We got up yesterday morning at a far too early hour of 8:00. Having gotten ourselves up, we congregated at the stoxpoker booth at around 9:00 so that we could take a group picture, and then get ourselves setup for the first match. Quickly, they threw a curveball at us. Nick, the guy who was supposed to play on the expo floor couldn't start at our designated 1:00 start time, so we had to start him at 11:00. We weren't quite ready, but we did in fact get him started in not too much time. Early on, Polaris was up a very large amount. But as soon as the first break was over at 200 hands, Nick started to play really well on the bad side of the cards to not lose as much as he could have. In the end, the humans tied Polaris with Polaris having a small 5 small bet margin. So Polaris is now 1-1-1 going into the second live match.

My job so far (and probably for the rest of the event) is to run around with my picture and take photos of the various people and the expo so that we can post them on the website. You can see a gallery of photos from day one here. I think I got some good photos, and I'll be aiming to get some better ones today.

After the expo was complete, we spent a little time cleaning up, and posting information to the website, but we had ourselves a relatively free evening. So a group of seven of us went to go see Penn and Teller. I enjoyed the show, but I guess I was a little disappointed at the same time. It felt awfully short to me, and there wasn't enough WOW moments. I mean, there was definitely some. Penn and Teller pulled off a pretty major shock value trick where they switched a person from the audience into Teller on stage. The trick setup was this: They called for someone from the audience who could handle a video camera. They get him up there, but while they are showing him the stage and everything, Teller is behind the set in front of a video camera there and says "this is not the trick he thinks we're doing", or something to that effect. They then go through a routine where Teller provides Penn with all sorts of props to have fun with the person behind the video camera. It's all very funny until the end of the routine where Penn gets up and says that there was a bunch of things that the person with the camera didn't get. There was even stuff the audience didn't get ... like that you are actually Teller. High shock value, and very clever -- although we think we figured out how they did it. I just wish there had been more tricks like it. Anyways, I enjoyed it and certainly thought it was worth my money.

We returned to our rooms to chat for a bit about the show and hang out for awhile. A couple of people who didn't go returned from the poker tables reporting that the games were rather soft. I'll have to sit down for a session or two while I'm here. I got to bed a bit earlier, but I think I'm still not getting enough sleep. One of these days I'm going to crash and need some serious snoozing time.

Diane's doing well, although I wish I could pay more attention to her. I'm glad she's down here with me -- but there's an awful lot of work to do during the matches. She's been taking Mike's video camera around and shooting the event, so it'll be cool to see what we can use those tapes for after the event is all over.

It's almost 9:00, so it's time to start the process all over again!

Morgan