Like my first sexual experience, my time at the World Series of Poker didn't last long … is how I would have started this section if I'd been eliminated the first day. But I wasn't. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.

I didn't have illusions about being one of the November Nine. We live in an age in which sitcoms outnumber miracles, and perhaps that is what we deserve. Rounders and Matt Damon's chin ignited the late-'90s romance of hold 'em among the kids, but it was Chris Moneymaker's 2003 World Series coup that cemented the narrative of The Rise of the Amateur. Internet gaming upended the rules: Moneymaker parleyed 39 bucks in an online satellite into a seat at the Big Game, and ended up winning the whole shebang, 2.5 million bucks, besting poker maestros and demi-maestros and side-stepping bad fortune. The "Moneymaker Effect" transformed the Main Event. The next year, attendance tripled to 2,500 hopefuls. The guys at home — Miller Lite wisping out of their pores and into the upholstery of their fave recliners, the latest arguments with the wife and the most recent workplace humiliations buzzing in their brains — said to themselves, I can do that. "I'm the best player in my weekly game, everyone says so." The Moneymaker mythology was just another version of gambling's core fantasy: I am different from those losers I see on the street every day, this time I will prove it has not been all for naught. I am a winner.

The amateurs were thumping the fabled cowboys these days, but I was an amateur's amateur. I didn't want to go out first, and I wanted to make it to Day 3 at least. Day 3 had the sheen of respectability. I would not bring shame upon my house — my friends, family, and poker game back home. To Coach. Day 3, then take it from there.

Since there were four starting days to the Main Event, the first player flamed out while I was still in my Brooklyn hermit shack. Twenty minutes into Day 1A, his KKs got smithereened by Aces. He stumbled out of the hall, ducking the media, this nameless, hapless schmuck, and into the neon desert-within-a-desert that is Las Vegas, where presumably he spent some money.

What else are you going to do but spend some money? Take the new City Center area, a virtual money sink, a highly evolved specimen of Super-Plex that seemed almost self-aware once you entered its nimbus, bristling with enchantments 24/7. "Wow," I said, as the highway lifted and aimed us into its black, glass heart. The dark buildings of the complex surrounded us — residential towers, sleek hotels — curvilinear, sheer and grim. Jon was driving — my college roommate. He showed me around my first night in town. He was also the first person to take me to a casino, one of the AC Trumps, back in '96. Now he was playing tour guide again. "This wasn't here the last time I came," I said.

"Yes, and look at it," Jon said. "It is shit." Despite its 9 billion-dollar price-tag and 1.5 million square feet of space, the City Center ("Capital of the New World") had not turned out to be the flaneur-friendly wonderland promised in the brochures. "They said it would look like Central Park," Jon said. "Look, those are the trees." He gestured toward to a lonesome half-dozen slouching out of the cement. I didn't see any street retail on our approach, no inviting boulevards, no place to wander except into the entrances of the casinos. But what casinos! They were the magnificent embodiment of scientifically derived Plex principles: gargantuan in scale, single-minded in execution. A pure expression of consumer will.

The nearby Cosmopolitan, for starters. Jon took me there, into this ebony monolith whose name was nailed in huge letters across the top floor, more fitting for a corporate headquarters than a hotel. I appreciated the honesty. Condos were supposed to make up the bulk of the building, but the recession wiped out those aspirations. Deutsche Bank took over, apartments became hotel rooms, and the first floor a hypermodern casino — in the Vegas war of gambling vs. places for people to live, the money wins out, I imagine. Windows were scarce, per standard casino style, but the mammoth footprint of the building sometimes created the illusion of a banquet room without walls. All you can eat — this was land of fabled buffets, after all — you walked on and on, never satiated. Trudging through the main floor of the Cosmo on a weekend night and you were one of thousands — tens of thousands? — of hungry souls. Addled. Prey to sundry appetites. What's next? One of your party is sucked into an eddy of diversion over there and has to be rescued by texted coordinates: Let's reconnoiter over by the pai gow or the chanteuse who's just mounted the platform by the crystal stairs. Micro-entertainments pop up here and there like brief sun-showers, suddenly somebody's singing on a tiny stage for a couple of old standards, and then they split.

