Around the World in 150 Days, Day 10, Sleepless in Las Vegas
Authors note: This entry was written while mostly drunk, so the grammar and spelling in it promises to be a disaster.
April 16th, Somewhere over the Pacific: I have no idea what time it is, but I'd guess in the area of 3am. I guess to figure out that you'd have to define a time zone first. I spent some time attempting to sleep but again it didn't work. I decide to take out 'The Wolf on Wall Street' and keep reading as Jordan Belforts increasingly excessive drug addiction has his already absurd life spinning wildly out of control.
I read until the plane lands in Los Angeles at LAX. The local time is roughly 6am and my next flight doesn't leave until 10:10am. I go over to the 'Admirals Club' lounge and find out again that just because I have a first class ticket I will not be receiving a free entrance. However, I do have the option of paying $50 for a one time entry, and considering I have four hours to kill I figure I can get some writing done and grind poker, so in theory it's +EV.
I find a spot in the lounge that has me sitting upright so I don't fall asleep. I fire up the computer and start writing and toying around on facebook. Eventually I fire up Full Tilt and play some heads up, but unfortunately get stacked when I run top two into bottom set and never really regain any momentum in the match. Fuck it, all that matters was the equity involved in playing, plus the action and music cranking in my head phones has managed to keep me up quite easily. I order some dry cereal with milk. I debate hitting on the blonde girl sitting a table over from me, but she's talking on her cell phone and I haven't slept so I'd be talking like a maniac.
After my four hour internet vacation in the lounge I walk over to the gate for my flight and get in line. As anyone who has flown LA to Vegas before knows it's a very easy less than hour long flight, and today is no different. We touch down a bit past 11am and I book it for the baggage claim. I collect my things, get in the giant Vegas airport taxi line, and after a 15 minute process of weaving through the queue I finally hop into a cab and spend the ride chatting to the lady cab driver about how quiet Vegas has been lately. She asks me quite a bit about the poker tournament I'm about to play then wishes me luck when she drops me off at the Bellagio. I wonder how many times a cabbie in Vegas says good luck a day?
When I arrive at the Bellagio I check into my room, throw my stuff down, take a shower and get changed. I walk down to the poker room at about 1pm and find that the $5000 pre lim event (the last of the series) is going off. I haven't slept yet, but the atmosphere is intoxicating. I find LuckyChewy and Charder30 sitting next to each other on a table and start chatting. One of them asks if I'm going to play. I say I kind of want to, and ask if they have $5000 I can borrow. Chewy says 'sure' then gives me his room card, tells me where to find it, and I run up to his room. I tear thorugh the contents of the location he recommended, find over $5,000 in cash, then run back downstairs into it and bu yin. It's about 1:30pm, and I haven't slept.
Ironically, I wind up being seated on the table of Chewy and Charder. My moderate sleep deprivation causes me to hit some kind of strange second wind and when I sit down at the table I am a stream of constant and totally nonsensical table talk.
The tournament itself is incredibly boring. I've never played a donkament where my decisions were so incredibly straight forward and simplistic, where I have basically nothing to consider and there is basically nothing worth a proper write up (let's be honest here, that tournament was dull but I wrote down a few hands, I'm simply way too drunk and high right now to bother actually rewriting them.)
By 12 hours later we've grinded a field of 120 down below 18, which was the amount of players that cashed. After that I engage in a three hand sequence that gets interesting:
First we're seven handed a player UTG raises to 11k and I shove 90k next to act with TT. He and everyone else folds and I move up in the world. The next hand I find 33 UTG 7 handed and with an incredibly tight image open raise. It folds to the BB who call on a short stakc, and when the flop comes 257 he checks and I get nearly enough to put him in. He folds and I move up to about 130k. The very next hand it folds to the MP2 player who is local Las Vegas player 'Prince' who nobody can quite figure out, but he's really aggressive and doesn't seem overly stack size aware. He makes it 11k like he does many hands, and it folds to me in the BB with 99. I think over my options then decide shoving is best because if I normally 3 bet he won't four bet light, I have an image for all in bets right now, and he open raises a ton. He snap calls AA and I busto when the board blanks off for me. I finish 15th for a slightly over $1,500 profit.
Afterwards I stumble off to my hotel room and order some food because I haven't eaten in for fucking ever. Then I pass out.