Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  I soon refined my idea into an individual record for marathon poker playing, and chose the benchmark of 100 hours. Why? I blithely figured four days seemed like a very impressive length, much manlier than three days, and by extension, if I was going for ninety-six hours anyway, how could I not go for an even hundred? I imagine many new Guinness marathon feats are set with similarly imprecise logic. When Timothy Weber of Germany set a new record in 2003, for “Movie Watching,” his mark of 70 hours and 1 minute (thirty-two films), like mine of 72:02, suggests reaching a set goal and then quitting as soon as possible. On the other hand, this begs the question of how Louisa Almedovar and Rich Langley could have not made out for thirty-three more seconds after setting the record for the “Longest Kiss,” at 30 hours 59 minutes and 27 seconds, to make it an even thirty-one hours? Maybe they had bad watches. In their defense, they did remain standing the whole time.

  New categories for records are always tricky business, for a couple of reasons. First, even though it has not been done before, you have to explain your intent when you apply, and it has to be impressive enough to woo the researchers. One hundred hours I was sure they would go for; ten hours I was sure they would pass on. But where was the unwritten dividing line between humble and heroic? This confusion does not stop once the new record attempt is approved. If Guinness gives the go-ahead for a new category, any attempt could theoretically be argued as a new benchmark. If I quit after five minutes, I could claim that I had set the world record for longest poker playing session at five minutes, having been the only person ever to have done this feat under the Guinness World Records rules for it, which I had essentially just invented. This claim would be ridiculous, so the Keeper of the Records reserves the right to approve or deny attempts that fall short of the stated goal. In theory, if I said I planned to do 100 hours and fell short, after eighty-two, they still might honor it and grant the record if they deemed the attempt worthy. This waffling leaves the record setter in something of a gray area, and provides sufficient motivation for picking a goal that is lofty enough to command the book’s respect and approval, but realistic enough to actually do. I knew that people in casinos routinely play poker for twenty-four-hour stints, so asking Guinness to approve anything near this threshold seemed ludicrous. It had to be 100 hours.

  My wife had different ideas. Although she is used to this kind of behavior from me, she immediately expressed serious concerns, and I have learned, after more than a decade of marriage in which I have been proven wrong again and again, that on the rare occasions when she draws a line in the sand and takes a strong position against one of my ideas, she is usually right. Going solely on gut instinct—or maybe women’s intuition—she pointed out that 100 hours without sleep was, in her words, “a really long time.” My argument for the plan was simple: “I played for almost forty-eight hours in Vegas, after flying, while drinking cocktails, without even trying. Now I have a clear goal and should be able to double my earlier effort.” Her argument, based on what I had told her about Weber’s movie watching and other marathon records in the book, was even simpler: “Why bother, if seventy-two hours would get you the record?”

  Good point, and well taken. I reset my official record-breaking sights and filed an online application with Guinness World Records, explaining my intent to play for at least seventy-two hours, and detailing the circumstances: I would do it at a large U.S. casino, in a public game under the standard casino rules open to any casino guests, all monitored by casino management. As I expected, the folks at Guinness World Records gave me the green light.

  When the research staff then approved my shot at a new category, they did what they do for every presanctioned attempt: they provided me with a laundry list, three typed pages’ worth of rules, stipulations, and details of the required documentation. The key points for my poker stunt were these:

  A fifteen-minute break must be taken after every eight completed hours of the record-breaking activity. This is a standard medical safety rule Guinness has incorporated into most of its marathon record attempts. However, as Ashrita Furman found to his chagrin, when he thought he had already broken the pogo stick jumping record for the first time, these fifteen minutes cannot be accumulated. You cannot skip one and then take a half-hour nap after sixteen hours.

  I was to maintain a “logbook” recording the start and finish of play, times of all rest breaks, and changes of casino personnel.

  Officials of the game’s governing body had to be present at all times, and had to ensure that the rules of the game were followed. No such official could be used to satsify this monitoring requirement for more than four hours per session. Each official had to sign in and sign out of the logbook.

  In addition, I needed to have two independent witnesses on hand at all times. Like casino officials, they had to rotate and never work more than a four-hour shift, and had to sign the logbook duly. The witnesses couldn’t be relatives of mine nor be under age eighteen.

  Finally, the zinger: I needed a licensed and practicing member of the medical profession overseeing the record attempt in its entirety. Once again, the doctors or nurses had to rotate in four-hour shifts, and sign the book. They also could pull the plug: if it was their professional opinion that I should quit, I was to stop immediately.