The hotel's nightclub was called Marquee, up on the terrace. It was quite splendid. I wanted to stay, I wanted to live there. I'd scoop the hairballs and condoms from the drains in the pool, whatever. But since the disco was grafted onto a residential structure, access came by way of drab fire stairwells, which at peak traffic were filled with wobbly bachelorettes on stilettos, Jager-mad groomsmen, and leather-skinned jet-setters creaking in crisp designer duds who passed each other up and down the stairs with a delirious urgency. A scene from the inferior American remake of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or lost footage from The Towering Inferno.

The City Center is to old Las Vegas what the 2011 World Series is to the inaugural series, back at Binion's Horseshoe in 1970. Only 40 years ago, but let's picture it in sepia, for kicks. It was seven players then, and there was no official prize money. The players voted on the winner, Johnny Moss, who received a silver cup. In 2011 there were 6,856 entrants, and the top 10 percent got paid off, with the champion paying taxes on $8,711,956 in winnings. Harrah's Entertainment runs the thing now, and it's big biz, with circuit events across the country all year long at outposts of Harrah's vast empire, an ever-increasing cable presence, and T-shirts. The machine hummed, you could barely hear it. Look for sawdust on the floors, and you will not find it. The old days were gone, like the Dunes, the Sands, imploded by dynamite charges, blown away. In their places these beautiful monsters emerged from the rubble: the Bellagio, the Venetian. Monster places for monster people — like I said, I wanted to move in.

The past couple of years, the Rio had been the home of the WSOP. The Rio shared the slab-architecture of the new megacasinos, rejecting the weary kitsch of old Vegas — the miniature cityscape of New York New York, the Paris' Eiffel Tower replica. So corny! But really, what could the Rio have been shaped like — a 20-story toucan? The lightly enforced Brazilian theme disappeared altogether once you got to the convention hall, where the World Series had been underway for five weeks with lower-stake Hold 'em events, Seven Card Razz, and the like. The declivity of the Hall of Legends was festooned with huge banners featuring the blown-up faces of game greats — a grim-looking Erick Lindgren, Scotty Nguyen, last year's champ Jonathan Duhamel — then it was into the rotunda, where you could buy snacks, beef jerky, and WSOP merch. Smack in the middle of the rotunda was a WSOP display, featuring a TV monitor that replayed last year's Final Table on a loop day and night. When I went to register the morning of my start, at 6 (I hadn't been sleeping well, I had been sleeping quite poorly), the announcer's voice echoed in the empty halls. Nobody there at that hour. Everybody'd seen it already anyway.

The afternoon of my arrival, the hallways brimmed, the Pavilion and Amazon Rooms a-whirr. I stepped into the Pavilion. The first thing I registered — this was before the size of the room pummeled my brain — was the crickets. The chips clicked and clicked, thousands of players fiddled with their chips, stacking them, tossing them into the pot, scooping them up, dealers counted off All-ins, click click click. Cricket symphony. There were more than 200 tables, 10-seated, which meant they could shoehorn a lot of players in. It was Day 1B, and the Main Event was underway in the Green Section, the Black Section, etc., while in one corner players grinded through satellite games, still hoping to win a seat in the World Series. The buy-in was 10 grand, but pay 300-something bucks in a satellite, make it into the top 10 percent of the field, and you won a ticket to the Big Game. You could play as many as you liked, satellite after satellite, maybe you'd make it next time. Same principle as slot machines, just a lot slower.

The Amazon Room was smaller, around the corner past the vendors peddling poker primers and arcane table spectacles ("Hide Your Eyes"), the registration areas, and the Poker Kitchen, where you could grab a quick sub or a salad. The Amazon was where the ESPN cameras roosted. The network was providing unprecedented coverage this year, on the web and on cable, so the room was well-branded by the sports channel and the World Series' main sponsor, Jack Link's Beef Jerky. You got your Peppered Flavored Jerky, Teriyaki Flavored Jerky; it's a convenient source of protein in an easy-seal pouch. TV cameras snipered down on the two Feature Tables, which were situated apart from the regular sections, and percolated under blue and crimson lights. On Day 1C Brad Garrett did his time at one. Brad and Ray Romano yukked it up while playing, their TV bond no act and still going strong these long years into undead syndication. We should be so lucky to have such good buddies in our corner.

