I'm Heeeeeerrrrrrrrrre

As I write this I am sitting in my room at Monte Carlo, and it is 2:17am local Vegas time. My plane landed a couple of hours ago and I headed straight over to the Rio, where I just registered for WSOP Event #12, 6-max no-limit holdem, which will begin at 12 noon Vegas time tomorrow (today), less than 10 hours from now. Fortunately that's about twice as much sleep as I usually get so I should be nice n rested for the big event tomorrow.

Have I mentioned how much I love being in Las Vegas for World Series time? While I was in the WSOP room to register for Event #12, I decided to stick around for a short while and watch as the money bubble was reached in Event #11, 7-Card Stud with a $5000 buyin. In just maybe 15 minutes walking around the Rio, I sat and watched the following pros make the money in this tournament, and these were just the people I recognized from a quick look at them:

Johnny Fuckin Chan
Scott Fischman (sitting immediately to Johnny Chan's left)
Phil Ivey
Chris Ferguson, on a very short stack as the bubble burst
Humberto Brenes
Jeffrey Lisandro (sitting two seats to Humberto's right)
Daniel Negreanu
Cindy Violette (sitting immediately to Daniel's left)
Barry Greenstein (sitting immediately to Cindy's left)

Is that a great table there or what? All at one end of the table, one after the other, is Negreanu, Violette and Greenstein. Yeeech. Glad I'm not sitting across from that motley crew there.

I'm also pretty sure I saw Vanessa Rousseau also make the money, though I could have been wrong about that being her. It was some hot chick anyways, that I can definitely verify for you.

I also saw and said hi to Gus Hansen right as I walked into the World Series room. Gus was just leaving and my guess is he just missed the money in the 7-Stud event.

I know I've written about this before, but to me there is just something magical about being 5 feet away from all these big name pros who I've watched so much on tv and followed so much online over the past several years. This is why I come out to the WSOP, to be part of the same thing that all my poker heroes look forward to once a year to show their mettle against the best of the best. Now I will be heading to bed for a nice, restful sleep before getting up and heading back to the Rio to hopefully make my best-ever live casino tournament run. So far in I think 3 attempts in multi-day live casino events in my life, I have failed to last beyond the first day in any of them. My best run ever was also my most recent, which was the WSOP Circuit Event at Caesar's in Atlantic City back in early March, but even then I only managed to last about 7 1/2 hours as I recall, so it's still not much to write home about. This week in Vegas I intend to change that, starting with today's 6-max nlh event.

Time for bed. I'll write more since my pc is working so well in my room here.