Aug. 4 | 4:50 p.m. ET

Shane Schleger, who I don’t actually know but who somehow knows almost everybody I know in the New York City poker world, recently called the World Series of Poker “Summer Camp for Degenerates.” And as I get ready to leave Vegas, I can’t help but feel those same weird mixed feelings I did during my childhood camp days.

I’m wistful, but I’m not sure for what. It’s odd; I feel like I’m going to miss so many of my friends, but I’ll see most of them soon — and all the time in fact — when I’m back in New York. I guess I’ll miss them in this context; I’ll miss the scenarios where we stay up all night knowing that we can sleep later when there’s no money to be won, where being home at night seems kind of irresponsible.

I’ll miss being around dozens of people who understand exactly why it’s fine to grab an obscene amount of money out of your pocket, hand it to a pal and not worry about if/when it’s coming back. I’ll miss the feeling of pure possibility that comes with the World Series.

I hung around the Bellagio all day yesterday, doing well in cash games, hanging out with Herbert Cheng and busting out of the $1,000 tournament there. I’ve found an investor for today’s $1,000 tournament, so I’ll play that one before I pack up and leave early tomorrow morning.

And then it’ll be a couple weeks off from poker before I head to Atlantic City for another — but much smaller — series of big tournaments. But it won’t be the same as what I’ve just experienced. There’s only one World Series. In less than one week, somebody will have won $11 million dollars, and more than 8,000 of us will be thinking about how we’re getting back next year. See all of you then.

Aug. 4 | 4:45 p.m. ET

Nick Dileo is a jerk. All right maybe that’s a little strong, but he is really, really annoying me.

It’s about one week ago today, and I have a very clear plan. At 5 in the morning or so, I bust out of the last Mega-satellite that they are running for the championship event. I had decided that if I didn’t win a seat in this way, I was not going to play the $10,000 World Series of Poker final event.

There are still questions of whether this is the right decision or not, but if I can successfully sleep past one in the afternoon it won’t matter. Registration will be closed for the main event. So that’s my plan. Just don’t wake up before noon and the decision will be made for me. At least that’s what I thought. When I wake up the next afternoon to find out that things are different this year and you are allowed to buy in all the way up to Sunday, the fourth flight of the first day, I am not happy about it.

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Why wouldn’t I want to play the World Series of Poker? Because I’m tired, that’s why. Five weeks in Vegas under the wrong circumstances can be a very, very long time. I haven’t been sleeping enough, I haven’t been eating enough, and I haven’t been winning enough. And to bring my spirits up that much more, didn’t they just start World War III or something of the sort?

Barring some questionable fiscal outcomes, I’ve actually had a wonderfully memorable series this year. But my head is in a million different places right now, both good and bad. I just don’t know if this is the right frame of mind to play perfect poker for 16 hour sessions. So I am uncertain how I feel about investing $10,000 in what would be, under the best of circumstances, a high variance gamble.

I have gotten various offers of various seriousness from people who say that if I don’t want to put up my own money, they would be happy to invest in me for a percentage of whatever I win. But if I’m not comfortable with the idea of losing my own money, I’m not sure how I feel about losing other people’s.

So, the answer would seem pretty simple. Just take a year off from the championship event. Here’s the problem though. If I don’t play this tournament then I can’t play any other tournaments for a whole year.

Why? Well, pound for pound, the WSOP final event is simply the empirically best all-around tournament of the year. For the amount of time you’re given to play and for the amount of dead money involved, there simply is not another tournament like it. While the World Poker Tour’s $25,000 championship probably has a better structure, it is a pretty boiled down field of mostly the best players in the world. And while I have found games where people go all -n on the river Jack high these are not games in which you can win $12 million.  So if I can not justify playing this event while I’m out here then there is not really any event I can logically justify playing. It would have to be a year without tournaments.