There were celebrities. Jason Alexander, who had been staked by Poker Stars. Nelly, so I was told, and Shannon Elizabeth. The poker luminaries in their firmament, the guys who wrote the books and cranked out the instructional videos, recognizable from the poker TV shows you may have watched at home or endured in a hotel bar. They were being overthrown, these kings. Was this the Main Event or the Deadliest Game? Doyle Brunson, da Godfather, went out two hours into Day 1A. Greg Raymer and Jerry Yang, two former world champions, hit the rails, and Matt Affleck, too, what are you going to do? Michael "The Grinder" Mizrahi, whose antics livened last year's TV coverage, was obliterated while crawling on his knees and elbows toward a straight draw. (His farewell Saving Private Ryan tweet to his three brothers, who also played: "Officially out of the Main Event!! Sour start to the day!! Good Lucky my brothers!! Sorry left you guys behind!!") If they were going out, what chance a wretch like me? About 1,400 players atomized by the time I started play on Day 1D.

I railbirded for two days, watching, trying to get accustomed to the ebb and flow of the place, listening to the crickets.

Sunday at noon. My table draw was Yellow 163, Seat 9. Pavilion. When I returned half an hour before the start time, the room was mostly full, the players warily clocking their tables, approaching, backing off, like guests at reception waiting for the signal to dig into the canapés. No one wanted to be the first to go out, and no one even wanted to be the first to sit down.

The announcer bid us to join the dealers, who had been at their stations, bow-tied and patient. Terse greetings all around. "Hey." "How's it going?" Mostly 50-something white guys, with two youngsters in Seats 5 and 6. The young guys owned the game now — the past couple of winners have been under 30. Some of them probably even did yoga.

They played the "Star Spangled Banner." I stood out of politeness. It was not often that one heard the national anthem of the Republic of Anhedonia at a sporting event. The so-called "lyrics" consisted mostly of grunts, half-muttered curses, and long, drawn-out sighs, depending on the particular sufferings you were cultivating that day. Still, it never failed to lift the spirit, however faintly, we agreed on this if nothing else.

You don't want to see our flag, trust me.

Phil Hellmuth, superplayer, and "Playmate Holly Madison" started the tourney with, "Shuffle up and deal!" and the cricket orchestra started up. I wouldn't have minded "Shuffle through your regrets and tremble!" but tradition is tradition.

The blinds were 50 and 100. One of the young players at my table, the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, started off energetically. He had the demeanor of a college alt-rock DJ or someone building cybernetic organisms in the garage, and took down pots with quiet efficiency. Was he one of the young players Matt had warned me about the day before? I met Matt Matros eight years ago when he was in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence. Since graduating, he'd supported himself on poker, writing during the day and gambling at night ("The Making of a Poker Player" details his trip to glory). Last year, he won the WSOP's $1,500 Limit Hold 'em bracelet, and the week before we had lunch, he'd won the Mixed Hold 'em event. I asked him if he'd seen any "new moves" this year, the latest gizmos, which was very silly because I barely knew the old moves, whether we were talking Hold'em or the Cabbage Patch.

"These young players," he said, "they're four-betting with nothing. Five-betting." He said young players the way WWII grunts used to say, Hun bastards. The Big Blind was considered the first bet, a raise on that was the second bet, and a reraise on top of that one was a three-bet. Pretty normal stuff before the flop, the first three communal cards. In his Little Books of Poker, Phil Gordon repeatedly warned, "Beware the Fourth Bet — it means Aces." Lemme tell you, son, in my day, four-betting used to mean something. Nowadays, these young players are four-betting, five-betting helter-skelter, who knows what these crazy kids have in their hands, they could be raising with shit, rags, 7-2. The preflop four-bet was a relatively new weapon in the arsenal, but that didn't mean I had to back down when I had decent cards. Matt told me to trust my instincts. "If you have a good read on someone, five-bet them. If they're bluffing, they'll fold." OK! I told him I was going to play tight, try to make it to Day 3, not misplay my premium hands …

