The Single Most Important Picture of this Year's World Series of Poker

All right, I know the photo above doesn’t look like much. On a personal level though, this may be the single most important picture from this year’s World Series. I’m going to make an attempt at explaining why. It might not work but bear with me.

For context, this is from the 3rd day of play in the final event. The people looking into the camera are all friends from New York. The person they are looking at is the person taking the picture, me. Also helpful is the following photo which gives a geographic context:

The important part of this second picture is that empty space in the middle. The people in the 1st photo are on the left of this empty space. I am on the right. Now at first glance the empty space in the middle may not seem that large, a space of maybe 3 feet. But if you look a little closer you’ll see that the distance between the two groups is over 56 million dollars.

At the instant that the top photo was taken I’m in the money in the largest poker tournament that has ever existed. Everyone sitting at a table to the right is guaranteed some portion of the 56 million dollar prize pool, anywhere from $20,000 to $7,500,000. Guaranteed. The people on the left get jack. Granted some of the people in that 1st photo are smarter than I am, and some of them are far wealthier, and one in specific has significantly more anonymous gay sex than I do. But right now they are left side people and I am a right side person. For this brief shining moment I am special and I have friends who are happy for me and it’s actually kind of cool. (As the top photo empirically proves.)

Of course at the time I took it all for granted. I was a little busy and didn’t really have time to wax philosophic. The day after I got knocked out though it hit me. Before catching my plane, I went back to the Rio to cash out a couple chips I had stashed in my room. As a left side spectator I watched the tournament for a minute or two. That’s when I actually noticed that empty space in the middle, that one-way membrane that separates us common folk from the people who could still become this year’s world champion.

I try to explain what it’s like to get knocked out of the WSOP final event. It’s been said that the worst day of every poker player’s year starts the moment they get knocked out of the final event. There’s a little truth in this but I don’t know if it translates. I mean, I imagine it’s got to blow to get shanked in the kidney with a sharpened screwdriver but until I lose a prison fight I don’t know if I’ll fully understand the actual pain.

Try to imagine the best Christmas you’ve ever had. You’ve got the friends, and the family, and someone actually put some thought into a present that you actually love, and you’re all ‘nogged up, and you’re thinking "this really rocks." Then you hear a buzzer go off. A referee steps in and escorts you outside. All of a sudden you’re standing on the lawn in the cold. Now the worst part of it is that everyone else is still having Christmas. You look in through the window and everyone is still laughing and getting presents and everyone is having way too much fun to care that Christmas just ended for you. That kind of describes how it felt to go back and be there on the left side and watch everyone else play.

Of course, this year, to console my delicate sensibilities I did receive something:
This blurry sealed bag that happens to contain a couple years worth of rent, all in casino chips. Naturally they can’t just give you cash or a check which you would put in your pocket. No, the Harrah’s Corporation has to take one last shot at you as you’re walking out. They give you chips and make you walk through the casino in the off chance you might decide to let it all ride on red 5 before making it to the cage.

I succeeded in keeping Harrah’s hand out of my wallet but you know you can never get away completely clean. I couldn’t dodge the post game dinner shakedown at the Wynn with some friends. And of course I want a special thanks to go out to Richie "the Dwarf" Bell for telling the waitress "ehh, just bring me whatever you recommend," when she asked him what kind of sake he wanted. There’s nothing like picking up the tab on a $50 glass of sake.

So then finally, you’re in Vegas with a few friends and you’ve just outlasted over 5,400 people in the largest poker tournament ever, what could you possibly do to top it? You bowl the crap out of that town, that’s what you do! The roll of film with all the photos of the, uh, hookers and the blow and whatever else it is that cool people do when they win money got misplaced. Here’s an exciting bowling pose though.

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 1 (The Why)

A while back American Airlines ran this incredible promotion. In hopes of building loyalty and combating JetBlue on a couple of their most popular routes AA offered a free ticket to anyone who made two trips from New York to California or Florida within one year. Between the number of decent LA tournaments I could go to and the fact that both my parents and Christi lived in Florida it was the perfect promotion for me. I easily completed the two required trips and was mailed my free ticket. Now the thing that made this offer so impressive was that the ticket was good for anywhere in the world that American Airlines flew to. I looked up the world map on the AA website and found that every continent short of Antarctica was positively littered with tiny red dots representing cities you could get to using AA. All I had to do was take two flights to places I was going to anyway and I would get a free ticket to anywhere in the world, it seemed too good to be true.

Now, as it so happens I’m not all that well traveled. I’ve seen a fair cross section of the large and lushly diverse country that I call home. I’ve lived in Michigan, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York. I’ve taken various road trips out west, along the Eastern seaboard, from Florida to Chicago, and so on. If it’s a state with a major legal casino I’ve probably made a business trip to it. However, I’m not so much a world traveler. I've never even made it over to Europe. I did spend about a month in Ethiopia in ‘99 but beyond that I'm not so much a member of the international community.

Luckily I’ve a fair number of friends who are far better traveled than I am and I spent almost a year interviewing them on what I should do if I had the chance to fly anywhere in the world for free. I received a decent range of suggestions but with the parameters I set one country came up more than most of the others, Thailand. So I called up American and told them "I’m going to Bangkok!" to which they replied "No you’re not."

