Poker players say that the day you bust out of the Main Event is the worst day of the year. I guess if that holds true, then you can claim to have had a pretty decent year. However, there definitely is a little spark that dies inside of you when get knocked out of this event. All those thoughts and daydreams of, “hey, maybe I’ll make the final table,” or “hey, maybe I’ll be the next World Champion,” are replaced by the cold hard truth that it’s not going to happen. At least not this year.

I already had one foot in the grave when I showed up to today’s tournament with just 15 big blinds. I still had a little hope though. A key double-up in the early going would have given me enough chips to potentially maneuver my way into a “real” stack. I got that opportunity on the third hand of play against child actor turned poker player Justin Henry who is one of the youngest people to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Kramer vs. Kramer. It folded to Henry in the small blind who raised my big blind to 3,000. I looked down at a six and squeezed the second card slowly, another six, and quickly moved all-in hoping to look strong enough to get Henry to fold some of the bottom of his range (like King-Nine or whatever). He called with King-Queen and I was put out of my misery on the flop which contained a Queen.

As I walked out of the Rio, I searched for some type of emotion regarding having been knocked out, but I couldn’t muster anything up. My feeling then and my feeling now is a pretty bland sense of “oh well.” Being that I was all geared up to play poker and only got to play three hands, I decided to head to the Venetian to catch their deep stack tournament, a $550 buy-in today. In the fourth level, I made a pretty sizeable re-raise all-in with an Ace-high flush draw on the turn. My opponent gave it quite a great deal of thought before calling with third pair and a different flush draw. I wiffed on 13 outs and am now back at T.I.

I’m staying in Vegas for at least another three nights and will participate in the ‘Dream Team’ event at the Rio on Sunday. I’ll write more about that later. For now, I’ve got to catch a ride to a round of golf.