"Do you want to do that," Matt asked, "Play it safe?" I was here to write an article, but was that all there was to it? "I think you'll be most satisfied," he said, "if at some point, you suddenly have a read on someone: 'This guy doesn't have anything,' or 'This guy has something.' One way or another, you're going to have a read, and you're going to do something that you didn't expect you were going to do before, right or wrong." Something new in your game expressing itself. "Obviously, it's better if you're right, but even if you're wrong, it can be really satisfying to just have a read, a feeling, and go with it. Your gut."

I could play it safe, or I could really play. Matt was asking me, Why are you here? It was the Vegas question, namely — what the fuck are you doing in Vegas? As usual in this town, whether you gambled away the mortgage money, fucked a stranger, or went to see Carrot Top, you answered in your actions.

There were three empty seats. Brighton Beach eventually sat on my left. He was an intense, twentysomething dude with a strong cut-off-your-feet-and-mail-them-to-your fiancée vibe. Eventually Seat 8 showed up. The dealer looked at his ID and said, "Oh, shit!"

One thing you do not want to hear is a dealer say, "Oh, shit!" when a player joins your table. He was wearing a red World Poker Tour jacket with … was that his name embroidered on the left breast? This motherfucker was so bad, he had a goddamned monogrammed World Poker Tour jacket! Floor managers and players from other tables moseyed over to say hello. Fortunately, he was on my right, and if he went crazy with six-betting or nine-betting or who knew what, I could make a quick muck.

I had enough chips to withstand some hits, power in the forward deflectors. We started with 30k, 300 Big Blinds. Plenty of M. "It's all about M," Helen told me during our initial training session, and it was one of the first things I came to understood, slowly, the hard way, during my AC runs, the secret narrative as I passed through levels. M is how much life you have in you, how much you can take. To calculate M, you add the Big Blind, the Small Blind, and all the antes you have to pay into the pot each round, and the sum is how much it costs to play one orbit 'round the table. M, for Paul Magriel, who first articulated it, but also M for the Wave of Mutilation. Above 20M, 20 rounds, you can play your fancy-move poker. But once you dip below that, your spirit is draining away each round, and you have to start playing more aggressively, play a wider range of cards, swipe some blinds, so that you are not erased from existence. Existence, because this is life we're talking about here, how much can you take before you break. Dear reader, I hope you're operating at a big M most of the time, I really do. Things are easier that way. But then sometimes things go wrong — you lose your job, get some sort of health issue named after a foreigner, the kid won't say why he doesn't want you at the wedding, and the angry voices in your head are now using Auto-Tune. You take a tumble in a thousand ways, big and small: This the Wave of Mutilation, gobbling up your reality. Replay the hand — is there something you could have done differently to keep things the way they were, something you should have said to keep them from walking away? It doesn't matter, the dealer's shuffling again. You dwindle to 6 and 3 and 2M and you can't pay the rent next month, nobody's returning your e-mails. Things are desperate. You don't know how you're going to survive. And the truth is, you're not going to. Next level, the Blinds will go up, and up, and up.

Seat 7 never showed, and was blinded away until a floor manager removed the remnants of the stack. What came up for him or her to blow the 10k entrance fee? I hoped they were tied up in a dungeon somewhere. Not a serial killer dungeon, but one of the tony thousand-bucks-an-hour variety you can find only in Vegas, and they were having a pleasant time being beaten.

Coach gave me a simple order for the first three levels: "Make it to dinner." You can sort players into dependable categories. Tight is conservative. Loose plays a lot of hands. Loose-Aggressive plays a lot of hands, plays a lot of shit, but will bully you with betting. At the first table, I played something that might be called Tight-Incompetent. I folded out of turn, tried to bet 2.5x the BB, per the table custom, but misidentified the chips and put in less than 2x, which was a no-no. I made each mistake only once (for a change; see Dating Failures of, in my index for contrary indicators) but I'd marked myself as the weak player. At Yellow 163, I got my nicest run of cards, QQ, JJ, flopped an Ace-high flush, but there wasn't a lot of action. I wasn't down, but I wasn't fattening my stack.

