"Miss? Miss?"
The two yellow-uniformed security officers stood over the girl at the bench. They were kind at first, whispering for the girl to get up like one might speak to a kid within the latter stages of a night's repose. The girl didn't budge.
"Miss..."
This time it was louder and slightly more insistent, such as you might speak to someone who is not going to get out of the way.
The woman was laid out, face-down at the padded leather bench within the hallway outside the Amazon room, the cavernous hall where the largest poker event on the earth was about to happen. If her loss of movement was any indication, she was really tired, really drunk, or really dead. It's Vegas, so anything was possible.
"Miss!"
From my vantage point, I COULD NOT tell in the event that they poked the woman or not. Regardless, her tangled hair rose up off the bench. The high domed ceilings across the rotunda made her explanation echo throughout the hall.
"I'm with a player. He's playing right now."
It was 8:45am.
Welcome to the arena Series of Poker Main Event.
The Rio, home to the WSOP
I can only imagine the person she was waiting for, but I DO NOT desire a big imagination to do it. I've seen his ilk more times than I WILL count.
It's a tawdry and trite analogy, that story of last call, the only about some lonely and sodden soul working an expanse of sticky mahogany, firing pick-up lines at disinterested and eye-rolling women like they were targets rather than humans.
In a vacuum, that story could appear apt for the sector Series of Poker. At a distance, it might appear as those left with no WSOP gold bracelet are stumbling in the course of the halls of the Rio, shooting money at a target they may be able to barely see not to mention grasp. But that isn't it. This is not a gloomy 1am tale from a series restaurant bar. That is the WSOP Main Event.
It's something bigger. For the entire grinders who've been here firing bullet after bullet at event after event, that is the last chance of the summer to win an incredible bracelet. It's less like a bar finally call than a graying, middle-aged man on the tenuous end of his relevance grasping for one last chance to succeed in something big.
Or, you know, maybe I'm projecting.
The WSOP, where the ocean is made from people
However you need to take a look at it, that is it for the WSOP. It is the biggest day of the year for many poker players. One last chance on the Super Bowl. One final opportunity before summer camp is over for the year.
For the uninitiated, this last call is an extended one. It begins at 11am local time when the 2015 Player of the Year Mike Gorodinsky will call right into a microphone, "Shuffle up and deal!" It is the "Racers, start your engines" of poker, and it'll fan the flames of the following two weeks of action. There'll be three opening flights running between today and Monday. During that time, thousands of hopefuls will take their shot for $10,000 apiece. Most of them will fail before next weekend. Over the following week and half, all the field of players may be winnowed to at least one table of nine. Those folks will take a break and are available back on the end of October to minimize to the principle Event champion.
From the outside, it'll see mundane, the type of thing that will send a lady to sleep on a bench. In the midst of the maelstrom, however, it a freakshow of the very best kind. It's ten-day period where players discover just how polarized their emotions may also be. Inside just an hour, fortune and fame can deplete and spread like ash. It isn't life and death, but it's as close as poker can come.
The Amazon Room
We are, as we've got been annually since 2005, at the ground here and embedding ourselves for the duration. Veteran reporter Howard Swains is at my side. Over the following couple of weeks, we'll be covering up to we can, from the Team PokerStars Pros within the field, to EPT stars who're making it big in America, to each other ridiculous thing we discover along the best way. The last of these usually takes up most of our time.
If not for us, then for the hundreds assembling within the hallway, that is Las Vegas where the theory of last call is a joke, but that is also the last chance for a gold championship bracelet.
Or, as they are saying on TV: That is the principle Event.
Read More... [Source: PokerStarsBlog.com]
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