So no matter how much every post-Jack Binion owner of the Series has inadvertently tried to change it, the fact is that the WSOP is still the greatest opportunity a poker player will be offered, year in and year out.

When I first started to play the WSOP, the event had grown to the point that they were getting hundreds of players. I would explain to people that there just were not 500 truly dangerous no-limit players in the world. And at the time that was true. Back then you could count on two hands the number of public card rooms that spread a regular no-limit game.

Of course things have obviously changed. Now I don’t know if you could find 10 public card rooms that don’t spread at least a 1-2 no-limit game. With the Internet and whatnot I think it’s safe to say that we’ve produced more than 500 world-class no-limit players. However, I think it’s also quite safe to say that there are not yet 8,778 experienced, ninja-level, no-limit players. And that’s how many people showed up this year. And that’s where my friend Nicky comes in.

Most of the people that know me were kind enough to call me an idiot for not doing whatever it takes to get into this year’s event. Nicky, however, was far more annoying than most. He would not let me forget what an opportunity this event is. He would pester me insistently for a while before giving up. “All right if you really feel that way, I guess I’ll respect your decision. You’re an idiot, but I’ll respect that.” And then two minutes later, he’d start pestering me again. Very annoying.

I made the mistake of telling Nicky that I had run into Gavin Smith a little while ago and he asked if I was playing the final event. I told Gavin I wasn’t sure and it would kind of depend on how I was doing on the trip. At this point Gavin said one of the nicer things anyone said to me the whole trip. “Well, I hope you get fricken buried this trip. Buried like you’ve never been buried before, so unbelievably buried that you can’t even breathe!” The meaning of which was that if I got buried enough I might let him put me in the final event, which was implying that I would be a good investment for him. Anyway, it was a really nice thing to say even if my girlfriend Christi didn’t quite understand why I was so happy that Gavin had wished financial ruin upon me.

So, after making the mistake of relaying this anecdote to Nicky he just wouldn’t let up. “Well what about Gavin? If you’re not going to buy in yourself, why won’t you let him buy you in? Have you called him? I’m calling him right now ... I’m going to if you’re not. I will.” And so on. Very annoying.

So after days of this, Nicky finally wears me down and talks enough sense into me. I decide that if Gavin and I both put some money up I might not feel too weird about it. It’s the only event I’ve been consistently lucky in so it may not be the worst investment in the world. And anyway, Gavin is a grown man and if he wants to flush thousands of dollars down the crapper who am I to blow against the wind.

On Saturday, one day before the final flight will start, Nicky is in the bathroom at the Rio when he hears Gavin’s voice. He tracks me down and puts the two of us together (after leaving the bathroom). A deal is brokered, and I’m ready to buy into the final event.

Unfortunately, for some reason Gavin doesn’t have $10,000 cash on him right then so he has to find it from someone else. And that of course is the magic of the poker world. Gavin doesn’t have to walk more than a hundred yards before finding someone who happily hands him two $5,000 casino chips no questions asked.

And with that I am suddenly a contestant in the largest poker tournament the world has ever seen.

As of today, even though I’ve outlasted well over 7,000 players so far, I’m still not in the money yet. I have to make it through a couple hours of Friday’s session before Gavin and I will see a return on our investment. But even if I go out the very first hand of Friday, I feel really good right now. Of course I might have written a very different post if I had gotten violently kicked in the junk on the second day like Nicky was (knocked out after being a 95 or so percent favorite on the flop). But right now I really think that playing the tournament was the correct thing for me to do. So, I wanted to take a second to thank Nicky and everyone else for pestering me and Gavin for putting his money where their mouth was.

I should mention that Gavin is one of those types of guys that you feel you really should resent for the amount of success that he’s had. But unfortunately, he’s too down to earth, so you end up liking him a lot and realizing that he deserves what he’s gotten. If someone besides you is going to get it, it’s actually all right that it’s Gavin.