I heard the cries from the other tables as All-ins began, and people busted out. I saw my first right before the end of Level 1, when Brighton Beach, who was down to 10k, shoved. He was getting a massage. I'd seen someone on Helen's poker feed say that hubris is the short stack ordering a massage. Did I mention the masseuses? There were teams of them, ladies in white polos hoisting their cushions, rubbing lotion into hairy necks. Brighton Beach shoved his stack into the pot, and a minute later he was out. I wondered if his rub-down would be prorated. Everybody shook their heads and checked out their stack. Going out this soon, what was up with that loser?

Level 1 ended. The line for the Men's was a bit long, as you can imagine. The smokers beat it out to the patio — I hadn't seen that many smokers in years. As I hustled back to my room, I Googled the dude in the World Poker Tour jacket. He was Matt Savage, proselytizer for the New Poker. I'd been following his Twitter feed for months — as a director of pro poker tournaments, he answered questions about rules and regulations. He wasn't Godzilla, but I was still glad to be downwind from his betting. In my room, I wrote some notes, reviewed my tip sheets, and made it back in time for Level 2. Breathe in, breathe out.

Enough people had busted that the floor managers started breaking up tables, rerouting players on the outskirts of the room to the empty seats at the center. Day 1D was a contracting, dying star. We gathered our chips and dispersed into the void. I saw Savage every once in a while during the following levels. We waved. The next time I spoke to the Guy in the Teal Hoodie, it was at the end of Day 6. I said hi, weirdly eager and proud that one of the fellows from the first table was still around.

"I remember you," he said, with a mellow drawl. "You were in Seat 9. You were a good player."

Too kind. "How are you doing? Still in?"

"I'm chip leader," he said. "I have 12.8 million." His name was Ryan Lenaghan, an online player who had discovered he liked casino play. He finished in 18th place.

My second table was Black 63, seat 10. I had been invited to someone's house for Thanksgiving and arrived with my sweet potato pie in the aftermath of a big argument. What happened here? There's carnage everywhere. Two young guys would nurse 12k for the rest of night, sober play that was a reversal of whatever had decimated them. Yeah, something big went down before I got there. Daddy's drinking again, Gabby got her nethers pierced. No one seemed to like the loud Aussie in Seat 4; he'd raked some pots and when he left for cigarette breaks, everybody made fun of him. He looked like the cow-faced droog from A Clockwork Orange, completing the effect with a weird hat his shag peeked out of. The table captain was named Marc Podell. He was a fellow New Yorker in his early 40s, and he made a steady accumulation for the rest of the day. He was getting cards — he had no problem showing us why the other guy should have folded — but he was also outplaying us. Half the time he was getting a massage (he knew the masseuse from Main Events past, they set up appointments by text), and the other half he was calling the raiser and showing the better hand. The Aussie was the other big stack at the table, and Marc tried to goad him into going on tilt. It worked.

"How many chips do you have?" I started hearing that a lot more, this locker room check: Who has the bigger dick? It was posturing, but also a serious consideration of how many chips this would cost you if it went south. I got more JJs and played them, a pair here and there. It was a tight table — again, no one wanted to go home on the first day. I never saw a four-bet, or five-bet. I was playing tight, too, and should have started running a bluff here and there now that I'd "established a solid image at the table," as they say in the books, but I held back. Honestly, I wanted to play good cards well and not get all crazy. I made it to dinner, per Coach's order. Helen's other order? "Go to the seafood place. Get the swordfish."

The line was too big, so I got some cruddy sandwich and ate at the sports book. I called Coach to debrief, told her about Matt Savage and the sleepy play at my first table.

"They're calling that section, 'Mellow Yellow," Helen said, chuckling. She'd sworn off tournament news after her less-than satisfying WSOP visit weeks before. But now she was hunkered over her poker feed, reading players' tweets from the tables, checking out the competition: She had a player in the game.

