Now... Macau

I mentioned earlier this week I have a big trip coming up. Today’s the day... this morning I leave on what will be the longest journey I’ve taken yet -- for poker or anything else. Following a short flight to Chicago, I’ll be headed to the other side of the globe to Macau to cover a couple of Asia Pacific Poker Tour events for the PokerStars blog.

This Macau stop of the APPT is also known as the Asia Championship of Poker (ACOP) and features a couple of weeks’ worth of tournaments. In fact, the ACOP has already gotten started with some preliminary events (here’s the schedule). I’ll be covering two tourneys in particular, the ACOP Warm-Up ($25,000 HKD; ~$3,200 USD) that begins Saturday and the Main Event ($100,000 HKD; ~$13,000 USD) that cranks up next Wednesday.

I know there’s a lot of buzz in that part of the world regarding that Main Event, which features a buy-in bigger than the WSOP ME and sounds as though it will be attracting a large field. And of course, we’ve all been hearing about Macau for some time, which a few years ago overtook Las Vegas as the biggest gambling spot in the world (in terms of casino revenues) and which has been the site of the world’s highest-stakes games over the last couple of years.

All of it will be new to me, of course, as this will be my first go-round on the APPT.

Thankfully I have a couple of days to get up to speed, although obviously a lot of my time between now and Saturday will be taken up with traveling. It’s a 15-and-a-half-hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, basically one of the longest flights there is. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe we’ll be flying up over the North Pole as make our way westward. And then comes the ferry over to Macau.

Time-wise I’ll be 12 hours ahead of where I normally reside while I’m there. Will hopefully find time here and there to post a few updates here on the blog, but we’ll see how the schedule goes.

Okay, gotta run. Talk to you on the other side. (For real.)