2 Days Down, 192,102 More to Go

The workload here at the Main Event is a bit more manageable today, so hopefully I'll be able to sneak in a few more posts here.

Today is shaping up to be a pretty highly-caffeinated day. Head hit the pillow at about 4:30 in the morning, rolled out of bed for breakfast at 9, then stumbled over here to the media room.

The whole media room experience has been interesting. Due to the nature of the coverage we're doing, I end up with my ass parked here for much of the day, from around 10 each morning until about 3 the next morning. So I get a pretty heavy dose of everything that goes on in the media room, for better or for worse.

On the better side, good lord, some of the female talent hired by the Scandi poker sites is pretty amazing. And we're talking writer/reporter types, not your typical skanky booth-girl fare. Sadly, though, most of them disappeared after the first few days.

On the worse side, I came reasonably close to losing my shit yesterday, as one of the major media outlets here seems to have a hiring requirement that you have to be a fucking obnoxiously loud douchebag, and only speak at 11 on your volume scale, even when you're in an otherwise silent room filled with writers and reporters just trying to do their work. The really sad part about it is that the bulk of the decibels is directly proportional to the number of attractive females in the room, despite the fact that there's no fucking woman on earth, attractive or otherwise, that's going to be impressed about you shouting about a stupid call with third pair on a coordinated board. Plus most women don't go for loud fat dudes with beards anyway.

Last night was pretty surreal, getting dropped off from the cab at the front of Caesar's at 4 or so, after working all day. Typical weekend night with a mile-long cab line and silicon breasts spilling out everywhere, and there am I stumbling my way through to go to bed, after a long-ass work day. If you worked in this environment full-time I'm sure you'd get used to it, but my tired head keeps getting confused, as I look around and see Vegas, but it's more a pseudo-Vegas. It looks just like where I was on vacation a few weeks ago but I'm suddenly on the other side of it, pretty far away from boozing it up and donking off cash at the tables.

The PokerRoom employees here have been great as far as picking up the tab for everything, so I've hardly spent any money whatsoever while here. (Again, not my normal Vegas experience at all). I'm pretty much the only American amongst the whole crew, which has been interesting. I find myself otwardly apologizing for all sorts of things ("Umm, yeah, sorry about the whole UIGEA thing; "Yes, indeed, restaurants here insist on serving huge, gigantic portions, haven't you seen all our fatties walking around?) and inwardly feeling like a bit of a loser, as nearly everyone seems to speak approximately 128 different languages.

It's been kind of cool covering a team of 40 or so players. It's frustrating in some ways, as the content we're doing is pretty straightforward (photos of players in action, how they're doing throughout the day, etc.) but it's also good in some ways, as we're not expected to do the same sort of broad coverage of the WSOP that other outlets focus on. That'd be a losing proposition, given the fact that we've got two people in total scampering around the room, so it's kind of nice to not be forced to try to dig up interesting facts or details about the action that no one else has reported on. Since we don't have an ungodly number of players here like Stars or FullTilt, it's possible to keep pretty close tabs on them, and you end up rooting for them fairly strongly.

All this does make me fiend pretty strongly to play in a Main Event, which surprised me a bit given my general "meh" stance on poker of late. It's hard to get a real idea of the level of donkitude that you see, even with a buy-in of $10,000. And I don't bring that up in the normal dead money sort of argument way, just that I need to play in this damn thing at least once, if everyone and their brother's uncle's dog is doing the same.