Yeah, that’s the Amazon Room in the Rio Convention Center, and while it looks like it’s empty, on the far side of the room are the 500+ entrants in the first $235 Daily Deepstack of the series, which had a prize pool of nearly $100,000 (I’m changing up my notation so I don’t have to switch back and forth between what I’ve used for the blog in years past and what I’ll have to do as a live reporter for the series.

I had started the W-Day countdown referencing the series rather than my first day of coverage, but due to a scheduling change because one of the other reporters wanted to play in the Canino Employees event, I’m going to be covering that instead of having a day off after our orientation today.

Lots of stuff to cover about not upsetting players, how to get hands correct, how not to upset players, how to bring a wide variety of voices into a unified style, and stuff about not upsetting players.

I haven’t done a day of live reporting standing on my feet scribbling notes and running back to write them up yet and I’m already feeling pretty old. People are laughing at how dated one of my superiors’ My LIttle Pony reference is, and that wasn’t even a thing until I was well into adulthood.

Still, everyone’s excited because we’ve got one of the best jobs in the shop. Everyone I’ve talked to loves poker and I suspect most of them—like myself—love to write, so actually getting paid to write about poker is worth what are sure to be some long grueling hours over the next couple of months. I mean, I’ve been doing it for free or—in the case of PokerNews—less than $1 per hour considering the amount of time I’ve put into some of the articles I wrote for them. I mean, I would have written the stuff anyway, it’s just that hardly anyone would have seen it.

Nice post-orientation mixer with the live reporting gang with some delicious Southeast Asian-influenced food (garden rolls with peanut sauce, pot stickers, stuffed mushrooms). There were some yummy-looking fruit cocktails in tall glasses that I thought were just decorative pieces until I saw that a couple of them were gone and looked closer, but by then it was time to head back to the ranch and get some sleep before covering the first bracelet event of the summer.