Her order for Levels 4 and 5 was simple. Get Bagged and Tagged — stagger to the end of the day, write my name on a plastic bag, and drop my chips inside for safekeeping until Day 2B. It almost seemed possible. This horror show ran seven days. Early on, you wanted to stay cool and keep out of expensive confrontations, but you also needed to feed the stack. "You can't win it the first day," Steven told me. But, he added, "You can't fold your way into money." You gotta play.

One of the players in my cheapo home game is Nathan, whose friend Chuck was in town to hang with Steven Garfinkle. A professor of Ancient History at Western Washington University, Steven called himself a "committed amateur," as opposed to a pro, although plenty of pros wouldn't mind a 10th-place finish in the World Series, which is how far he made it in 2007. His stay was being comped by the Aria, one of the new Cosmo-style dreadnaughts moored in the City Center complex. The Aria was more than 20 stories tall, a fortification dwarfing the old standbys of the Strip in the manner of the other upstarts. ("These young players," says Circus Circus, "They do it differently.") On the casino floor, tiny lights blinked in the walls, I walked on silvered floors and techno music summoned me to this or that pleasure zone around the next bend. A real Logan's Run building — outside the walls, my world was ruined, the Library of Congress half-buried in sand.

Inside Aria, however, everything was swell, except for the recent outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease, which lent a Masque of the Red Death air to the proceedings. On the night of 1C, I tagged along for dinner at Jean Georges. Comped! I asked Steven what a good goal for the first day was.

A good day is tripling, he told me, but hitting the room's average is OK, too. There comes a point in the event, Steven said, when "The Big Blind is someone who was here." Day 5 started with a 10k Big Blind, the amount of a person's buy-in. Ten thousand dollars to start off the hand, it represented a human soul who had looked at their table draw the first day and said, I feel lucky, just like you had. And then there is a point, he continued, "when the ante is someone who was here." This was all that remained of a person, their buy-in, and the Final Table players rolled them in their hands and tossed them to the felt. Like gods. Helen had said that her World Series time was "Heaven," and here it was: the big pot as afterlife, containing the spirits of the eliminated players.

Take, for example, the tall, thin man in Seat 2, who arrived at Black 63 from a broken table. He had long dark hair, and wire frames with light blue lenses. Throw in the black clothes, and if he declared that his job title was "Master of Illusions," taught Doug Henning all he knew, I'd have believed him. He and Marc recognized each other from "around" — other tourneys in other cities. He was supertight, a clam's clam, this older gentleman. I couldn't really see him around the curve of the table, and he rarely played a hand, so I only paid attention to him when he mixed it up. Which he finally did a couple of hours after dinner break. He went for it — shoved all in before the flop. Marc called him. AA vs. KK. Marc had the AA. The man went poof, rabbit in a hat.

"That was sad," I said. I don't think "sad" is a poker term, but there it was. I'd barely spoken all day except to say, "Raise." The Master of Illusion had been sitting so quietly for so long, mum, watching, waiting for precisely a hand like KK. KK — of course you're going to go for it. And just like that, he was atomized, called up to the Big Stack in the Sky.

"I've seen him play before," Marc said, grabbing the chips. "I knew he had something good." But not good enough for Marc's aces. He casually mentioned that this day's haul might be larger than his starting day in 2008, when he cashed in 100th place.

Level 5 was over. We bagged our chips in Ziplocs, wrote our names on the plastic. It was 12:45 a.m. I was a lump of quivering human meat, but somehow I'd made it through Day 1 with 23k. Half the average stack. The next day, the blinds would escalate to 250 and 500, with 50 dollar antes. I whipped out the abacus: I was at 19M. On my way upstairs, I bought a pouch of Jack Link's Beef Jerky. The easy-seal bag really did lock in freshness, this was no mere marketing ploy.

I'd be back for Day 2B, if my own, personal daily Wave of Mutilation didn't wash me away first.

In the next episode: Black 6, Seat 4. Pink Flip Flops at the Poker Table. Heist Movie.

Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One will be published in October by Doubleday. Follow him on Twitter here: @colsonwhitehead.