and found myself in Vegas.



Sorry I haven't been able to blog for a couple of days, but I got sucked into the Vegas vortex. Time and days of the week have no meaning here. And the WSOP is really not a defined number of events with start and stop times…it is an endless experience with no bounds.

I still wake up at 7:00 am whether I went to bed at 1:00am or 5:00 am. I am hoping that some kind of routine eventually makes itself known to me. Hopefully this will provide a little more time to share my impressions (the strange, the funny, the degenerate and the exhilarating) of the series.

The one thing that surprises me is that as large as the WSOP has grown, it is still very much made up of a close community. People feel and recognize the comradely of our communal passion, whether they are big name pros or young unknown hopefuls. And while I've enjoyed meeting a lot of the big names that I hadn't met in the past, the stories coming from the up and comers are exciting and fascinating. Because of the growth of both online poker and the expansion of tournament schedules around the world, young players have already developed a wealth of experience that would never have been possible even five years ago.

The other stories I love are about the people on the cusp, successful players that have been living in anonymity that are about to become "known." Gavin Smith is a "cusp" player I was looking forward to meeting this trip. I guess I knew Gavin's name from rgp (although he himself is a lurker not a poster) and Barge trip reports. While Gavin has always been a savvy player, he has just been on fire lately, capping off many big money finishes these past few months with his victory at the WPT Mirage event last month. I got a chance to talk with Gavin, who is a really fun guy, right before his final table of the $1500 pot limit hold'em event. Hopefully that interview will get uploaded on the site sometime today.

I try to do an audio log each night (well early morning) on my impressions of the day which can be found under the WSOP audio tab on the home page.

And I promise to be more faithful to my blog now that I am getting more acclimated to planet Vegas.