Two weeks before the Main Event, I met with Helen again. She'd already been out to the WSOP, which lasts for weeks and features dozens of tournaments. Omaha High Low, HORSE, Six Handed. I asked her how it was.
"It was Heaven. Heaven!" Pure joy in her voice at the thought of it. Although Helen cashed deep in the $1,500 No Limit event, she didn't win enough to pay her way into the Big Game. Since she'd returned east, she'd avoided Ray ban Sunglasses Hut WSOP news. I tried to give her an update, what I gleaned from her Twitter list of players to follow, but I was pretty useless.
Helen gave me another poker seminar, and I scribbled bullet points in my marble notebook. She briefed me on some new moves she hadn't seen before — people in Vegas were breaking out their next-level shit all over the place. I wrote it down, feeling like a jerk. I was being staked to play in the Main Event, and here I was picking the brain of someone who Monster Energy Caps was so obviously in love with the game — the rushes, the science, the sheer dynamism of it — and she wasn't going to be there. I was playing for Methy Mike and Big Mitch and the other home-game slobs, but of course I was also playing for Helen now. I recorded her wisdom and resolved to play according to the teachings of my sensei, and try not to fuck it up too muc
"Get into your spine," Kim said. "Get into your body." I was getting into my spine, I was getting into my body. Per instructions, I imagined a string that traveled through my head into my spinal column, and that the rest of my body dangled off it: The Marionette, they called it. "I want you to feel supported, and unsupported." It was Cheap Oakley Sunglasses easy to relate to being a puppet, under the sway of some malevolent and capricious puppet master: This was already a close approximation of my relationship with my deity. In Kim's studio — as the fan almost covered the noise from the playground across the street and the ambulance hustling by — I pictured myself floating through the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, past the rows and rows of the barking slots and the creatures who clawed their hands through big, white chum buckets of coins, deep breath in, past the crowd huddled around the craps table as they cheered on some lucky devil's rush, deep breath out, past the cheapo blackjack tables and the high-stakes blackjack tables and the cordoned-off rooms of the super-high-rollers, New Era Hats which were always empty save for the eerily patient dealer, and into the Pavilion, the chamber as large as a football field where the tournament unfolded, the numbers and color codes hanging from the ceiling on wires, where my first seat of the tourney awaited my rebuilt posture. Shuffle up and deal.
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