Las Vegas: Day 1

Figured I'd give you guys a bit of a rundown of how each day is for me and how the trip is going. It's been fun so far.

Wake up time is 3:30AM EST, but I'm completely on edge, excited about the trip. I'm freaking out a bit about whether or not I packed everything and have the proper paperwork for tickets etc.

Get to the airport, am completely lost, but end up finding my way to my first flight by 7:46AM. Lucky me, I'm sitting behind 3 skull-candy-sporting, fluorescent pink wayfarer-wearing loudmouth 15 year olds. End up wanting to reach over and slap each one in the face, but restrain myself. Flight is something like 3hrs.

Next is a 2.5hr stopoff in Denver. Didn't do much there, just tried to get some sleep, watch a dogisheadsUP video, and hopped on my next flight to LV.

Second flight is much better, everyone's quiet and I get about an hour of sleep before waking up over I guess what was the grand canyon. It was a little hard to gauge how big the canyons were since we were so high up. Got some nice pictures.

Finally I arrive in LV, get on a shuttle bus, check in to the Imperial Palace, and get a phone call literally within 30 seconds of opening my hotel room door. It's Debi, she's at the MGM, and apparently everyone's already there and having drinks.

I can't tell you how surreal it was to meet everyone. It reminds me of meeting a celebrity: you've seen tons of pictures of everyone, but when you meet them in person there's just this weird surreal feeling. Anyways everyone was super nice and friendly, and made me comfortable as soon as I sat down. We knock back a few, then we all get the itch to play some cards (we are in Vegas after all...). We sit down at a 1-2 game at MGM, and almost have a table full of CCers. There was one aggressive but fishy shortstacking lady with $40, and a couple of decent but slightly weak-tight Swedish guys who were nice, and later on a weird weak-tight player sat down (who did stuff like donk 1/3 pot with 88 on KT9r).

First hand, I toss in (literally) a raise, and as Sean (Icemonkey9) put it, "he nearly took someone's eye out". "I'm used to a mouse", I reply...

Anyways I calm my nerves a little bit and settle down. Not too many interesting hands to post, but I played aggressively for a FR table and took down a few isolation-spot pots, some bigger than others. I was held back a little bit by the aggro shorstacker behind me who loved to get in on every pot and spoiled some of my iso attempts.

We end up heading out for dinner a couple hours later and have some really good mexican food which was nice.

After that, I head back to my hotel while everyone else decides to play some more cards. I'm exhausted, my eyes feel like they're melting from the 40C (100+F?) heat and decide I really need some rest.

So the first day was awesome. Met everyone from CC, some of which I've known for like 5 years!??! Had a nice intro to live poker as well, a nice dinner, and finally got some rest to overcome the jetlag.

Speaking of which, my internal clock is still a little off. I woke up at 8am today LV time, looks like I'll have time to wander a bit before railing Fredrik's first day at the WSOP ME.

More to come tomorrow morning about the day ahead, hopefully more poker to talk about!