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!