Some more WSOP tidbits

I haven't posted anything for awhile, mainly because I haven't been playing much poker lately!  After a week and a half in Vegas, the pile of things that need my attention has grown so large that I can hardly dig myself out.  So in the meantime I will spend some time sharing some more details about what the WSOP was like.

(I've found that no anecdote is too trivial to hold the interest of my friends who have been asking me what it was like.  I was afraid after a few hours of stories that I was going to have to start making some things up!)

The World Series truly was an international affair.  At my table were people from Greece, France, Sweden, Luxembourg, Canada, Japan, and a few other places.  One young guy at my table spoke fluent English, Greek, and Swedish!  What an odd combination.

The Greek guy at my table was this old fart who spent a lot of his time complaining about Scandinavian players.  He thought they were too loose and aggressive, making too-large bets.  He bitched so much that I really started to get annoyed.  When he finally busted out, I thought, "Serves you right you racist bitch."  He had accused me of being Scandinavian when we first sat down; I told him I was more German than Scandinavian but if I had known what a jerk he was, I would have said, "Yeah I'm Norwegian," just to piss him off.

The Luxembourg guy sat down (in the Greek's vacated seat, in fact) and offered to share his gum with us all.  He was very excited, his first trip to America and he found this extraordinary gum!  I took a look at it and said, "Dude, that's Rolaids."  He didn't know what that was -- nor did most the rest of the table!  So I said, "It's an antacid."  Still no response.  So I said, "If you eat something spicy and your tummy hurts, you take a Rolaids and it makes you feel better."  The whole table got a laugh out of that; the Luxembourg guy laughed the most of all.

I spent the entire first day in the main room, the "Amazon" room, and stayed at the same table.  Over half of the folks at my table busted out during that day, but I hung in there.

The second day, I drew a terrible draw.  They put me in a satellite room called "Brasilia".  This room had something like 68 tables in it, and I was at table 63.  They were breaking the tables from highest to lowest to fill other short-handed tables, so before lunch they broke my table and I had to move to another one -- still in the Brasilia room.  It was like table 57.  Naturally a few hours later, my table broke again, and I moved to Brasilia 34.  I'm not going to claim that all of this moving around affected my chances, but it was rather distracting and it did prevent me from developing a consistent image.  At least I can take comfort -- and I do, too -- that at no table was I the first player to bust out.

Near the end of my remarkable run, I looked around the room, and I saw Gus Hansen at the next table, Men "The Master" at the table next to that, and Alexander Kostritsyn the table next to that.  I couldn't believe that I was in that company -- or, even more, the other big pros that had already busted out!!

I asked myself at one point, "What in the world makes you think you can play this game at this level with the Big Boys?"  I immediately realized the answer:  The fact that I can!