ONE FOR THE ROAD

Day 28...

It‘s strange when you’ve worked for a month in the Rio and it suddenly ends. You become so accustomed to the Amazon Room that it becomes a home of sorts, somewhere you belong and feel comfortable. What’s more, it’s hard to switch off, to stop thinking about the game. For the past four weeks, my head has been polluted with poker, and I think it’s going to take a while before it begins to heel.

With our final day being the Sunday, we had just two days of free time in Vegas before heading back on Wednesday morning. It was Dana’s birthday on the Monday and I tried all week to get her tickets for the Penn and Teller Show on either Monday or Tuesday. Everyday I would approach the ticket machine and each time was told that tickets were unavailable for these days. I took this as meaning that the tickets weren’t on sale yet, especially as they presented it as a selectable date on the calendar, but it was simply that these were the days of the week that Penn and Teller didn’t work. I don’t know who sod is and how he got into politics, but I hate the fucker.

Nevertheless, Dana celebrated her birthday at the steakhouse in New York New York, eating steaks bigger than her head (that’s pretty big) before heading to the Voodoo Lounge where she drank a cocktail that was bigger than Hellmuth’s head (that’s even bigger). I’ve blogged about the Voodoo Lounge before, but must repeat that the view is excellent and worth the entry fee alone. Sadly, the bar fees are negative ev and I nearly fainted when I received no change for ten bucks after ordering a vodka and coke. I think I stood their waiting for a good few minutes before realising.

Afterwards, we headed down to Spearmint Rhino with Kara Scott, Nick Wetherall, ‘McLovin’ Gary Clark, Danny Ryan Jen and Rod and Marc Convey. McLovin in particular appeared pretty uncomfortable with the idea, and didn’t appreciate it when Dana encouraged a stripper to sit on his lap. Although McLovin was stubborn in his refusal, his pleas seemed to fall on stony ground as the stripper refused to move. After the umpteenth request, she did alight from his lap, but called him “lame” as she departed. I thought that was a bit rude and actually felt sorry for McLovin.

I was equally as uneasy with my surroundings as McLovin and made my exit shortly after arriving. I’ve been to a number of strip clubs before, Seamless was a frequent venue of choice during 2007, but just didn’t feel comfortable being in a strip club with my girlfriend. Not sure why, and I daren’t delve deeper into the reasons.

I was ill during the night and threw my guts up a couple of times, which was odd as I’d only had one drink all night. I hoped that it was something I ate, because if it wasn’t, then I fear my long hours, unhealthy diet and stress of trying to juggle multiple have finally caught up with me. There are a lot of people trying to make a living our of poker journalism. Whilst many of them are lazy fuckers, a handful are some of the hardest working people you will ever meet, so hard-working in fact that sometimes they forget to look after themselves. I think that may have happened to me.