#259: “Time Collected”
Last Wednesday, sitting in the Pavillion Room of the Rio, I mused that I felt like I was in a Philip K Dick novel every time the announcement came over the PA that time was being collected. The truth is in Las Vegas that feeling is more common than on just those occasions. The city is straight out of science fiction. If you were beamed there from a spaceship, your first response would be ‘what the fuck happened here?’ You walk down one of the sidewalks lined with synthetic grass, inhale deeply the inhospitable hot, dry air, feel a warm tingle in your lungs and wonder how these gaudy, marauding neon-lit monstrosities came to be. You ask yourself ‘what sort of sick fuck builds an effigy of Ancient Egypt or Rome on Mars?’ Chuck Palahniuk said “Las Vegas looks the way you’d imagine heaven must look at night.” I’m not sure about that. For me, it’s more like you’re on the holo-deck of the Starship Enterprise but everything has been recreated from polaroids of the Third Circle of Hell, a two-dimensional Pandæmonium where everybody is programmed to say ‘have a nice day’ and ‘you’re welcome’.
Poker is a peculiar endeavour. You don’t have to be a masochist but it helps. In Vegas, everything is magnified. You take repeated beatings until you develop a relationship with the pain and its inflictor. If you understand the nature of the beast, you develop a sort of poker Stockholm Syndrome. If you don’t, you are doomed and the game will devour you. Dara O’Kearney had long described to me the march of the lost poker souls, the weary, punch-drunk and catatonic players nearing the end of their World Series campaigns. Seeing these beleagured creatures first hand though was eye-opening. They walk the halls of the Rio like poker-zombies, knowing not why they move forward yet seemingly compelled by some greater force.
That being said, I had a great time at my first World Series. The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist J. R. Moehringer once said “while I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.” I think that’s sort of what happened to me. Rooming with Dara is always a pleasure (even if running with him in the desert heat is a little less so) and in Vegas we became poker’s Estragon and Vladimir; two Irishmen in a desolate place with a dubious raison d’etre, waiting for our time to be collected, playing, failing, playing again, failing again, trying to play better, trying to fail better.
In the ten days I was there, ‘Team Unibet’ booked 11 cashes. Dara made the money three times – in the Tag Team Event, the Online $1K and the Crazy Eights (be sure to check out his four line twitter poems, composed for each bust-out at the World Series), Daiva Byrne cashed a Venetian event and the Tag Team Event, Alan ‘Hotted89’ Widmann cashed a Venetian and the Tag Team Event and on my last day there Ian Simpson put himself on the score sheet, making the money in the Crazy Eights. I managed to cash the Monster, the Wynn $1K and had a deep run in the Giant, shoving KQ into A9 to finish 25th out of almost 9000 players. I also want to say a big thank you to Nataly ‘Miss Beep’ Sopacuaperiu who supported us all on the rail and treated us to a splendid night out in the Palms. I wish all my friends the best of luck for the rest of the Series. At the time of writing, I was gutted to see that both Dara and Daiva have bust on day 2 of The Main Event. There’s still a fortnight to go so I do hope Dara doesn’t have to compose a poem at least once.
Sad as I was to be leaving Vegas just as the Main Event was starting, that feeling was completely over-shadowed by my excitement to see Saron and Hunter who I missed so much. Big shout-out to my friend and ‘Lapp-Dance’ partner Kat Arnsby for keeping them company while I was away. Poker trips without family is hard so they will kept to a minimum going forward. In closing, here is a short poem of my own I wrote on the plane, waiting for take-off:
Pitchers of margarita, eggs, hash, bacon,
No king, no queen, a giant cash forsaken,
Vegas hosted, Gold Coasted,
From reality disconnected,
Desert-roasted, antes posted,
All my time has been collected.