HugePoker

As my twitter followers already know, I busted out of the main event several hours ago, in the middle of Day 5. I finished 341st out of 7319 players, for a cash prize of $36,431 (or something - can’t remember the exact number). I played the final day with Jean-Robert Bellande on my left and Cole South on his left - a daunting but exciting proposition. Things looked very good for most of the day, as I took my chips from 380,000 to over 600,000 (with Cole getting knocked out along the way), until I ran into a pair of nasty hands - one in which I faced a massive bet from Bellande and either made a smart fold or failed to snap off a big bluff, and the other in which I couldn’t find a fold with KK against a player who had flopped a set of Sevens. The first hand played into the second in a funny way, but I’ll hopefully write about that later - right now I should collapse to try and recover from the ugly cold that continues to torment me before my road trip back to Seattle.

It is a weird weird feeling to be so completely immersed in something and then in one moment have it just vaporize. After three consecutive days of making difficult decisions about tens of thousands of dollars worth of chips, I went to the wrong parking area to get my car, and then was nearly incapable of deciding where to go for dinner (ended up going back to Pho Kim Long, where I’ve gone for the last two dinner breaks - I guess I just wanted to pretend). It’s a major poker cliche that the worst day of the year is the day you bust out of the main event. I’m not sure that’s true for me, but it might be the emptiest day of the year. I feel great about how I played - with a few exceptions I think I played some of my best poker, and while there is obvious disappointment about not making a truly deep run or a six-digit score or bettering my 2007 cash or making the “November Nine”, at the end of the day I’ve got a check for over $36,000, and I’ve cashed in three out of the four main events I’ve played, and I’m pretty happy about all of that. Still kinda empty though.

Thank you all for your support, blog comments, tweets, text messages, internet research and spying, and actual physical in-the-room cheering. I have to confess that a big part of the thrill of the WSOP for me comes from knowing that a bunch of people - some I know and love, some I’ve never met - are watching my progress on twitter or in the blog or in person, getting excited as I get deeper in the tournament, groaning when I take a hit to my stack, cheering when I double up or pull off a big bluff, and maybe feeling a hint of my own deflation when I bust out. The last two WSOP’s it’s been disappointing to not give my fans anything to get all that excited about, and I’m really glad I got to create some good buzz again this year … partly because I’m such a giver and love to bring a little excitement into other peoples’ lives, but mostly because I just like all the attention. It’s fun to be a little bit of a star for a few days, I just wish I could have drug it out a few more.

My 2010 World Series of Poker is in the books - a small but solid success. I’ll take it.

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