I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner.  (Isn’t that how every late letter starts?). But it’s true - if you’ve been following this live blog this far, you want to know how the story ends, don’t you?  And I’m very sorry that I’ve been remiss in my responsibilities to you, my investors.

But here’s the consolation prize - by dint of good luck, IMMENSE poker skill, and an iron butt capable of playing poker for hours, we won $3738 (after a $20 tip into the dealer pool).  This means that if you invested $5.00, you’ve won $18.70 - a 374 percent return on a two-week investment.  Congratulations!

This morning went about as expected.  I played two hands:  66, which got me the blinds and a limper; and AQ, which went down to KK.  I lasted long enough, however, to make another $500 more in my payout - a good morning’s work by any measure.

So, I went to the cage, collected my winner’s card and my money.  My friends Rick and Doug took a nice picture of me, then we went to get chicken and waffles at Hash House A Go Go.  Glenn and Bert bought me lunch (thanks, B & G!). Pictures below. (Note the change in attire - after last night’s idiocy, I had enough of the black suit.)  I then entered the 1:00 p.m. $250 deepstack, and am crushing it too.  But that’s a story for another day...

See you back in Houston!

OK - so Shiva the Destroyer worked his magic for 80 percent of the day, then went home to be replaced by Dexter the Self-Immolating Donkey.  Remember him?  He ended every episode by driving his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud into a volcano, while firing an M10 bazooka up his nose.

That’s kind of how my day ended yesterday.  Sitting on around 600,000 chips, I could have just rode out the rest of the day and ended up in the top 100 with 252 players left.  Instead, I played too loose, fired my bazooka at a guy who was impervious to pain (and good sense) and lost more than two-thirds of my stack.  It was also the first time that I felt like the worst player at the table.

I’m not a bad player - I think I got tired, lost my focus, and talked myself into decisions that I would not have made earlier in the day.  So, now I have 120,000 chips and will have to bet 40,000 of them every ten hands.  That’s tough - it means I can’t wait too long, or my chips will just get blinded away (i.e., disappear).

Some good news: there are no giant stacks at my new table (Orange 481, scroll down here to see the table assignments and their stacks), and I am in Seat 9, which means I don’t have to post the 32,000 big blind/ante bet for eight hands.  If I find a good hand early, I can shove with my full stack.  Also, there’s actually a smaller stack than me at the table (poor Sean Kane).

Anyway, I was a little blue last night, but I’m feeling better this morning.  I got up and did a full workout (hi, Art!), and am ready to fight the good fight.  I might not feel like Shiva this morning, but I might be able to get in touch with my inner Larry the Lobster.

See you soon!

Quick update - I’ve moved twice since White 111.  I’ve been at Black 198, caught some wild hands and got over 600,000, then moved to Black 191.

There are now 369 players left at 9:30, Las Vegas time.

Oh, I forgot to say.  We are all winners now!  If I go out right now, I win $2500, and each of my investors make $12.50.  Congratulations!  More money to come - here’s a link to the payout schedule.  The higher I finish, the higher my payout.

More stories to tell, but not right now.  Need to concentrate.

Day 2 - up at 8:00 (10:00 CST).  For all the stress of yesterday - long workout, 13 hours of poker, three Cosmos, poor diet - I felt pretty good.  I had a pancake and a Diet Coke for breakfast.  That’s what passes for comfort food for me at this place.

Going into this morning, I am 26th overall in chip count out of 5917 total entrants.  The plan is to take advantage of small stacks, and avoid large stacks like the plague.
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Okay, my seat is at White 111.  I am the chip leader here, but there are some large stacks.  Players seem nice.  The guy to my right asks me, not unkindly, if I’m going to a funeral.  He’s got a small stack, and I get the sense that he is trying to curry favor with me.  It won’t work - I am Shiva the Destroyer this week.

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It’s been almost two hours and I keep getting great hands.  I am now at 300K, and have knocked out four players.  I’ve had KK three times, AK twice, and JJ once.  Here’s what a big stack looks like...

