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I looked up, of course. It was the only thing really happening, from a sensory perspective, in that huge 3/4-empty room. And it turned out that the little jittery dude spouting that apparent nonsense was actually Daniel Negreanu, being jovial as he chatted with a friend. [6/N]
It was a tiny, nothing event, just "Daniel being Daniel." But it could never, ever feel again the way it did then--could never hit my nerve endings the same way. [7/N]
It could only happen against a certain kind of blankness. The room simply couldn't feel that empty, that isolated, these days. I'd have my own phone in my pocket, and everyone else would have theirs. Vegas used to feel like a separate *planet*--never again. [8/N]
(How do college classrooms feel to students these days? What does it feel like to read, say, that Eudora Welty story set in a hair salon, if your sense of space and place is the one we have now, and not the one where I can just squint at Daniel Negreanu in a vacuum?) [9/N]
And part of Vegas, and the WSOP, being a different planet was the information gap between it and the outside world. I was a *huge* poker nut, reading everything I could about the series. But whenever I got there, all the news I'd read seemed like a faint shadow on a wall. [10/N]
Some of it was that the tournament results were such a small part of the total poker action. Some was the vividness of the people. Some was the flood of small, bizarre happenings that seemed so notable to me, but passed through minds seemingly instantly and forever. [11/N]
Chris "The Armenian Express" Gregorian comparing seven-card-stud hands to three-course meals, incessantly and bizarrely (but with a real element of poetry). Someone straddling to $50 in a 1-2 game on a lark. And things orders of magnitude weirder than that. [12/N]
It felt like a totally separate world that is gone forever. And, yes, part of that was the naughty thrill of seeing a big hand, then seeing it written up in PokerNews, and often seeing only the faintest correspondence between the two. [13/N]
Why was it like that? Well, the reporters were working long hours and needed to put out volume. Poker moves fast. And, frankly, in 2006, people who could readily process information from poker tables often found more money to be made in the chairs than behind them. [14/N]
I always liked chatting with the PokerNews folks. They knew a lot about the game, they worked hard, they were there out of love, and they approached things with great humor. And it was a nice change of pace to deal with people who were actually *working*. [15/N]
But. Anyway. Back to Daniel Negreanu doing Lil' Jon. The space could never be now what it was then, so empty and still. Negreanu could never burst into song without thinking about whether it'd end up on Twitter immediately. [16/N]
And the very idea of "Snap Yo' Fingers" being a "summer song" or "song of the summer" or whatever feels way more 1999 or 2006 than 2021. Someone of my skill level being able to be a solid favorite day after day in the WSOP prelims--that's gone too. [17/N]
It is totally, completely unrecoverable. Gone, entirely, forever. And that's OK (and even if it weren't OK, that's how life works). But that's where my head was when I made that little vulgar joke on the show. [18/N]
To everyone who ever wandered those long empty Rio hallways with me in the separate-psychic-universe era of the WSOP, or who ever listened to me talk about those hallways or anything else about poker, thanks for the memories. [19/19]
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