WSOP Diary: Day One

Travel to Las Vegas was almost completely painless. Debbie drove me to the Oakland airport, getting me there at 7:35 AM for an 8:55 AM flight. The line to check luggage was fairly brief. Although I was in the second boarding group (note to self: from now on, always use Southwest's Internet boarding document feature), I got a good seat, near the front of the plane. Peter "Foldem" Secor was also on the plane.

The flight was uneventful. I had a window seat, on the starboard side of the plane, and I had an excellent view of the changing California landscape from the coast through the Central Valley and the Sierras to the Owens Valley, and on to Nevada. I got a good view of Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory.

Land, get baggage, wait in long line for cab, go downtown to my hotel: the Nevada, on Main Street, a block and a half south of Fremont. It's a low-end hotel, but not the dive I feared it might be.

After checking in at the hotel, I walked to the Horseshoe. Tournament registration is upstairs, outside Benny's Bullpen (the old bingo hall) where it has been for the past few years. There are two new wrinkles: Players need to fill out a release for the television coverage; and instead of getting a slot-club-style card, players get a badge on a lanyard, like a trade show badge. I've seen a number of players wearing these, but there's no real need to do so. I've been carrying mine in a pocket.

Benny's Bullpen is where tournament play is taking place. On the ground floor, the back end of the old Mint side of the 'Shoe is taken up by single-table satellites and low-limit games. The poker room itself is devoted to top-section games. The race and sports book is taken up by tables, also, devoted to $50 two-stage tournaments.

The poker areas are all hopping and happening; the rest of the casino seems placid by comparison.

I had lunch in the coffee shop, then returned to the poker room. They had just started a must-move $50-$100 eight-or-better seven-card stud game – a feeder game into another game that fed into the main game. The second must-move game got short, however. The players wanted to bump up the limit to $75-$150. I decided that this was just a little bit too high for me, and opted to move to the first must-move game instead.

I wound up spending eleven hours in the game, being moved to the main game while I was away getting dinner (again in the coffee shop).

During another break, I walked across the street to check out the Golden Nugget's new poker room. It turns out to be way in the back of the Nugget, past the pool area. It is a sizeable room. I didn't count them, but I estimate between twenty and thirty tables. I saw lots of low-limit games, and a number of top-section games, from $10-$20 to $50-$100 hold'em, as well as a pot-limit hold'em game (I didn't see what the blinds were).

I wound up booking a $1400 win in the stud/8 game. It was a good game, and I think I could have done better than that. I then discovered that walking a block and a half down Main Street at midnight was a lot scarier than it was at noon.