I have not made a mistake this morning.  I am Shiva the Destroyer.  Godzilla laying waste to Tokyo.  Beware the Giant Stack!

End of the day - I have 193,800 chips, which puts me in the top twenty at least of the 6,000 players in the tournament.

As I am writing this, I’ve had three Cosmopolitans with my friends and am a little bit drunk.  It’s for good reason - I have exceeded my expectations and have a chance to go really deep in the tournament.

Can I win this thing?  It pays $660,000.  Yes, I can.  But right now, I need to sleep off this drunk.

So there.  See you tomorrow!

New table - White 136.  When I pulled my chips out, the table collectively gasped.  I probably have four times more chips than the next highest chip stack.

Everyone here has been playing together from the beginning, apparently just trading chips with each other.  I am the New Guy, but they have been mostly welcoming.  One guy said, “You look too young to be playing with us.”  I showed them my DL to put that to rest.

About 150K.

Table White 136 (and my stack)

Another big hand - nut flush takes out three players!  I’m at 135,000!

I won the hand on the river and, for the first time in my poker playing life, I yelled out, “Yes!” and hit the table, knocking over everyone’s stacks.  Lots of dirty looks, but I don’t much care.  I’m probably in the top five percent now - very formidable.

From the original 10 at Green 235, there are just four of us left.  It has not been as collegial here as in years past.  Not a lot of conversation - just quiet concentration.

Now my challenge is to wait for hands.  No chances.  Patience.

Big hand - set (three of a kind) of sevens - was able to get two callers all-in.  Now at $47,800!

Sorry about the sporadic reports - I’ve been down to about 8,000 and was getting tired.  Hitting the set of sevens has gotten me back in the game.  I was really concentrating, which doesn’t lend itself to live-blogging.  As your fiduciary, I have to do what’s best for all of us, so updates will have to wait until later tonight.

Here’s my stack - oranges are 5000, yellows are 1000, pinks are 500, and blacks are 100.

On break again - at 17,000.  Sigh.

I’m on a run - king high flush, three of a kind eights, a nice uncalled bluff.  All getting me paid.  I think my suit is helping - I am getting MASSIVE respect from the other guys, who all look like they should be bowling.

Gave some back on a feeler bet with the guy who thinks I’m a cop.  I think I’m staying away from him, going forward.  My game is designed to make people uncomfortable - but he stands firm.  He’s one of those guys who talk in poker lingo without sounding like a douche.
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First bad play of the day.  AK, and guy raises to 500.  I should have re-raised, but didn’t (mistake no. 1), then called twice when the board doesn’t pair my ace or king.  Had to fold to the all-in bet on the river.

27,100.  Sigh.
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Your Hero live-blogging ...

Woo hoo!  I’m up for the tournament - 20,300.  My first mega-hand - KK - and a guy raised 600 into me.  I called, and two other callers do as well.  The flop is all undercards, but two diamonds, so I bet 1000.  One caller stays with me.  The next card is a diamond.  I can’t bet into the other guy’s potential flush, so I check.  The last card is a blank, so I bet 1500.  The guy folds.

Onward.
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At the break, I bought my first food of the day - a bag of fruit and nut trail mix.  My friends are kind of aghast that I’m not eating, especially after a 90 minute workout this morning, but it’s not unusual for me.  I used to try cases on an empty stomach because I believed that digestion slowed my brain.  Of course, I know this is totally idiotic - I would lose my steam at around 2:00 and have to binge some M&Ms to get my blood sugar back up, but today, I haven’t made a bad decision yet.  Some plays were sub-optimal, but not bad.  I’d tell you if I did.

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Two BIG hands - a straight and AK both get me paid off.  I probably could have gotten more from the straight, but not looking back.

30,600!  Woo hoo!

A couple of hands go my way, and I’m now at 15,500.

