What Day Is It?
It's hard to believe we've been in Las Vegas a month already. The time flies when you're regularly working fourteen hour days, I suppose. It's even harder to imagine it will all be over in another two and a half weeks. One thing that's been a bit of an adjustment is never really being sure what day it is. As Garry Gates, the PokerNews Director of Tournament Reporting said, "If you know what day it is, you've had too many days off."
Tonight I finished up three days of coverage of $1,500 Seven Card Stud Hi/Lo. What looked like it was going to be a relatively painless Day 2 yesterday hit a snag around 11:30pm when play suddenly ground to a halt. At 3:30am, the tournament staff suspended play with 13 players remaining, rather than continue on to the final eight as we were scheduled to do. What a way to spend a birthday - fourteen hours in the Brasilia Room watching paint dry.
That meant I needed to gird myself for a long Day 3, but thankfully the structure caught up to the number of chips in play, and we played down to our eventual winner, Ryan Hughes, in a speedy six and a half hours. We learned during the course of the evening that not only had Hughes won a bracelet in the $3,000 Stud/8 event last year, but upon his win, he became the first two-time bracelet winner in WSOP Stud/8 history. Pretty neat stuff.
The energy in the Amazon Room, with the $50K HORSE event running, lots of tourists in town for the weekend, and the Main Event gearing up at the end of next week, has been manic. Hordes of new media reps have descended on the Amazon Room to feed off that energy. Some of them are most welcome (see, Otis); some less so. At the end of the day, the job gets done and I guess that's all that matters.
No day off for me tomorrow. The PokerNews staff is getting stretched a little thin so it's right into my next event - the $10,000 Pot Limit Omaha world championship. I'm sure this one will bring out all the action degenerates with ten large to blow. David Degenyamine, I'm looking at you.
I haven't played a hand of poker since I busted out of the razz tournament two weeks ago. Ok, that's not entirely true. While I had about an hour to kill the other day waiting for my event to start, I played some $1/$2 razz on Full Tilt from the media box at the back of the Amazon Room. All of the live cash games had long lists.