HoldemFAQ.com

I just have to share this one.

I played in the PokerStars $18.50 + $1.50 turbo satellite to the nightly $50+$5 - $50,000 guaranteed tournament. I held on and won a seat in the main tournament.

On the first hand, I am in the BB. I get:

Everybody folds to the small blind, who raises to T80 - which is 4x the BB. I figure he is a donk who is trying to steal the blinds. Since I have an excellent hand, I raise it up to set the tone early on. I DO NOT want him to make a habit of stealing my blinds. So I pop it up to T240. He calls.

Pot: T480

The flop comes:

SB checks. I bet T380. SB raises to T1100.

What the heck? Does he have 99, TT, KK, or AA?

I do not ponder too long. I figure he would have reraised preflop with AA or KK. The only thing I need to worry about is 99 or TT. I push all-in (I know - dumb move. Why put my tournament life on the line with one pair?)

He calls and shows:

How sick is that? First hand of the tournament and the blinds get two huge pocket pairs.

The turn is:

The river is a brick and I suck out (for once) to double up.

dobbbber - if you read this - I am so sorry.  That was sick in a lot of ways.

Well, I am now back home and have had time to reflect on my first attempt at the WSOP. Overall it was a blast. It was a poker mecca, with no shortage of games anywhere. If you wanted a game, there was always one to be found. There were mega-amounts of people there. I tried to get the awe out on the first day that I arrived.

I saw a fair amount of pros. The list includes Scotty Nguyen, Dan Harrington, David “Devilfish” Ulliot, Chris Ferguson, TJ Cloutier, Johnny Chan, Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Erick Lindgren, David Benyamine, and any more that I cannot remember.

I only played in two WSOP satellites and one event. Simply put, I did not care for the structure. While I did like the 60 minute levels, I did not care for the T3000 starting stacks. It boils down to that you really can only be outflopped (or miss the flop) twice before you are short stacked and in an “all-in mode”. Personally, I prefer deep-stack tournaments. I played in a bunch of them - two Venetian Deep Stack events, two of the nightly Venetian Tournaments, Ceasar’s Mega Stack, Harrahs Deep-Stack. I still would love to play in the main event. You get T20,000 and the levels are 2 hours long. Next year, I am pretty sure that I am going to pony up the $10,000 and play.

I will also try to satellite into the main event by playing several of the single table tournaments. I found that the skill level on the lower buy-ins was weak ($175 - $330). Once you start getting to the $525 single table tournaments, the skill is a lot better.

I had a ton of fun and I cannot wait to go again next year! If you are a serious poker player, then the WSOP experience is a MUST!

Thank you for reading along and following my adventure at the 2008 WSOP!

The last two days have been hectic.  I tried to cram a lot of tournaments into the little time left.  I came up empty in all of them - then I played the Harrah’s Nightly $150 Deepstack on Monday 7/7.  I will go more into detail later, we started at 8pm, and I wound up at the final table at 3am.  They were going to pay 9 places, when we worked out a deal for everybody involved.  I took home $1700 - which was third place money.  The blinds were getting so high, that it was going to be a crap-shoot (no pun intended).

So, I took the biggest pay - which equated to third-place money.  We finished at 3:00 am.  I have to be at the airport at 6:30am, so it is going to be another long day today!

I will provide a wrap-up in the coming couple of days, after I get home and get settled back into life’s routine.

First - apologies for the lack of updates the past day or so. I have not been really active. On July 3rd, I went over to The Venetian to try to satellite into the $1060 Deep Stack tournament. The satellite cost $240. The table was full of decent players. We started with T2000, and the blinds were 15 minutes long. At the 400/800 level (level 5), we still had 5 players. UGH! I wound up going out in 4th place - 2 places short of the money. I did not really like this structure, so I decided not to play any more satellites.

The Venetian did have an 8:00pm tournament with T5000 starting chips and 30 minute levels for $180. Not too bad, so I bought in. I was completely card cold the first five levels. My stack was down to about T1800. Finally, the cards started to turn around, and I worked my way back up to about T5700 when I got KK in the small blind.

Everybody folded to the button, who raised it to T2200 (blinds were T200/T400 with a T50 ante). I capped my cards and pondered what to do. If I call here, I am committing about 40% of my stack. I figure I need to push, so I go all in. The button immediately calls and shows AQo. statistically, an ace flops about 17% of the time. When you have pocket KK, I think the percentage that an ace comes on the flop goes up to about 98%. This was not one of the exceptions, and I was out. Ugh - very frustrating.

Today, July 4th, I decided to take a down day. I needed time away from poker just to “recover”. Donna and I rented a car, did some laundry, and drove to the Hoover Dam. I wanted to take a tour, but it was so bloody hot. it was about 114 degrees. Yikes! We decided that we would take a tour of the dam NEXT time we are here (as well as drive out to the Grand Canyon).

We drove back and stopped at a casino called “Red Rock Casino” that was off the strip. It was quite different and more relaxing that the hustle and bustle of being at the Rio. We played for awhile and then headed back.

On the way back, I rolled down the window and told Donna, “Hey, its not too bad out now. I think I can handle this.”

As soon as I said that, we passed a time and temperature display. It indicated that the time was 11:41pm and the temperature was 97 degrees. Geesh - 97 degrees and I think it is cool. I must be getting sick.

Tomorrow I hit the felt again. This time it is The Venetian $540 deep stack. I hope I can go deep into the field again.