Posted by Johnnymac 6:42 PM
I have been meaning to post about my travel plans this week and never got around to it. Beau's WSOP news today is a good excuse.

My dad turned 70 in June and in celebration he wanted to foot the bill for a big family vacation: his girlfriend (my parents are divorced), me and my wife, and both of my brothers and their wives, plus his lone granddaughter. Being the degenerate gambler that my dad is (how do you think I turned out the way I am), he naturally wanted to take the family to Vegas and so that's what we're doing. And it so worked out that the cheapest weekend that fit into everyone's schedule happened to be this coming weekend.

Now you might say that I did this on purpose but the truth is that I had completely forgotten about the WSOP when we made our reservations late last month and it never even crossed my mind until I bought tickets on the telephone to Penn & Teller's show at the Rio on Saturday night. The email receipt for my purchase had a banner ad for the WSOP.

"Holy crap," I thought, "my wife is going to be so pissed and think I did this on purpose and I am never going to get out of the doghou-... aw screw it, who am I kidding, this is going to be AWESOME! Hell yeah!"

It was cool enough to think that we might at least get to be there in person to at least see the tournament and some of the famous faces that are bound to be there, even if only for a few minutes, but then one day last week my boss heard about my trip and made a startling suggestion, "Since you're going to be there anyway, would you mind flying out a day early to represent us in person for that conference call scheduled for Friday morning in the Vegas office?" (yes, we really do have an office in Las Vegas, I'm not kidding, this is a true story)

"Um, sure. No problem."

"Great. I would say that I hope it's not too much of a problem, but I'm pretty sure it's not. And I really do appreciate your help here."

"Um, sure thing. You're welcome. Happy to do it.... very happy to do it."

So I changed my flight and added a night to my existing reservation at Mandalay Bay. And not ten minutes after I had done all this, the conference call got pushed back a week. Holy. Crap. YES!

So here I am with a non-refundable ticket to Las Vegas and a hotel room the night before the main event of the 2006 WSOP and my wife and the rest of my family not showing up until Friday afternoon.... what will I ever do?

One thing is for sure, all joking aside, I am not going to all of a sudden decide to play in the main event or any satellites and probably not any super satellites, either. Padilla posted a link to the schedule a couple of months ago and all fantasies aside of missing work for an extended period in expectation of making the final table, the first two rounds with all of their splitting and tiering and flighting and off-days span an entire week.

So that's not going to happen. But I am almost certainly going to head over to the Rio sometime on Friday to see some of the action and I'll probably go over on Thursday night, too, to see if this book's description of the night before the WSOP with throngs of railbirds and poker nerds and desperate satellite players is accurate. And if it is, I think that is something I am going to want to see. In fact, I might have to say right now that it's in fact not accurate because that book was written before the Moneymaker Era and I am pretty sure that all of the action going on in the book is exponentially crazier nowadays. Exponentially exponentially crazier.

And I'm pretty sure I'll get some poker playing of my own in, too.

Just 3 more days, baby. 3 more days.

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