On the last hand of the final preliminary event of the 2009 WSOP, the $5K 6-handed event, I lost with AKs to French pop star Patrick Bruel’s pair of tens.

This was shortly after dinner break, around 9PM. By 10 o’clock, I decided to drive home to Santa Monica despite having played three full days of poker and being exhausted. I had no real reason to go home, except to clean out the mailbox and take care of a couple errands, but I had a yen to spend a night or two in my own bed. Making the drive at midnight enabled one extra night and despite a fatigued, four-hour trek through the desert, it was worth it.

When I stopped by the Vegas rental apartment to pick up a couple of items for the drive, the living room looked barren, paper cups full of soda and remote controls decorating the area. The preliminary phase of the WSOP definitely felt over. Whatever wishes and dreams lived in that furnished sublet had now evaporated into the flat desert air.

Prior to the $5K event, I had my first and only cash of the 2009 WSOP event in the $3K “Triple Chance” event, which was added to the 2009 schedule as a superficial attempt to fill the absence left by the elimination of rebuy tournaments.

“Triple Chance” is basically a dumb gimmick that has nothing to do with rebuys and just allows players to start with 3k, 6k, or 9K chips, or to take the extra 6K chips whenever they feel like it. It seems clear to me that the best move 99% of the time is to just start with the full 9k, but many players experimented with different proportions of chip allotment. I generally think the gimmick, while nothing even close to a substitute for rebuys, did make for a better tournament, since it added an extra layer of strategy (however illusory) and that caused people to over-think things and basically to play worse.

After the first day of play, I had exactly 100K in chips and by the time we were near the money bubble the next day, I had well over 150K. After dinner on day two, I lost with AK to KK, which brought my stack down to the 50-60K range. I doubled up with JT vs A7 to a young, annoying player who celebrated at literally every street of the deal and then cringed when my ten hit the river. I couldn’t even see the winning river card from the one-seat, but after watching his reaction, I knew I didn’t have to get up from the table and instead counted my stack down.

I had 115K or so and two hands later I got it allin with AK vs the 77 of Jon Van Fleet, a famous internet player also known as “Apestyles.” He won the coinflip, and I took 46th place for $9145. As I was collecting the piece of paper needed to claim my cash, the annoying kid approached his entourage on the rail and said, “at least I made a little bit more money” indicating the slight prize jump from 46th to 45th place.

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I returned from California on July 2nd and mostly vegged out at my room at the Palms, where I will be staying until I am done with the $10K main event, over the following two days. They gave me a nice spacious room, and the bed is extremely comfortable. I saw Jay-Z perform at the theater here last night, my first time seeing one of my favorite MCs perform live, and it was a great show. So far this seems like a good spot for me to be during the main event.