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Rio like summer camp for New York rounders

By Andy Wang, MSNBC.com contributor
Posted July 6, 11:30 p.m. ET

After a long evening of cash-game poker at Wynn Las Vegas that ended at 4 a.m. last night (and yes, the cash games are great as advertised this week), I decided to take today off from cards.

After pool-hopping that took me to the Hard Rock, Bare at the Mirage and the Ditch Fridays party at the Palms, I went over to the Rio to check out how friends were doing.

One of the first players I saw was not a friend . He's a guy whose name I still don't know — he'll just forever be remembered as the European guy who hit a three-outer on the river to knock me out of the tournament last year. But I'm not bitter or anything — and that's just poker, of course.

There's a definite summer-camp vibe at the Rio. In 10 minutes today, I saw almost a dozen players I recognize from New York-area games (and yesterday, Howard Chen, a guy I know from a New York home game, won a seat in the satellite I busted out of).

Had a quick chat with the always cheery Francois Henry Bennahmias, president of luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet North America, who told me that he had $27,000 in chips, up from the starting stack of $20,000, during the 5 p.m. break.

Other New York poker comrades were experiencing more highs and lows. Irv Lorenzo Gotti had more than doubled his stack by the break, while Chris Lorenzo Gotti was hanging in with about $6,000 after an unfortunate hand where he flopped three kings and his opponent caught cards on the turn and river that made him a flush.

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Chris seemed to be in good spirits, though, and I told him that I was down to around $3,000 chips out of the initial $10,000 starting stack at the dinner break last year and rallied to around $25,000 by the end of Day 1. It'll be the middle of the night before play stops today, so there's still lots of time for players to get back in the game.

While the Rio is still a madhouse, it's not like it was last year. About 1,300 players started play today, so the final turnout for this year's main event might be closer to 6,000 than the nearly 9,000 who played last year.  Still, a prize pool of more than $50 million isn't exactly small. 

Andy Wang lives, works and plays poker in New York.

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