I'm covering Greg Raymer and Tom McEvoy today, but the Amazon room is so packed with spectators and players, it's very, very hard to get close enough to them to talk when they're not at the table. I wanted to write something for the blog anyway, though, so I went out in search of a story, and found it in the expo:
I found myself in the expo, which is much more crowded today than it was last time I was in there on Friday. Like all trade shows, there are the obligatory booth babes, the thumping music and the piles of giveaways that will end up under the passenger seat and stolen by a car wash guy months from now. The difference between the relative tranquility where players are competing for their share of over eighty-six million dollars, and the chaos where online poker rooms, magazines, T-shirt vendors and others are competing for their share of a billion dollar industry was striking. With so much at stake, it's remarkable to me that anyone can be calm in any of the rooms here.
Aside: I've just found out that there's a monkey playing poker in the expo right now. Apparently, some genius tried to enter the monkey into the Main Event, and they were -- wait for it -- denied. Shocking. I'm not going to go back in there and watch for two reasons: as far as I am concerned, there is only one monkey who plays poker and, as one of my colleagues here just said, "Why play a monkey? If you win, so what; you beat a monkey. But if you lose? Dude, you lost to a monkey."
I saw my friend Chris on my way in.
"How are you doing?" He said.
"The same," I said.
"I'm sorry to hear that. Barry Greenstein is signing his book in the PokerStars booth, though, so you should go see him and get one."
I thought that was a great idea. If you haven't read Barry's book, and you have any intention of playing poker seriously or for a living, you must. If you enjoy poker and would like to see the most beautiful poker book in the history of life, you must pick up Ace on the River. If you are the kind of person who does what a blogger tells you to do, then you must send me a dollar, then pick up Barry's book.
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The rest of Team Blog is kicking all sorts of ass today, too. With so many players in the field, it's amazing that they can find them all, then pick out some of the more interesting stories they have to tell.
In other poker news, my friend Ryan finished yesterday with just over 40,000 in chips, putting him just above average for play on Tuesday.
In addition to the great reporting and writing he's doing for the PokerStars blog, Dr. Pauly continues the work that made him famous (I'm serious -- we can't walk down the hallway without running into at least two of his fans) over at Tao of Poker.
Okay, I think that's it for me today. Sorry for the lack of decent content today, but I've felt really nauseous all day long, and I'm heading back to my hotel to have some chicken soup and call it an early night. (I think I may have eaten some bad pizza or something at dinner last night. Happy birthday to me.) This is a marathon, not a sprint, and I'm not going to be any good to the team if I end up with an ulcer or something like that, so even though I feel like a major slacker heading out of here before the end of the day, it's probably best to lay down this hand so I can play some more later, when the blinds and antes go way, way up.