What I quickly discovered was that American Airlines defines "anywhere in the world" fairly differently than I do. While the world map on the AA website was littered with tiny red dots that represented AA cities, the subtle difference between a Codeshare City, a Oneworld City, and an AA/Codeshare had eluded me. While you could get to Bangkok through AA it was not the specific Bozo type of city required for my ticket.

Well, I had backup and I told AA that I’d go to New Zealand instead. Now, the woman on the phone didn’t actually laugh out loud at me but there was a moment as she tried to figure out the best way to convey not only that I was not going to New Zealand but that it was a pretty dumb question in the first place and to convey all of that without insulting me too much. She got the first two ideas across but failed slightly with the third.

From there the conversation went: Australia? No. China? No. Singapore? No. And eventually I just gave up and asked "what’s the farthest point I can get to with this ticket?" She thought a second or two and said "Tokyo. I guess," to which I replied "Lock it up!"

And that more or less is the short explanation of why I ended up in Tokyo. Now just in case the idea of me trying to wade through Tokyo alone not knowing a single person or a word of Japanese wasn't silly enough I actually convinced Christi to put aside her debilitating fears of earthquakes, Asian bird flues, and having the only person she knows on an entire continent be me, and I dragged her to Japan as well. This all resulted in the following photos: Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Nippontastic Voyage Pt. 2 (The Photos)

Part 1 (The Why): here

This was the Japanese Inn we stayed at our first night.

The room was small but we liked the room service.

The view rocked as well.

This is Christi riding the subway. As you can tell all she had to do was throw on a black coat and she was indistinguishable from everyone else on the train.

This is Christi so hopped up on unfiltered Sake that she pretended to be a painted fiberglass bear...

...and then a sumo, where she yelled "FIGHT ME!!" and challenged the confused locals. Luckily, after about 20 minutes she eventually got bored.

This is Christi either at a Buddhist temple or in 1940's Germany.

Here's Christi at Shinjuku Train Station which made Grand Central look like an Amish buggy junction.

I didn't get any decent pictures of the neon of Shibuya so here's a stock picture of Time Square that's blurry enough that you can pretend it's Tokyo.

Here's me in front of a building with a giant bug crawling up the front of it. I'm still not entirely sure why there was a giant Japanese cockroach on the terrace but somehow in Tokyo it didn't seem too out of place.

As it turns out the whole city is pretty much laid out like the West Village, which makes it great for cruising around and randomly exploring little neighborhoods but not so good for actually finding anything specific. The fact that they choose to not even name most of their streets, much less list them in English, doesn't help either.

This impressed me though. It's not enough that you can buy a can of sake in any 7-Eleven. Their cans of sake actually have a button on the bottom of them that you can push and within a minute you have steaming hot sake no matter where you are. Those little bastards are crafty!

And speaking of crafty bastards, I stepped out of the shower and I couldn't understand why the area over the sink hadn't fogged up. Then I touched it and realized, heated mirrors. These fricking guys and their high tech mirrors. As you can clearly tell though, we westerners still have them soundly dominated on the hirsute front.

Completely by accident, we ended up in Japan at pretty much the exactly perfect time for all the touristy spring time activities. The weather was perfect for seeing cherry blossoms...

...and shrines...
...and gardens...

...and of course giant radioactive spiders.

This was where we ate the first morning.

And this was what we ate (after putting some wasabi on it). The restaurant was about 50 feet from the fish market that supplies all of Japan. It seemed pretty fresh.

This was one of our favorite restaurants.

It was almost like being in the Japanese pavilion at Epcot Center but it felt even more real.

Here's another of our favorite restaurants. All pampkin, all the time. We tried the pamkin pizza and pamkin curry. Actually very good.

This is a gratuitous shot of me on our picnic in order to show off my new haircut.

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I thought pachinko would be somewhat less dumb than slot machines. I was wrong.

This was of course great for my allergies.

I still have no idea what this thing is but the picture fits very well into the "Things Growing Out of Our Heads" series of shots, which also includes...

this...

...and this.

And speaking of things sticking out of heads, the only thing cuter than a giant robot shaped like a panda is of course a giant panda shaped robot with a little panda pilot sitting in it's head. These people do love their cute.
For Culture we hit the Kubuki theater. As you can tell, the Gaijin seats were pretty far back. Those little tiny colors in the distance are a bunch of Samurai's and Geishas and crap like that. We had headphones that were supposed to translate the play into English. However, what happened was that someone on stage would go into a 15 minute Shakespearean monologue and then at the end, through the headphones, all we would hear was "Let's go boss!" I imagine some of the nuance fell to the wayside.
This was an instillation piece at the Mori Museum. What was great was that the white things on the floor were hundreds of plastic cups arranged aesthetically. Two different times during the 20 minutes I was there I actually heard a shattering crash as some older Japanese lady would accidentally barrel through the cups. A very crafty people, the Japanese, but perhaps not so coordinated.

And finally, this was the view as we sadly journeyed back to our empirically inferior Caucasian country.

Here's Christi miserable to be back wallowing among the muddied, miscegenated, masses of New York.