The first one was interesting.  I was in the big blind, and got called by two players.  My hand was awful - J6 - but no one raised so I got to play it.  The flop was KQ6, so I have bottom pair.  I bet 400 and the guy to my right - a pleasant man with an indecipherable accent - calls.  The turn card is a 9.  I check to see what the guy is going to do.  He bets 600 and I make a quick call.  The river is a blank, and I bet 1200.  Later, the guy to my right tells me that my snap check-call made the difference, and he folds.

Still not sure what his accent is ...
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Flopped a flush with Q3d.  Got into a hand with the same guy.  Checked the flop.  Then bet 400 on the turn.  Scare card on the river - another diamond which would give the guy a better flush if he has a king or ace of diamonds, but he didn’t because he folded to my 800.

16,100.  Climbing back out of my hole.
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Q 10 comes up - my favorite hand.  Don’t know why, but I never lose with it.  I have to play it.  So I do - smooth call 200.  The flop is nothing helpful - a king on the board, no queen or ten.  So I bet anyway because it’s Q 10 and I never lose.  Across the table, a guy doesn’t believe me and call my 600 bet.  Turn doesn’t help - it’s an ace.  So I smile and say “Check.”  And there’s something about how I say it that makes the guy not bet.  The river is a 10!  So I bet again - 1200.  The guy looks at me for awhile, then calls.  When I announce my pair of tens, he throws his cards in the muck and starts replaying the hand in his head, trying to figure out how it went wrong.

17,800.  Will be back to my starting stack before long.
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Break time!

Won my first hand of the tournament!  Up $1700.

First to act, I started with 55.  I called $100.  Two callers.  Flop was 972.  I bet $600.  One guy calls.  Turn is a 4.  I bet $800.  He calls.  River card is a J.  I bet $1200.  He stews for awhile and then folds his probable pair of nines.

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Bad hand - I have A10 on the button.  Five guys, acting before me, just call 100.  I raise to 600.  Four of them call.  I get a great flop - 10 5 3.  I bet 800.  Two guys call.  Turn is a J.  I bet 1200.  I get raised to 4000.  I should have folded, but I call as does the other guy in the hand.  The river is anothing card, and the raiser goes all in.  The other guy folds, and then so do I.  I kept thinking that this guy had nothing because he didn’t raise preflop.  But I guess I was wrong.  He was probably playing a small pair, and made three of a kind on the flop.

I’m down to 13,400 from my original starting stack of 20,000.  No worries - lots of poker left to play.  Just need to tighten up for now.

At Table Green 235 in the Pavilion Room.

First hand 99 in Seat 7.  Middle pair - okay starting hand so I call 100.  But the dealer raises to 600, so I fold.  Turns out to be the right decision when an ace hits the board.

On the next hand, dealer warns me about texting during a hand.  Guy to my left says, “Does that rule apply to cops?”  I think he is referring to me in my suit.  Hmmpf.

A couple of hands later, he raises my big blind.  I have A3, think about calling, then think better of it.  Too early to be playful.

On my button, dealer accidentally flips my first card over.  Of course, it’s an ace and now it’s dead.  Funny part - the cards I end up with - 57 - would have been a straight, if I had played them.  But I didn’t, do an ace high hand won.

The guy to my left is playing pretty aggressively, and winning.  So frustrating.  He has had AA and AK in consecutive hands.  This reminds me that, playing 9 handed, there are always big hands somewhere at the table.

Enough for now - will write again shortly.

Well, I’m up at 7:00 local time - mostly a good night sleep.

Bert came in late, after playing poker at the cash (non-tournament) tables here at the Rio.  Apparently, our poker buddy Gary won a tasty $700 in about 90 minutes playing at the $1/2 table.  To give you some context, this is a table where the minimum bet is $2, and the maximum bet is everything you’ve got in front of you.  Imagine:

Gary   “I bet $2.”

Idiot    “I raise you to - how much you got there? - $300.

Gary  (thinking) “I call.  I have aces.  What you got?”

Idiot  “Dang it.  I was bluffing.”

Gary  “You bet $300 to try to win my $2?”

