant to recommend me because, I guess, he wasn't sure whether he could bring a guest and he didn't want to screw up his fun.

Despite this, after each Tuesday, Bert would come to my office to discuss at length his performance in the game and the sequence of events that inevitably sent him packing.  We would dissect the play and I would drop another hint about playing that would go unacknowledged and then he would ask me, "What if I win?  Don't I have to declare that?  You know, on my taxes?"  I eventually began to suspect he was self-sabotaging because he was terrified about all the legal consequences of actually winning money in the game.

Then one day, Bert told me that I was in.  He gave me an address and told me to be there at 6:30.

When I got there, there were cars up and down the street, but no neon marquees, no criss-crossing searchlights, no tuxedos and champagne.  Just some guys playing cards in a house in Bellaire.  Three tables, about 25 guys, playing hold 'em.  Strict poker etiquette - no acting out of turn, no string bets, no pulling cards out of the muck - but a pleasant camaraderie between men who obviously knew each other well.

I don't remember much about that first tournament, except that I had the bad habit of overbetting my hands, whether good or bad.  "Why so much?" Roncho asked me when I pushed all of my chips into the middle for the fourth or fifth time.  I kept a poker face because I thought that was what you do and he laughed.  Eventually, my reckless betting caught up with me and I was out, early in the tournament.  But the host, Jimmy, was kind and invited me to come again.

So I did and have kept coming back.  The guys (and women) in the game are my dear friends now, and we have travelled many times together to Las Vegas and Durant and Louisiana to play poker and watch Carrot Top and Penn & Teller and eat hamburgers at French bistros and order expensive sushi while mind-bendingly drunk.

That game led to another game, which I will discuss another time, which led to this upcoming week, when I will be playing in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker, a tournament with a rich history that costs $10,000 to enter.  

The idea that I am playing in a $10,000 tournament - $10,000 - is almost too absurd to believe.  For fun, I sometimes like to convert my poker bets into the real-life equivalent of the money to remind my opponents that the chips are not abstract tokens, but actually mean something.

"15 dollars to go.  That's a Wendy's double, a spicy chicken sandwich, fries and a Frosty," I will say.  

No one really wants to hear that because good poker players cannot care about the real money at stake.  They have to play their hand, even if it means that they might lose the equivalent of a hotel room at the Four Seasons with champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries for a weekend with their wife.  Caring about the actual money paralyzes your play - there is always time for regret later.

And if you are playing within your means, you don't mind losing because you're not gambling money you cannot afford to lose.

But $10,000.

$10,000.

I can't worry about losing it because you can't win if you're afraid to lose.

Fortunately, it's not really my money.  If I win next week, I share my winnings with the other people in the other game.  If I don't (or won't) play, my seat goes to the next person in line.  

And fortunately, I'm ready to play in this tournament.  I earned this seat by being consistently good enough in my other game.  My good play wasn't luck:  I've played six WSOP events for smaller amounts and cashed in four of them.

That means that in 66 percent of the events, I have finished in the top 15 percent, and I actually made the final table in one of them.

I can do this.

To prepare, I'm falling back on my touchstones from the other WSOP tournaments I've cashed in.  I will be wearing a new black suit and new black tie with a white shirt and Texas flag cufflinks.  I will have my lucky card protector.  

And I will, as I have done in years past, live-blog the game to keep my thoughts organized and to keep my imagination from getting too frisky as the hours slog on.  Boredom - and poker tournaments are really boring - leads to playing marginal hands, and playing marginal hands is what gets you bounced. Taking notes for the blog keeps me occupied in a good way.

This may be a short blog - I could lose all of my chips on the first hand.  I probably won't because I am a great poker player.  But I can't be afraid to push it into the middle if that's what I have to do.

And at least I won't have to write an IOU if I lose!