During the level following dinner break, I hit a crucial 12-outer (flush draw and overcard vs. top pair) to get some chips back, and I hovered around 25K for a while after that. The rest is kind of a blur: I remember pulling off one succesful and critical bluff out of position, I won a medium sized pot with AK vs QQ, and by the time I was moved to a new table with 45 minutes left in the night, my stack had risen above the 50K mark.

I played tight at my new table until the last few hands of the night, when I became very active and picked up about 20K chips to give me a healthy 70K to work with on day 2B, which begins tomorrow.

My first table was rather tough. The only player I knew was Dustin Dirksen, a very accomplished and talented no limit player, but the other players, strangers to me, played with surgical precision. There was maybe one weak spot, but he was weak-tight as opposed to spewy, so there were no crazy incidents of chips flying around. With the strange pressure that comes with the uniqueness of the WSOP Main Event on my mind and the tough table, it was a long day.

The reason I don’t like updating my tournament progress as the event goes on is because I try to absorb the larger picture and ignore the minutiae. This is an eight day tournament just to get to the final table, there are over 180M chips in play. Given that, early level chip counts are almost completely meaningless, and it can just be discouraging to report on having a big stack and then bust two hands later, a totally standard possibility. I don’t understand how people devote energy to twitter during the event, but I guess I will continue to update my progress in this space until the bitter end.