Mark S. Rasmussen improve.dk
Jul 26
2006

So I finally arrived at Vegas!

Lack of space

After a grueling trip of about 24 hours I finally arrived at our house in Vegas. As expected the overseas flight was a living hell due to my size and the lack of space in tourist class. To make it even worse, since I last flew with SAS, all passenger seats in tourist class now has their own little TFT monitor. Why is that bad? That is bad because these monitors run off a computer placed below one of the seats in the foot area. Naturally i got the seat which had the computer, so while I was already struggling with the lack of space, I now only had half the foot space that everyone else did.

On the plus side, all overseas SAS flights now have onboard internet via WIFI. How cool is that, surfing on the internet at an altitude of 30k feet?

Immigration troubles

At Chicago I almost didn’t make it through immigration.

I had my Pokernet t-shirt on with a little Pokernet logo and some cards. Besides my t-shirt, the immigration officer could naturally also see that my destination was Vegas, so by putting 2 and 2 together, he figured i was headed there to gamble (duh). He politely asked me, ‘Are you a professional gambler?’. I smiled and answered him honestly, ‘No I am not’.

  • Officer: ‘Are you here to play the WSOP?’
  • Me: ‘Yes I am’
  • Officer: ‘Did you put down the money yourself?’
  • Me: ‘Yes i did’
  • Officer: ‘So nobody is sponsoring your entry? You have paid everything yourself?’
  • Me: ‘I won my entry in an online satellite tournament, so no, i didn’t put down the 10 grand myself’
  • Officer: ‘What site was that?’
  • Me: ‘Party Poker’

And then he gave me the whole long speech. “You should now, you’re really out on a line here”. He warned me that they did not look kindly upon foreign poker players entering the US and playing their tournaments while bringing back home the money they won. He did let me go though. I have no idea where that speech came from. I guess it might be due to the Goodlatte bill that is currently a very hot topic in the House/Senate.

Pokernet camp

I am staying in the house that Pokernet has set up. We’re probably around 10-11 guys staying there at the moment, and how can you expect anything but a mess when 10 poker playing guys are living together?

The house is great. Everybody’s beating me in pool, but whatever, it’s great fun trying anyways :D We’ve got In’n’Out burgers nearby, a 7-Eleven, taco thingy, Burgerking and so forth.

Mark S. Rasmussen
I'm the CTO at iPaper where I cuddle with databases, mold code and maintain the overall technical & team responsibility. I'm an avid speaker at user groups & conferences. I love life, motorcycles, photography and all things technical. Say hi on Twitter, write me an email or look me up on LinkedIn.