Off to bed

It’s 10:12 p.m. as I write this - after midnight in Houston. I am going to turn in.

The ticket has been bought. I’m in Horseshoe Gold 675, Seat 6, across from the dealer, a good place to see and be seen.

I say this every year, but it’s always tough watching that cash disappear through the betting window, especially when they run it through a bill sorter - rrrrrrip! - and then they put a $10,000 paper band around it, like one of those bricks you see in a briefcase during a drug deal in the movies. There's a weight and tangibility to those bricks of cash that you don't perceive in a digital money transfer. Watching the brick disappear into the cage feels real, kind of like it must feel if you had to give someone the keys to your boat to cover a poker debt.

What's funny is that there are guys (and gals) in the casino throwing that kind of money around on a single poker hand, and not even thinking about it - I've seen it, stacks of weirdly colored chips being shoved around by bored gamblers who can't let themselves think about what those chips can be exchanged for in the real world until they cash out and emerge blinking into the sunshine of the next morning.

As Wayne and Marge's careful middle-class son, I don't think I'll ever be that blasé about that kind of money.  But . . . now that I think about it, seven years ago, I felt that way about buying into the Seniors Tournament for the then-absurd amount of $1000. I may be slouching towards that same indifference at a smaller scale.  Yikes.

While I was waiting in the half-hour line to buy the entry ticket, I chatted with a nice guy from Detroit named Michael. We compared our respective home games, told bad beat stories, and wished each other luck. Although he’d had a bad run if cards so far this year, he was optimistic about his chances in the big tournament. I could relate: hope springs ever eternal for us degenerate gamblers.

Wojo has been playing today and last time I checked, he had grown his original stack of 60,000 chips to 105,000 by playing carefully and cultivating a table image of being a rock.

Wojo the Rock in the black hat and sunglasses

He joined Samm, April, Mike and me for dinner tonight at Binion Steak.

“From here out, I’m folding aces if I have to,” he declared.

“Uh-huh,” we said.

“I mean it!” he said. “I’m where I wanted to be at the end of the day, and I’m not going to give that up.”

As I have five percent of his tournament, I was not going to argue with him, but I’m not sure he would walk easily away from aces, especially preflop.

In coaching us up before the tournament, our buddy Anar had told us he might do the same thing early in the tournament because there’s up to a twenty percent chance of losing with your aces, and why risk your whole tournament on a spin of the wheel like that?

He’s right. But aces!

Anyway, I had a nice meal, a big honking piece of prime rib that my trainer Art would have swooped in and took away from me if he was in town. But he’s not in town, so yum!

Okay, it's now 11:03.  I play tomorrow at noon. I will get my beauty sleep and dream of boats and flushes and Broadway and wheels and sets and aces, always aces. (And sometimes kings, but not queens or jacks.)