Idiot  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

(This did not actually happen, BUT IT COULD HAVE.)

Anyway, I worked out this morning in the hotel gym.  Cards fly in an hour!

It’s 11:25 p.m. local time, which is 1:25 a.m. Houston time.  And it really doesn’t feel that late.  This is a legendarily notable aspect of casino design - the windowless game room, noise and music at a constant hum behind the buzz of people kibitzing and chips clacking.  Time doesn’t slow down like you think it does - instead, it just kind of slips, like an old transmission, moving sideways instead of forward.  Your chip stack is the only measure of progress, and because it ebbs and flows, you can spend hours at the table and not realize that you’ve played hundreds of hands.

Here’s what I mean:  you mow your lawn, and an hour later, the lawn is mowed.  But you sit down at a poker table, and an hour later, you have a stack of chips in front of you - maybe more, maybe less, but mostly nothing much has happened.

And that’s okay.  You relax, you play your hands, you meet interesting people, and you leave your workaday life behind for awhile.

A few years ago, my friend Wojciech, a fine poker player and amateur philosopher, counseled me to take a poker trip to relax and recharge from the stresses of work.  I didn’t believe him - it seemed counter-intuitive to me that betting hard-earned money would not itself be stressful, but he was right. For me, the narrow mental focus you get from playing in a poker tournament is kind of a variation on being in one of those old sensory deprivation tanks.  (Don't know what I’m talking about?  See an old Ken Russell movie called Altered States with William Hurt and the great Blair Brown to see what I’m talking about) In fact, a poker idiom for thinking long and hard about what to do is called “going into the tank.”

Coincidence?  I think not.  I very much look forward to climbing into the tank tomorrow morning.

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We had dinner tonight at Joe’s Steaks at Caesar’s Palace - I had snow crab, stone crab, Chilean sea bass, and an Old Fashioned to drink.  No dessert.

We then came back to the Rio, where I bought my entry into tomorrow’s tournament.

It took awhile - there were hundreds of middle-aged men waiting in line to buy their tickets.  Picture every 50-plus suburban guy you’ve seen at Home Depot, wearing pretty much the same clothes they wear to buy a socket wrench or fifty pounds of fertilizer at Home Depot, and you can picture this line.

While my roomie Glenn and I waited, I quietly explained to him that half the people in line were what poker pros call “dead money.”

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“Dead Money are people who have no chance of winning.  They’ve lost the moment they buy their entry,” I said.

“Do they know?”

Flashing on Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, I said, “No, but they find out eventually.  Here’s my test for identifying dead money - if someone thinks poker is mainly a game of luck, that person’s dead money.”  And this is totally true - some people think they can cash in a tournament if they get good cards.  It ain’t so.  It just ain’t so.  Can’t explain it, but while good cards help, they won’t win you money in a tournament. You have to win pots with bad cards and skill to cash.

Anyway, I got my ticket and watched my money disappear. Am I dead money this year?  I don’t think so.  I got skills, baby.  Off to sleep now.

On the plane.  This will be the “before” picture.

It will be interesting to see what the “after” picture looks like in five days.  Maybe:

OK - first dispatch from vacation.

I played some poker last night at a friend’s house, trying to tune up my game for this week’s festivities.  If the intent was to build up my confidence, well, that didn’t work out so well.  I played too many hands, particularly in a ridiculous game called Omaha, and spent my budget pretty quickly.  I was home by 10:30.

At least I got a good night sleep.

My flight leaves at 2:20 this afternoon.  I will be picking up my iconic black suit from the dry cleaner this morning, then pack for the trip.

The question is how much I should pack for exercise.  This year has been a transformative year for me after I started working out with my personal trainer Art.  Ever concerned about my dissipated lifestyle, he arched an eyebrow (his skeptical stink-eye look is world-class) and cautioned me against over-drinking, over-eating and carousing, and strongly encouraged me to find time to work out in the morning before playing the tournament.

