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.