Day Before Tomorrow

Tomorrow at 10am, I'll take the shuttle out to the Rio, having breakfast there courtesy of Party Poker, some coffee, load up on water and then go take my seat at noon. I'm a little jittery, and while I'm sure my hands will display some shaking early on that early nervousness should really settle after a few hands.

Note to self: Bring ibuprofen. If I for some reason get a headache, I'll kick myself over and over if I forget to bring something that can fix it.

After last night's dinner with Debi, Joe, Joe's coworker Sam and Sam's wife Nancy, they drove us downtown and we parked on top of Binion's. Fremont Street is nowadays roofed with one giant TV-screen and they had special shows running on the 4th of July theme. It was very cool. You can find some pictures and Debi's running trip report here: http://www.cardschat.com/f4/las-vegas-2009-trip-report-155822/

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On a different note, it seems that there's some weird stuff going on with the number of levels played every day. For those not familiar with poker tournament structures, I'll just briefly explain the basics first before going into the details:

Everybody starts with 30,000 in chips, and the blinds start at 50 (small blind) and 100 (big blind). Differently put, everyone starts with 300 big blinds. Now and then players get eliminated, but their chips are now in the hands of other people, so the average remaining stack of chips will grow from 30,000 as players get knocked out. In order for the tournament to ever finish, it's necessary to raise the blinds progressively so that we don't end up in a situation where someone has so many chips in relation to the blinds that they can fold for three days straight. The blinds are raises (usually doubled, but sometimes slightly less) every two hours, and every two-hour slot with a certain blind size is called a "level."

Before the tournament started, it was stated that ever day 1 (of which there are four, and I play on the fourth - day 1d) would play five levels. Right before day 1a started, this was changed to just 4 levels. Uh, okay. Making last minute changes is at their discretion.

But now that day 1a and day 1b has been played, they're now playing day 1c with FIVE levels, which is one more than the first two days. In effect, there's a bigger risk for players playing today to get eliminated after only one day of play than the first two days.

On the surface, this may look incredibly unfair but in reality it probably doesn't matter because I assume that tomorrow (day 1d) will ALSO play five levels, and since they're playing two separate day 2s, and day 1a and day 1b will play against each other on day 2, it doesn't matter much - it just means that day 2a will be longer than day 2b.

For me, however, these news suck. They mean that I won't be back early enough to meet up with the CardsChatters who are having a party on Monday; yesterday I thought I'd be done playing at 10:30, now it's more like 1a.m. Not much I can do about it, I guess. Except maybe go bust early.

My plan for today was to try to relax, maybe get some hours of live poker played and meet up with the CC:ers coming into town today (which is the majority of them). I went down to the poker room but unfortunately there wasn't any no-limit game going so I headed back upstairs to do some relaxing instead. If I don't get to play anymore before tomorrow it's not a big deal; I feel about as prepared as I can be.

I'll try to make a final post before leaving for the Rio tomorrow and let you know how I'm feeling about it all, but in case I don't - wish me luck.