Scott is Playing the Main Event of the 2023 World Series of Poker

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 aroun...

I came home early from my family vacation in Galveston last night. After I put away the stuff I brought back from the beach house - including two half-gallon jars of the mole poblano I made there using this ridiculously complicated recipe - and after I watered my unusually successful potted herb garden, I had the house to myself.  No dogs, no kids, no lovely spouse, just me puttering around in a quiet house. I should have gone to bed early. My flight this morning was at 9:25, which meant I needed to be up at 6:15 to be out the door by 7:15. But I stayed up, rereading my poker books, looking for a nugget of wisdom that I could retrieve at exactly the right time to survive in the tournament. I didn't find it. Poker books are mostly probability treatises, advising you on how to calculate your likelihood of making the winning hand and size your bet to avoid suboptimal returns and seize on bargains, and psychology manuals, telling you how to read opponents, sniff out weakness, and use...

For those of you new to my live-blogging on playing the World Series of Poker, this is how last year's Main Event blog ended: The Main Event isn't for the faint of heart. I don't remember the last time I felt this drained.   The prospect of playing another ten hours on Saturday and another ten hours on Sunday before making the cash seems like climbing a Himalayan mountain in your bare feet. And it wasn't the poker play that was tough, it was being disciplined all the time that wears you out. I folded and folded and folded and folded and folded. You don't see that on TV, but that's the reality of this game. You fold and fold and fold and every once in a long while, you play a hand. Is this fun? It depends on how you define "fun." At this level, it isn't a friendly home game where you make goofy bets and goofier calls because there's not that much at risk. This was fun in the same way that doing high-level MMA is fun - there's the mental gam...