Unfortunately though, now that he’s done me a favor, that will have to be the last nice thing I ever say about him lest it seem like payback for his having confidence in me. So instead of blathering on about him I’ll just post a link to a charity he’s involved with, which is something he would probably rather have anyway. He’s that kind of annoyingly nice.

And of course I really need to thank Nicky, who, well he’s just really annoying. It is my sincere hope that everyone reading this, at some point in their life, will have at least one friend who’s there for them and at times might be as annoying as Nicky. So very very annoying. Thank you.

— Mike May

Aug. 3 | 11:21 a.m. ET

So I’m out — in one of the worst ways possible, although I suppose how you get knocked out of the World Series of Poker always has to be one of your worst memories. Flop of Jack, 10, 3, with no flush draw on the board. I had Ace-Jack (which I had raised with pre-flop) and bet out, a European player who had been prone to throwing his chips around pushed me all-in almost instantly, and I called in less than five seconds.

I knew, based on something I had picked up earlier, that he didn’t have a bigger made hand yet. He was most likely putting me all-in with a draw. If he had King-Queen, with two overcards and an open-ended straight draw, the odds were slightly in my favor. I didn’t like the fairly thin edge, but it was an edge that I had to take. That’s what you do in poker.

My opponent grimaced when I called and then turned over Queen-Jack. Wow!!! I was actually an 80 percent favorite here. He was dead to one of the three queens in the deck. One of those queens came on the river. Instead of having 40,000-plus in chips, I was out of the tournament, about 45 minutes before the dinner break on Wednesday.

Poker pros have said that the day you bust out of the World Series is the worst day of the year, but I’m not devastated. You have to get extremely lucky to even outlast more than 7,000 players like I did, and although I didn’t suck out on anybody in 20 hours of play, I did get in situations where opponents were forced to give me all their chips. (One example: I made a set of aces against a set of queens earlier in the day.) Of course, this is the only time in history that outlasting more than 7,000 players gets you no money.

Last year, after I busted out of the World Series in less than four hours, I left Vegas wondering if my friends and I were good enough to even be doing this. In the year since, we’ve proven that we’re winning tournament players, and my experience at the World Series this year only cements my belief that I have to come back because I know I was one of the better players at every table I sat at.

And I’m not even done for this year yet. I might buy into the $1,000 tournament today, or play cash games all day (something I admit I miss doing).

Some great news: Mike May is still in, with about 80,000 in chips; he’s in decent shape to make the money tomorrow. I’ve only known Mike for a short time, but so many other people have told me he’s such a good and gracious guy even when he’s trying to separate you from your mortgage payment. And Mike has done nothing but reinforce this all week. Send good vibes his way.

Finally, I want to tell my poker crew, family members, friends and investors that I appreciated the encouraging phone calls and text messages I got throughout the tournament. I know I wasn’t always quick to get back to everyone, and I know you understand why, but I want thank you all now anyway. And dear readers, I’ll be back at least one more time to wrap things up before I head back to New York. I’m not quite ready to go back to work, but I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.

Aug. 3 | 11:30 a.m. ET

What I’m about to say may remind some of you of that scene in Say Anything, where a bunch of guys are sitting around chugging beers behind the Gas-n-Sip and dispensing romantic advice to John Cusack, who finally says, “If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas 'n' sip on a Saturday night completely alone, drinking beers, no women anywhere?” In response and after a thoughtful silence, one of the Saturday night losers replies, “By choice, man!”

Well, I’m here to tell you that this year I didn’t play in the Main Event by choice. Oh, yeah I tried to get in. I played a bunch of $160 double shootouts online. I played in a Last Chance event at the Venetian. I played in a 440-person $1,060 Mega at the Rio. And when none of those attempts worked out or resulted in getting me a seat, I put out the word out that I was available to be backed.

