Business Lunches

After lunch, everyone headed off but Paul and I stayed on to discuss a few things over, as it turned out, another four or five bottles of wine and a couple of tequilas. At one point, we were joined by Alun Bowden who wanted to do an interview for Inside Poker magazine. Myself and Paul obviously realised this was a stupid thing to be doing given our state of inebriation and I remember us setting down a couple of ground rules, the most important of which was that we had to okay the article before it went to press.

Alun agreed to this and by the end of the interview he'd managed to catch up with us in terms of drunkenness - he later informed me by email that after he left us he walked into the revolving door at Treasure Island and almost knocked himself out. Paul had the good sense to go home, while I went on to meet the lads at Dick's Last Resort, a cheesy rock bar pick-up joint in the Excalibur which has the best name of any bar I've ever been to in my life.

I spent most of the next day curled up in a ball but managed to shake myself out of it to meet up with everyone at about 11pm, again at Dick's. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't have crossed my mind to go to a bar again for at least two days, but this was Mike Lacey's birthday so I at least wanted to show my face for a while. I stayed for about three hours, slowly sipping my way through about three pints. I was actually starting to come round a bit at this time and it could have turned into another messy night, but I had the foresight to run off home with KP when no one was looking (he too was also feeling rough from the night before). It was looking like a good night and I might have stayed on, but I knew that Paul was organising a bit of a BBQ/party at the house for the following night so I was trying to save some energy for that.

The BBQ was actually quite a tame affair. Jesse May had organized a booze cruise type thing for the same night, a lot of guys were playing the Main Event that day, and pretty much everyone who was there had been out with Mike Lacey the night before and was feeling rough. By 2am, the scene resembled a gay sauna with lots of men in shorts sitting around the jacuzzi and swimming pool. Kirsty was the only female left at that stage and she quite wisely gave the jacuzzi a wide berth. Aside from that, there was some low-stakes basketball going on, and some disappointingly low-stakes frames of pool. If the Irish guys played pool for the same stakes as Ivey and Lindgren etc. played golf, it would be safe to say that myself and KP would never have to work again. Unfortunately this was not the case so it was soon back to work with day 2 of the main event.