Travel Report: WSOP-C Atlantic City, Arrival

I might have been dreaming. Could have sworn I heard shouting coming from the parking deck across the street from my room at Caesars Atlantic City.

Sounded like someone saying “we’ve still got one grand” over and over, adding “we’re in Atlantic City.” His interlocutor was female, and while I couldn’t make out her responses they seem to have been antagonistic to whatever plan he had in mind. Went on for quite a while, and whether real or imagined, the exhange was enough to remind me I wasn’t sleeping in my own bed.

My flights yesterday were both smooth. Speaking of gambling tales, on one leg I was seated near a member of one of the NASCAR crews who spent most of the journey excitedly relating his recent adventure in Las Vegas to his neighbor.

The tour had a stop there last weekened, I believe, and this fellow told how he’d taken a Mason jar filled with $63 worth of coins along with him. Ran it up to $500 or so, he said, before leaving Las Vegas with “about a hundred.” (Which probably meant something a little less than $63.) Had friends -- apparently lacking his discipline -- who lost two or three grand, though.

So, you know, it was like he was up. A lot.

Took a cab through the dreary, pounding, early evening rain and made it up to my room a little after dinner time. Ended up spending some time scoping out the scene downstairs, including finding the large ballroom where the WSOP Circuit $1,650 buy-in Main Event will be happening today.

Found WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla there monitoring the conclusion of a preliminary event, and he and I had a good time talking about what we’ve each been up to since last summer. Dalla’s a sports bettor, and he and I also talked some college hoops and some of the conference tourneys he would have his eye on this weekend.

Now that I think about it, all that shouting about what to do with the last thousand dollars probably was a dream, suggested to me by that bit of eavesdropping on the plane, my rereading the end of Jesse May’s Shut Up and Deal and a couple of chapters of Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town on the flights, and my conversation with Dalla.

In any case, it is sounding like there ought to be 300 or so hopefuls showing up this afternoon, themselves all dreaming of a handsome payday and a WSOP Circuit ring come this weekend. And each willing to part with more than a grand to get there.

Check in over at PokerNews today to see how things go.