Gambling with my life

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/05/2010 (5685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My 2010 World Series of Poker journey has begun. I’m in Vegas for the fifth year in a row to play in the world’s largest poker series. I did, however, go through a little bit more of a journey getting here than I would have liked.

I left Winnipeg on Wednesday and my flight left at 6 p.m. local time. Unfortunately, my flight was not direct, as we were going to connect in Denver, Colo., and from there move onto Vegas. Well, that was the plan, anyway.

Now, I must say I have done more than my share of flying and it really doesn’t bother me the least bit, but that may well have changed after what I would like to describe as the flight from hell.

First off, I walk onto the plane and it’s one of those tiny 50-passenger outfits. I can’t say I have ever been a real fan of those planes, as they move around way too much for my liking. No problem, right? I mean, after all, I’m only going to be on it for a couple of hours to Denver and then transfer to a much larger plane on my way to Vegas. Oh, how wrong I was.

Everything was going smoothly as we were on our final descent into Denver, when all of a sudden the pilot begins to go back up into the air instead of completing our landing. After what seemed like an eternity, the captain came on the speaker system to let us know there was a severe thunderstorm, so we would have to fly around until we were given the OK to land the plane. After about 30 minutes of stalling, we were once again on our way to land the aircraft. We are very close to landing when — boom! The pilot was forced to go up once again as the conditions were too poor to land the plane. So again, we stalled in the air waiting for our signal.

At this point we were all a little uneasy, but seeing as there was nothing any of us could do, we sat back and tried to relax until we were given the OK. Well, that OK came about 20 minutes later. The air traffic controllers decided for us to try to land on a different runway and as we were making our descent, the entire plane began to shake and sway from side to side. The turbulence was so bad it actually felt as if we were on ice. At this point, I could tell everyone on the plane was in a complete panic, the stewardess included, but just as it seemed we were doomed, once again, the pilot managed to lift the plane and get us back into the sky.

Wow! I will admit, I have never been so terrified in all my life. I will say if the pilot had been less experienced, who knows what could have happened. Thank you, Kevin! As all of us on board tried to calm down, we were informed we would have to go to Montrose, Colo., in order to land the plane and refuel. So off we went to Montrose where we managed to land the plane, finally.

After about 40 minutes there, we were given some good news, as we were allowed to board the plane once again and fly back to Denver. The storm had passed and we made a safe landing at the Denver airport. Even though we were about three hours late, I still managed to make my connection to Las Vegas!

So, off to Vegas it was, and now I was on the type of plane I felt comfortable with and I have to say the flight was very smooth until… we were about to land on our final approach into Vegas when, with the landing gear down, I saw the plane start to go up all of a sudden! Wow. Now this was too much. We circled the Vegas skyline for about 25 minutes and after trying again, we landed successfully. I couldn’t believe that happened again in the same night, and just as I thought I had made it through the night, my luggage didn’t arrive with us.

After all I had been through, I felt like the luckiest man in the world. So what did I do? I went straight to the Bellagio and started playing some poker! In my first session of 10-20 no-limit, nothing too interesting happened, but I did book a very nice win.

Stay tuned as next week I will have plenty of poker updates. Hopefully, for my sake, they will all be good ones.