Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 85

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When we arrive at the hotel the front desk does not have our reservation. It takes a while for them to call up to the poker room and sort everything out while we sit in the lobby reeking of 30 plus hours spent on planes and in airports.

We get up to the room and I find it’s currently 10am. I don’t quite feel like sleeping anymore so I go down to get some lunch then try and find the poker room. We’re in the same hotel as last November and while the poker tables on the main casino floor are all still there with posters of various players, there is no actual poker in sight. I go back to the room and tell Celina I’ll be hitting the spa with the laptop to do some writing.

Easily my favorite part about a visit to Macau is the time spent in the spa. The entire thing is set up to relax you and put you in a total state of rest slash apathy. Going in for multiple massages, food, and time spent hanging in the lounge room with a recliner that has TV and computer access for several hours will end up costing something like $60 US. Despite being a city similar to Vegas in the sense that it’s full of casinos and little else, Macau is mostly lacking in the distractions and lifestyle of Vegas, with a much higher focus on the actual gambling. As a result, when you spend day after day hanging in the spa you never really feel like you’re missing out.

Today I waste away for around six hours in the spa before I make my way back to the room to find Celina and afterwards, the poker room. It turns out it’s a floor up in a sort of side room, and that the main room will be used for tournaments later. I run into Australian tournament director Danny McDonough and ask him how many they’re expecting for the $10,000 HK (about $1300 USD.) He tells me it should be about 30, not quite the number I expected but I guess it’s a smaller event being used in build up for the upcoming APPT Macau main.

During the evening is the charity event, which only starts us with 2,000 in chips at 25/50 blinds with 20 minute levels and loses all semblance of the structure so fast it becomes push or fold within 90 minutes. They’re paying a huge 60% of the field (as it actually got an overlay) and I wind up cashing but not for anything substantial.

During the evening APPT director Jeffrey Haas invites us out to dinner and drinks with some of his friends and employees. It’s clear just from hanging around today that they’re interested in making Celina a pretty major name in Chinese poker, and seeing as there’s not much in alternatives for attractive female Chinese speaking poker players she’s become a bit of a priority. While she does interviews and publicity type stuff I mostly stay in the background and let her do her thing.

By the end of the night we wind up half drunk in a karaoke joint in the city at 2:30am bellowing the few songs in English any of us actually know. Somehow despite the travel and the poker and the booze and the absurd jet lag I’m holding up fairly well, but I know I’ll be paying for this tomorrow.

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