I’m not sure if Art has been to Las Vegas.  Unless you’re fighting an MMA bout, you don’t come to a casino to be your best self.  It’s like the capital of Bad Choices - e.g., the buffet offers a tofu bowl or you can belly up to the endless bowl of fried cheese sticks with chunky marinara sauce.  You can stay in your room and read a scholarly essay on restorative justice in The Atlantic, or you can play blackjack dealt by strippers in bedazzled corsets.  And since it’s already 127 degrees outside in the Nevada desert in June, you really don’t walk anywhere outside of the casino.

Art, being a really good trainer, has an ace in the hole (like the gambling reference?).  If I don’t meet my weight loss goal for this month (weigh in on the 19th), I have agreed to do 100 burpees.  What’s a burpee?  I didn’t know when I signed Art’s contract (it is in writing), but when I looked it up online, I blanched.  Check it out here.



Suffice to say, it will be informing my decisions this week. Eeeesch.

OK - time to start getting ready for the trip.

If you are here, it's because you invested $5.00 to purchase 0.5% of my winnings (if any) in the 2019 World Series of Poker Seniors Tournament, being conducted at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 13, and I have given you this blog address to follow my adventures this week.

You are in an exclusive club of 25 people who have seen enough potential in me to forego the things you could have spent the five dollars on instead, like:

• A bag of Rattlesnake Snap Bean seeds.
• A vintage issue of the National Lampoon.
• A concert quality wooden kazoo.
• A tube of bespoke Italian toothpaste.
• The highly underrated McCormick & Schmick's Happy Hour cheeseburger.
• The highly underrated Death by Injection CD Down at the Courthouse (featuring the song "Witness Stand")

This will be the fourth year I have entered the Seniors Tournament.  It's $1000 to enter, and for that considerable sum, you get 20,000 chips to play with (here's the structure sheet).  Without going into a lot of poker detail - that's for later in this blog - 20,000 chips are a lot of ammunition, and played conservatively, can keep you in the tournament for a really long time.

Of course, this being no-limit poker, you can find yourself on the wrong side of an all-in bet and be bounced out of the tournament quickly regardless of how many chips you have.  It's happened to me before.

The first year I played in this tournament, I played too many hands and found myself with sub-optimal chips after about seven hours, and was forced to push all my chips into the middle of the table with AJ offsuit against a guy with a lot more chips and an AQ.  When I did not pair my jack, I was out.

The second year I played in the Seniors Tournament, I finished 758th and made $1587.  For those of you who bought a share of me for $5, you made $8, a nice return on investment.

Last year, I went out pretty early when my JJ lost to a disguised set (three of a kind) of 2s.  I was kind of shell-shocked as I left the poker room, and realized that I had, like the first year, played too many hands too aggressively.  I won't make that mistake again this year.

I am arriving at the Rio on Wednesday afternoon with my friend Bert.  We're sharing a room with our friend Glenn, who weirdly does not play poker, but wanted to tag along to see us play and see some shows.

On Wednesday night, me and my poker buddies are dining at Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak and Snow Crab at Caesar's Palace.  In 2017, the seafood tower we shared powered my deep run (here are my friends Gary, Manni, and Bert at Bardot Brasserie, sharing a ridiculous amount of seafood):

After that, I'll try to get a good night sleep before the tournament begins at 10:00 a.m., Las Vegas time.  My plan is to work out on Thursday morning (hello, Art!), then put on my black suit, black tie, and starched white shirt and have a healthy breakfast, kind of like last year.

  

We're planning on sushi on Thursday night (but only if I'm out of the tournament), and Carrot Top on Friday night (but only if I'm out of the tournament).  I would gladly pass on both to chase the tournament win, however.

I will regularly update this page as the tournament goes on.  Writing my impressions will, in theory, keep me from getting bored and throwing away chips on poor hands.  It will also be a good tool to keep some tabs on the players over time - that can be the difference between a call or fold that ends my tournament or puts me in the cash.

Thanks again for your support!  Vegas awaits . . .