Normally, pre-publication, I’d already be moping around, worrying about reviews, resenting that I was worrying about them, and wishing I were better adapted to that curious process of watching something that was once entirely internal being released into the world with an independent life.

This time, though, it’s different. I’ve hardly moped, I’ve barely resented, because I’ve had something else to occupy my emotions and imagination. By the time you read this I’ll be in Las Vegas, warming up for the $10,000 buy-in Main Event of the World Series of Poker, a twelve-day leviathan of an event in which somewhere around 6,000 players will be taking part.

I’m a recreational poker player, about to play the biggest tournament in the world. So, for the past few weeks and months, I’ve been in some kind of training. I’ve been playing as many poker tournaments as I can; my copies of the two volumes of the tournament poker bible, Harrington on Hold ‘em, have been so read and reread and considered that they’ve become tired of my attentions.

I played the event last year, having qualified on the online site PokerStars, which is again my enabler this time. In 2006, I lasted to about half-way through the second day, when, after playing a total of about 18 hours of conservative, mistake-free poker I blew myself up against a player who was too clever or too stupid to fold his hand against my confidently delivered bluff.

The Main Event takes place in an enormous aircraft hanger of a room in the convention centre of the Rio casino, just off the Las Vegas Strip. The walk after you’ve been eliminated is gruelling — it takes a few minutes just to get out of the room. The player who’d knocked me out, a thin autist who was wearing, for some indiscernible reason, a red T-shirt that had the legend ‘Mr Wonderful’ across the chest, walked out shortly afterwards. There are few things worse than going out of a poker tournament because of your own mistakes. It makes it even more sickening if you give your chips away to a player who doesn’t have the skill to use them. For a year, I’ve had bad dreams about me and Mr Wonderful.

I’m going to try to survive for longer than I did last year. I’m going to try to do more than just concentrate on survival. (Ten per cent of the field get a share of the prize pool.) If I don’t make it, if my exit is even more shaming than last year, as it is quite likely to be, I’ll find ways of reconciling myself to being in one of the oddest cities of the world.

I’ll be writing about the progress of the Main Event on my blog, I’ll be playing poker as much as I can elsewhere. I might take a trip into the desert or even have a go at investigating how the downtown art scene intersects with the rollergirl phenomenon. (Female roller derbies seem to be big in Vegas—it’s a ‘sport’ in which two teams of rather chunky young women skate around in circles trying to knock each other over: a metaphor for something, I’m sure, I’m just not sure what.)

The great thing about playing poker is that the activity obliterates everything else. Whatever happens, I won’t be reading reviews.