Sleeping in Vegas

Tournament poker, where a single mistake can be fatal, is infinitely more taxing than playing in a ring game. Playing for 12 hours at a time is utterly exhausting, and the physical challenge of stringing together a week of such days is quite daunting. Clearly, it's important to be as well-rested as possible. Yet sleep in Las Vegas is always elusive. First, your favorite poker game is being played around the clock a few hundred feet away. Second, it's a fact that the blinds in Las Vegas hotel rooms are designed not to close all the way, and just enough of Las Vegas' magnificent nighttime neon passes into the room to make sleep even more difficult. Finally, and this was particularly true in my youth, after waiting all year to come to Las Vegas, there's the nagging urgency not to waste a minute of it. In the month-long match that started tournament poker, Nick "the Greek" and Johnny Moss played poker taking "breaks for sleep every four or five days." Nick the Greek spent most of his downtime playing craps and needled his opponent for resting: "What are you going to do--Johnny, sleep your life away?" (A. Alvarez, The Biggest Game in Town, still the best book ever written on poker) No, the best you can hope for in Vegas is 3 or 4 twitchy hours of sleep each night before the siren song in your head is again too loud to ignore.

Given all this, it's critical to arrive in town as rested as possible, and each year I think "this time it will be different." But it never is. I look forward so eagerly to my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas that I play more poker, eat more, drink more, and sleep only fitfully in anticipation of the fun to come. Inevitably, I arrive in Las Vegas utterly exhausted, and, of course, too excited to even contemplate a nap before heading to the tables. This year, freshly freed from the numbing tedium of my quantitative equity finance job, I can at least count on racking up a short nap each day.

It's worth noting that several days of sleep deprivation almost always leads to a short time period--perhaps a day if all goes well--of hypermanic clarity and alertness. This is the best possible time to play poker; the game seems to go in slow motion and even the most minute gestures of your opponents are effortlessly interpreted and big bluffs are disproportionally successful. The tricky part is figuring out when the magic has worn off, at which point getting rest or leaving town as quickly as possible are the only financially viable alternatives.

Fortunately, pre-Vegas focus and attention tend to yield spectacular results. I came down to read some financial news, double-clicked PokerStars by "mistake" and ended up playing 2 simultaneous games of 200-400 limit hold'em for a half hour. The additional 8000 PokerStars dollars, in addition to providing a totally unnecessary morale boost, will pay for quite a few entry fees this week.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest it's 5:00 a.m.; maybe I can snag another hour of sleep.