Off to Vegas Tomorrow

The $10,000 buy in main event of the World Series of Poker is already underway and today 1,116 players forked over ten grand for their shot at poker's world championship. Over the next three days somewhere around 5,000 other players (including me) will do the same. We'll be playing in split groups and not playing everyday until the 10th when everyone who is left will be in one absurdly large room.

Some of these players will lose all of their chips and be out of the tournament in a matter of minutes. Their $10,000 gone. One bad hand can derail even the best players. In fact 90% of the players that enter will lose their $10,000. For a fortunate few the tournament will last until July 15th.

Finishing in the top 10% will earn you a $10,000 profit. Finish in the top 1% and you're looking at $100,000+. Of course it only gets better from there. The final 9 players will all earn at least a million dollars for their efforts and (depending on the number of entrants) the winner will win close to ten million dollars and will be this years world champion!

I'd say I'm about 20-25% to make the money, have a 1 in 300 shot of making the final table and a 1 in 3,000 shot of winning. Those might sound like long odds and they are, but they're much better than the average entrant. 1 in 300 is close to the odds of drawing an ace and a king of the same suit (any suit) from a standard deck of cards. 1 in 3,000 is close to the odds of pulling two specific cards from the deck in order (ie pull the ten of clubs and then the 3 of hearts from that deck and we'll give you $10,000,000 - doesn't sound quite as impossible does it!).

I'll be blogging from Vegas with details and recaps and while the tournament is going on I'll be texting updates to my wife Jen who will then post them on this blog. If you want to check out broader covereage of the event check out pokernews.com, pokerpages.com or cardplayer.com.

My next post will be from Vegas. Maybe this is the year something crazy is going to happen!