I’m just back from a week out West with Emily. Though we flew in and out of Vegas and stayed there Friday night, I didn’t end up playing any poker. Mostly we were there hiking, enjoying some warm weather (while Boston was getting nailed with the worst they’ve had all winter), and spend some quality time together.
We left Boston early Monday morning so that I could play all of the big online poker tournaments on Sunday. I figured I’d either get eliminated early and get some sleep or stay up all night making a big score. I ended up splitting it right down the middle, spending seven hours on a $300 tournament (part of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series and one of the largest online tournaments there is) only to finish 61st out of 2755 players. Combined with some other wins I had that night, it was enough to pay for the vacation, but it was still a very disappointing finish.
This can be difficult for non-poker players to understand, but opportunities to make a really high finish in a large field, large buy-in tournament don’t come around all that often, and it’s important to make the most of them. Though winning five or six times your buy-in can net you a substantial sum, in actuality it’s barely enough to cover entry fees you’ve paid into other big tournaments where you didn’t do so well. Basically these medium-sized scores keep you afloat between big wins, which can be weeks or months apart. Having already finished 24th out of 1922 in the first FTOPS event, I was really hoping to take down a big prize this time, or at least get some sleep. Oh well.
I ended up sleeping less than three hours, and Emily, who was still packing when I went to bed, got even less. We both suck at sleeping on planes, so we were dead tired when we got into the airport, though we still had to catch a cab to a nearby hotel to pick up our rental car (this was much cheaper than renting at the airport). We drove down to Henderson, Nevada, checked into our hotel (The Hampton Inn and Suites Henderson, highly recommended), and rested up for a bit. The staff at the Hampton were, without exception, the nicest I’ve ever encountered at a hotel. Everyone was extremely friendly, polite, helpful, charming, etc. We were ready to cancel out room in Vegas Friday night to stay there again, but they were booked solid.
Anyway, we spent Monday afternoon at a chocolate factory and cactus garden. It was definitely an odd combination, but enjoyable. Cacti are really very interesting, and I’d never appreciated how many different kinds there are. There wasn’t much going on at the chocolate factory, but we did get some free samples and bought a few delicious pieces. There’s a lot of good sightseeing and exploring to do within a few hours of Vegas, so I can’t say that I’d suggest prioritizing Ethel M’s, but if you’re ever looking for something more low key, it’s a good place to spend an hour or two and is only about thirty minutes from the Strip.
After dinner we hit the pool and hot tub. I was ready to crash, but Emily really wanted to watch Studio 60, so we stayed up. Well, she did. I fell asleep for at least half of it, and still didn’t feel like I missed much. I like Aaron Sorkin, but Studio 60 just isn’t doing it for me.
(Edit: Somehow these next three paragraphs got deleted when I first posted this, so my apologies to those of you who missed it.) The next day we drove about an hour to the Valley of Fire. I’d been there with my father and brother during my WSOP trip in July, but then it had been so hot that we’d barely left the car. The weather was quite mild this time, even threatening rain, so Emily and I got to do some hiking off the road and see more of the valley.
Our favorite excursion was into a beautiful canyon with views of astoundingly colorful mountains. Along the way we stopped to scramble up some of the lower ledges of the surrounding cliffs. We took a rock climbing class last year, but this was first opportunity to try out our skills on real rock. We only made it about thirty feet on terrain that even a novice climber could have covered in five minutes, but we were proud of ourselves.
Unfortunately, we had to rush the latter half of the hike, as it was beginning to rain, and a slot canyon is not where you want to be when there is any risk of flash floods. Driving back through the rain, I got to thinking about how amazing the plants and animals that live in the desert are. It requires incredible resourcefulness and resilience to survive in such a hostile climate, and they have evolved fascinating means to ensure that not a single drop of water is ever wasted. I read about these rodents, kangaroo rats I think, that have special membranes in their noses to re-absorb moisture from their breath so that no water is lost when they exhale. I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson there for poker players.
Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley. It was a bit on the expensive side, but it’s basically the only place to stay in Death Valley, which is definitely worth doing. After dropping off our things, we drove out to a vista known as Dante’s Peak. It’s an extraordinary view of the salt flats and surrounding mountains and a great place to watch the sun set on Valentine’s Day. Even in February Death Valley is hot, but it was plenty cold on the top of that mountain after the sun went down.