  The first two points were easy; the next two were trickier. The last was borderline impossible. These marathon rules presumably also apply to the game of Jass in the bar, walking for thirty hours with a milk bottle on your head, or extended pole-squatting sessions. There have been marathon games of Monopoly, separate movie-and television-watching marathons, and of course, the oft-challenged radio DJ record, one of the most popular attempts in the book. It is hard to believe they were all organized under these types of onerous rules. Not many people have enough friends who are doctors or nurses to rotate through voluntary four-hour shifts for three days and nights, and the cost of such round-the-clock oversight would be exorbitant. In addition, some of these marathons go on much longer, spanning four or five days or more. Likewise, having enough unrelated witnesses and rules officials to cover all these shifts would be extremely problematic in any kind of home game setting, or even for the average casino patron. But I had an ace up my sleeve. I chose Foxwoods for my marathon for two reasons. First, because it is the largest casino in the world, a superlative that made it seem especially fitting. More important, from my World Poker Tour article, I knew the executives in its public relations department, and I knew the media attention the record could bring to the casino (they would later use my picture in advertisements in the New York Daily News). All large casinos have medical staff on hand at all times for emergencies, and the poker room is always manned by a hierarchy of managers, submanagers, and dealers. So when I broached the idea, they not only agreed to help me take care of all the paperwork, filling all the managers in on the details, and to provide nurses and EMTs to monitor the attempt and sign my logbook, they also extended the courtesy of free food and beverage throughout the attempt, served tableside, and a hotel room for the inevitable aftermath, no matter how it went. The logistics of this record were far more daunting than my golf one, and by the end, my logbook had amassed many pages of certificates, signatures, witness statements, and other documentation. Of course, the casino’s largesse came at a price: I had wanted to begin my assault on the record book at 9 AM, since I am an early riser and didn’t want to “waste” any waking hours, but the casino wanted the morning TV appearance, adding six hours to my sleep deprivation. The casino also arranged a series of radio and newspaper interviews for immediately after the event, when I planned to go to sleep. But these obstacles were minor roadblocks on the path into Guinness.

  When I left for Foxwoods there was one secret I was keeping from wife: I still wanted 100 hours and set out with the belief that if I felt great after seventy-two, I would just keep going. As she might have predicted, that was not in the cards, so to speak. Had I insisted on my original four-day goal, things would certainly have ended d
ifferently. I can imagine only two possible outcomes: the best case was failure, the worst case death or lasting brain damage. Because as much as I prepared logistically for the attempt, I had done precious little research into the concept of sleep deprivation itself. Instead, I focused on practical matters such as changing my shirt and brushing my teeth, and to that end, I had a duffel bag packed with disposable toothbrushes and mouthwashes, deodorant, baby wipes, six clean shirts, extra socks, underwear, and pants, energy bars, aspirin, and anything else I could think of that might be useful over three or four long days. And nights. The Guinness guidelines stipulated that I take a fifteen-minute “safety break” after every eight hours of play. I’m still not sure why standing on one leg in the bathroom trying to change your pants and brush your teeth at the same time was any safer than sitting in a chair playing cards, but it definitely encouraged better hygiene, and I figured I’d try to get as much as possible done in those fifteen minutes. I thought I had everything figured out, but I had already forgotten the cardinal rule: THERE ARE NO EASY WORLD RECORDS. My ignorance stemmed from the simple fact that I had never stayed up for anywhere near my target time.

  My lack of research into the effects of not sleeping was not an oversight. I simply didn’t want to know. When I go for long bike rides on unfamiliar terrain, I prefer to not know anything about the route, because that way, you take everything as it comes, rather than worrying about the upcoming big hill you heard about. It is an ignorance-is-bliss approach, and I took the same tactic, intentionally, regarding the sleep issue. That was why I tried to quickly forget my friend Jim’s comment about permanent insomnia. I was also in denial. I did not want to confront any evidence that would dissuade me from my attempt, cause me to lose face, and keep me from acquiring another handsome Guinness World Records certificate. I had already told my friends, co-opted the staff at Foxwoods, rounded up a support crew, and based on my previous experience, expected an outpouring of media interest. I couldn’t back out. I wouldn’t back out. Had I done the obvious online research, I would have learned quite a bit about sleep deprivation, but I did not. I planned to go into the attempt as carefree as possible.

  My purposeful ignorance turned out not to matter. The research I should have done in advance, and did do afterward, simply predicted what I corroborated firsthand. I later found out that the military is understandably very concerned with the effects of sleep deprivation, because the reality of war is that sometimes there is no chance for soldiers to sleep during prolonged combat. For this reason, hundreds of studies have been done to determine exactly what happens to mental and physical functions after various periods of time without sleep. Coincidentally, seventy-two hours is a magic number for the military. Numerous subjects, hopefully volunteers, have been poked and prodded and tested after being kept awake for that particular length of time, and the data on this particular duration of exhaustion is ample—and accurate.

  One of the many military-sponsored medical studies I read summed up the results of sleep deprivation in a handy little table at the end of a wordy and virtually incomprehensible article jammed with medical jargon, and it read like a perfect description of me right around the time I was trying to get back from my ill-fated trip to the bathroom. The list included:

  Body swaying while standing (that’s me)

  Vacant stares (check)

  Slurred speech (got it covered)

  Less energetic, cheerful, and alert (leave it to the military to fund a study to figure this out)

  Loss of interest in surroundings (absolutely)

  More irritable (“more” being a gross understatement)

  Forgetfulness (I’m pretty sure I had this symptom)

  Difficulty speaking clearly (hard to separate this from slurred speech, but yes)

  Unable to carry on conversation (ditto)

  Short-term memory loss (again, I think I had this)

  The study’s conclusion was that after seventy-two hours without sleep, the ability to perform most tasks was diminished by at least 50 percent. Another military study more closely focused on performance found the drop closer to 80 percent. Recent experiments by the University of California at San Diego concluded that brain activity is actually altered during such extended periods of wakefulness, and that “the frontal lobe does not function when the subject is severely sleep deprived.” This is important, because as the authors point out, the frontal lobe is “the thinking part of the brain, responsible for activities such as speech, temporal memory, and problem solving.” Apparently this includes solving problems such as how to get back from the bathroom.

