Lost Episode 23: Event #55, $10K NL HE, Day 1B

I woke up feeling pretty poorly on the second day of the main event.  I seemed to have a recurring sinusitis problem throughout the series and I had previously blamed it all on the blasted players' pavilion, an ill-conditioned temporary tent structure set up behind the conference center.  I managed to drag myself to the dealer's meeting and discovered that I would be starting on break, so that gave me well over an hour to get some fruit juice and try to get myself feeling better.  I wasn't in the Amazon room for the pre-tourney announcements this time, and missed some of the pomp and circumstance.  During my early downs I heard the tournament director announce Berry Johnston, Tom McEvoy and Dan Harrington as previous main event champions.

Montel Williams received a fair amount of attention at some point during the day.  He accumulated a whole lot of chips early on and may very well been a day one chip leader at one point, although I hardly think any real official chip counts were possible until the end of each day.  There are news reporting agencies that have official chip counting personnel that are allowed inside the ropes that spectators must stay behind, but they typically only take a real close look during player breaks and they are not allowed to touch the chips even then.

Norm MacDonald was also cracking people up on this day.  He wasn't making quite the spectacle of himself as Ray Romano and Brad Garrett on the day before, but I heard in the dealer break room that he was fun to have at the table.  No celebs for me today, but I did deal to Brandon Cantu, Bert Boutin, and Lee Watkinson before my short day was over.  After my first three downs, I went on break again, then my first table back was broken up and I was sent to the dealer coordinator for reassignment.  I told her that I wasn't feeling all that well and I was released for the day, getting credit for just four downs on this day.  I hung around for a little while and then realized that I had a very long walk and a miserably hot wait and bus ride, followed by a two block walk back to the apartment.  I hadn't done this midday before, and it turned out to be much more miserable than dealing.  I recall wishing I had just bucked up and stayed until things cooled down outside.

During each of the four first days, we started with approximately 200 tables and eliminated about half of the field.  Blind levels are 120 minutes and players got short breaks between each level and an hour at dinner.  With time before to setup and wrap-up duties that include supervising the chip-bagging procedures, it takes just less than 14 hours to get in the first five levels each day.  Dealers get credit for 1 setup down, while watching the players chips at dinner break, and usually some extra time when breaking down at the end of the day.  I figure that there were close to 8,000 dealer downs during these first two days, and I've only dealt 14 of them.  What an amazing operation the World Series of Poker is!