We've made it to Vegas

We've made it to Vegas. After a rocky flight that almost led to some in flight vomiting we made it from the door of the plane to the door of our hotel room in record time. We're staying at the MGM grand which is the largest hotel in the world with 5,005 rooms. One of the features of this huge hotel is a lion habitat right in the casino! While strolling around looking for Emeril's seafood restaurant we stopped and watched the lions for about 15 minutes. I've seen these lions a few times in the past, but they've always been asleep. Today, however, there was a guy in with the big cats tossing around two large plastic balls. The lions would paw and bat at the balls much like regular cats, but the big difference came when the lions would trap the ball. With a normal cat you can just take their toy away and keep tossing it around, but clearly no one was going to try to take a toy away form a full grown lion.

I haven't yet registered for the main event, but shortly Jen and I are going to head over to the Rio to register and have dinner with my good friend Matt (who is also playing the main event) and a few of his friends. I have 5% of Matt's action so in addition to rooting for a friend I have a tangible interest in his success. But, we also have a $200 last longer bet, meaning whoever gets eliminated first owes the other a pair of C-notes. Clearly this bet doesn't mean much compared to the other dollars at stake, but it's a matter of pride. Our dream in to both make it to the final table, so we can really play up the $200 bet for the TV cameras. I would really enjoy saying things like "yeah I know there are millions of dollars on the line, but all I care about is sticking it to Matt and getting his money" Nominally the odds of us both making the money are 100 to 1 and the chances of us both making the final table are roughly 1 in 790,000 so I'm not going to spend too much time scripting my hilarious comments.

Speaking of odds, thanks to Erik for the correction on my odds of ending up with one of the top 100 players at my table and implying that I could be one of those players. Or perhaps I should be insulted that he thinks I'm so delusional that I would put myself in that category. In reality I think I'm somewhere in the 5,000th best player in the world range. I'm not really sure, but I think that's at least that's the right order of magnitude.

If you read my Main Event Preview Extravaganza you'll know that the first day of the tournament is split into 4 days and when you sign up you can request which day you want. I'm going request group C which will play on Day 3, Sunday the 30th. I'll have plenty of time to kill between now and then so I'm glad Jen (and Matt) is here. I'll probably blog it up a little tomorrow to let you know how any stupid gambling we do goes, talk about any interesting happenings, or share a little WSOP main event history.