  Not only did I experience every single symptom described on the military’s checklist, but I had many of them in combination, a sort of insanity cocktail. According to three of my friends, Joe Kresse, Matt Rosenthal, and Nalm “JP” Peress, I became increasingly irritable, snapping at other players and the dealers. I also became forgetful and slow to respond, constantly having to be reminded that it was my turn to ante, bet, or fold. But the real problem was just beginning to show up. Other than possible hallucinations, none of the articles mentioned anything about visual acuity. I suddenly found myself, at about three in the morning on the last night, with ten hours still to go, unable to read the cards. I could still see, and I could make out the faces of the players and the chips and the cards themselves, but the cards all looked blank, rectangles of white as pure as the driven snow. I tried holding them closer or farther away, squinting, but it made no difference. The red and black print, the hearts and spades, kings and queens, they were all gone. Even if you know nothing about poker, it is obviously not a game you want to be playing for money when you don’t know what any of the cards are.

  I remember the frustration of the blank cards clearly. I remember thinking that I could not go on like that for another ten hours. I remember thinking I might have to pull the plug on the attempt and let the chips fall where they may as far as Guinness granting the record. But I remember little else, because this kicked off a two-hour stretch of complete blackout, where according to witnesses, I was conscious and vaguely lucid, and continued to play, but I cannot remember one single second of that time, except as sort of a waking dream. In my dream, I saw the white gazebo surrounding the elevated table, and I became concerned that I was in the wrong place. I kept trying to make sure that I was still at Foxwoods, still making my bid for the record. Although Foxwoods has the largest poker room of any casino in the nation, with more than eighty tables, each accommodating eight to ten players, in my waking dream I was suddenly playing at a small solitary table, set in a distant corner of the casino, surrounded not by other poker tables but by clanging slot machines. I begged and pleaded with the dealer to help me get back to the official table but they ignored my pleas. I felt lost and hopeless and alone. These conversations never took place. It really was a dream.

  In anticipation of my record attempt, the casino had mounted a large, red, digital clock over the table, which was also surrounded by posters trumpeting my GWR attempt. Spectators watched constantly, except in the wee hours. The clock counted the minutes and hours from zero to twenty-four, and after a full day it reset to zero, something that had already happened twice. In fact, it was when the clock reset after forty-eight hours that I completely abandoned all pretensions of making 100 hours and focused on simply surviving the last day. Even at that point, just two days into it, the end could not come soon enough. At nearly six in the morning on Sunday, with just over seven hours to go in my bid, the clock read in the neighborhood of seventeen hours, the time elapsed in the third day. It was these glowing red numbers that suddenly came into focus, like the display on a bedside clock radio, as I “awoke” from whatever dream state I had been in. My blurry eyes focused, the red digits got sharper and sharper until I could read them, and suddenly I was there, at the table, with cards in my hand, cards I could once again read, and I was fully focused. I began to play at close to my normal level, and much to the apparent surprise of my tablemates, began to wi
n again. It was only later, after I had set the record, that my friends would fill in the missing hours for me. Here is what happened:

  Shortly after I realized that I could no longer read the cards, JP whispered in my ear that I needed to start folding every hand. He had to remind me several times, but apparently I got the message, and began to fold automatically, like clockwork, after every deal. After all, I had no idea which cards I had. The game I was playing required a fifty-cent ante; they deal roughly thirty-five hands an hour, so I stood to lose about $17 an hour sitting there with this strategy, which seemed preferable to how much I might lose betting on cards I couldn’t read. My strategy of playing aggressively at the outset, when I was lucid, had worked, and I was up a considerable amount of money from my many hours of play when I could still see, so the antes didn’t matter. What is interesting, especially to JP, is that despite his instructions, two or three times each hour I would deviate from the folding strategy and suddenly play a hand. I cannot remember this, and it happened while I could still not read the cards; yet on each of these rare occasions I did in fact hold excellent cards and win, like some sort of idiot savant on autopilot, recognizing the great hands subconsciously, despite not being able to perceive the cards.

  I also became increasingly irritable, distracted, and slow to respond, prompting the night-shift manager of the poker room, a woman who had been very supportive on the previous two nights and wished me nothing but success, to become somewhat concerned. At one point she came over and asked to speak to me. Again, I know this because she later told me, and Joe, Matt, and JP confirmed it, but I have no recollection. Nonetheless, I trust all these witnesses, who helped me reconstruct the ensuing conversation.