After driving back from Dante’s Peak, we showered and got cleaned up for Valentine’s Day dinner at the Furnace Creek Inn, where we sampled cactus and rattlesnake. It was a very nice meal at a charming restaurant, and our waitress was good but a bit stiff. On the way back, we stopped to look at the stars. Having lived in a big city the last seven years of my life (and Baltimore County before that, not the most rural of settings), I hadn’t seen so many in a long time. It’s weird to think that a few hundred years ago, that’s how the sky looked to everyone everywhere, and now so many people live in places where you can hardly see the stars at all.
On Thursday we woke up early to see the sunrise at Zabriskie Point, but thanks to a poor choice of trail to the top, we only caught the tail end of it. A fair number of people showed up to photograph the rising sun, and an older woman kept shooting dirty looks at Emily for some reason we never did figure out. My guess is that the old broad took a shining to yours truly and was sizing up the competition.
After breakfast and a brief nap, we went into some canyon for our second hike of the day. The entrance was amazing, a really narrow path through polychromatic rock walls and over stones that had been rubbed smooth by the feet of tourists and the occasional rain. Unfortunately the trail got less interesting after that, and we ended up doing some more scrambling and then heading back to the car.
The last stop for the day was Stovepipe Wells, were a sea of sand dunes wait to be explored. We saw some people with sandboards, but none of them seemed very good at “surfing” on the dunes. The plan was to watch the sun set on the dunes, but I was getting hot and tired, so we turned back early and were back at the car by the time the sun was setting.
Friday morning we saw a bit more of Death Valley, mostly from the car, then drove back to Vegas to check-in at the Luxor. We knew this weekend was the NBA All-Star game at Mandalay Bay, but we had underestimated just how insane the city would be as a result. Traffic was a nightmare, people were everywhere, and it took us better than half an hour to check-in at the Luxor, which is right next door to Mandalay Bay.
Dinner reservations proved to be a challenge, and we ended up at Restaurant RM, a seafood place at Mandalay Bay that was suspiciously uncrowded. It was considerably more expensive than we had planned, but it was also some of the best food I’ve ever had. I took a chance on sturgeon and loved it, and Emily’s swordfish was delicious as well. I can’t comment on appetizers or dessert, as I was too cheap to spring for those. I would have been willing if there were something looked particularly good, but nothing jumped out at me. The restaurant gave us each a piece of sushi and some chocolates on the house anyway, and both were pretty good, though probably not worth whatever is usually charged for them.
The plan was for me to play poker in the evening at the MGM, but I decided against it. Though I enjoy it, poker has really started to feel like a job to me. I play forty hours and usually six or seven days a week. Although I don’t get many opportunities to play live, I don’t enjoy it that much either, and even at higher stakes than I would play online, I don’t make as much per hour because I can’t play on multiple tables at once. It was a beautiful evening, so I decided instead to walk around the Strip with Emily, who had never been to Vegas before.
Traffic was so bad the next morning that we were nearly late for our flight. Getting to the airport was a harrowing adventure at the time, but probably wouldn’t be too interesting in the retelling. Suffice it to say that we got back safely but not until 1AM.
Today (Sunday), it was business as usual. I played a bunch of the big poker tournaments that run every Sunday, including the $500 FTOPS main event, and didn’t have a single cash. This is why I say that it’s frustrating to do well but not quite well enough in a big tournament. Everyone hears about your big wins and gets the impression that you’re making ridiculous money playing poker, but they don’t hear as much about the times you play all day only to end up a good deal broker than you were when you started.
The ups and downs (well, the downs, really) are the toughest part about being a serious poker player. The game isn’t that difficult to learn, but maintaining the mental toughness to endure seemingly endless bad luck and losing streaks is a constant struggle. It’s easy to get down when things aren’t going your way, and obviously it’s bad business to let that affect your play. But it’s also bad to let it affect your personal life. A major goal of mine for this year was to be more level-headed about everything poker-related and to keep both the highs and lows from influencing my mood away from the tables. I don’t do much to celebrate big wins anymore and I try not to let big losses make me grumpy. It was nice to get away from it all for a little while.