Even after the Main Event started, I still entertained the idea that I might play (the Rio had decided to accept entries up to the last minute before the final flight of the first day started on Monday morning). I felt an unmistakable pang when my buddies Nicky Dileo and Shane Schleger played their flights on Friday. But then a funny thing happened: On Sunday someone actually did offer to put me in. By then I’d already booked my flight out of town. I’d told my wife I’d be home Monday, and I’d started getting excited about seeing her and my 4-month-old daughter, who were both back on Cape Cod at the seaside condo we’d rented for the summer. Faced with the prospect of playing poker for another week or two and missing out on that time with them, I experienced something I’d never felt before: a desire stronger than the urge to play poker. I went and told my prospective backer thanks but no thanks.

He understood completely. But did I? For a long time, playing in the WSOP Main Event topped my list of dreams. I’ve realized that dream now, having played in it twice and having written a book about it, Take Me to the River. The new dream is to win it or at least make the final table. But where that once seemed semi-realistic, when there were under 700 players, it now seems increasingly farfetched. And so I have come to think about the WSOP in a new light. For this year, at least, the unlikeliness of outlasting 8,000-plus players, plus the amount of time and hard work involved, began to seem like something not worth giving up my summer vacation with my wife and daughter for. Will it next year? Only time will tell.

But for those of you still interested in backing me, I have this to say: I will entertain future offers, if for no other reason than to boost my poker-starved ego.

— Peter Alson is the author of Take Me to the River, A Wayward and Perilous Journey to the World Series of Poker, One of a Kind, the Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player, Atlas, From the Streets to the Ring, A Son's Struggle to Become a Man, and Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie, A True Tale of Love and the Vig.

Aug. 2 | 1:05 p.m. ET

I've got a medium-size chip stack going into Day 2 today, but the great thing about the World Series of Poker is the structure. It's nothing like all those other tournaments where the rapidly climbing blinds quickly turn the event into an all-in fest. With nearly 25,000 in chips, two-hour levels and blinds starting at 250-500, I can still take my time.

Which is good, because I'm at a different table today with nine guys I don't recognize, so step one is figuring out how these fellas play. If I make it through today, there should be about 1,100 people left; 873 get paid. So we're about one day of play away from the interesting part. Hope I get to tell you about making it that long.

I didn't really think much about poker yesterday except when I got phone calls and text messages about friends and friends of friends busting out. The bad beat stories are so sick that I don't want to dampen my mood by repeating them, but just know that I heard about three situations yesterday where somebody got all their money in as a 2-to-1-or-more favorite — and busted out of the tournament seconds later. It's a minefield out there.

In addition to Mike May, keep an eye on Adam Schoenfeld. He's one of the stars of my poker documentary, he's a Brooklyn boy like me and he'll know what to do with his 36,000 in chips.

— Andy Wang

Aug. 1 | 3:30 p.m. ET

It's on to Day 2 for me.

It was looking bleak at the dinner break Monday. I hadn't really gotten many cards to play and one ill-advised (but mathematically sound) move had me down to 3,500 in chips out of our original 10,000.

And I had just been moved to another table and had to post the big blind right after the break.

Luckily, I pushed all-in a couple times and wasn't called, then doubled up with pocket aces against pocket nines to get to 11,000.

Then I went kind of scorched earth and worked my way up to 24,525 in chips, which is where I stood when the night's play ended at 3 a.m. (There would be another hour of bagging and tagging chips, and getting the next day's seat assignments).

I don't want to give away much in case any opponents are reading this, but the hugest pot I won involved me flopping the nut straight and inducing an opponent to call my massive all-in bet — after a raising war — on the turn when he was drawing dead. There might be no better feeling in poker than having your opponent all-in and knowing you have the hand won before the final card is even dealt.

I'm exhausted, and have to gear up for Day 2 on Wednesday, so I'm signing off for now.

Mike May, by the way, had a similar experience Monday, losing most of his starting stack before rallying to around 23,000. As I told Mike when we walked out of the Rio convention center last night, it was a good day's/night's work for us. Now we just have to go back and do it again.

— Andy Wang

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