HugePoker

My WSOP has had a slow start on many pokerish and non-pokerish levels … I didn’t play any poker for the first two days here largely because I was recuperating from a wee bit of the old food poisoning that I collected from some or other bite of junk food along the road trip – could have been the pizza hut in Southern Oregon, but my money’s on the greasy breakfast buffet in Twin Falls, Idaho. The ice in my cooler melted and leaked out onto my laptop, causing the screen to fade to near-invisibility, and the wireless internet system I was expecting to use has been a disaster, so I’ve had a lot of frustrating technology-wrestling going on. I’ve played 2 $250 mega-satellites, 2 $340 multi-table cash tournaments and an assortment of single table satellites ranging from $65 to $275, and I’ve won … zero dollars.

In one of the single-table tournaments I got down to the final 2 players with a 2-to-1 chip lead and the other guy suggested that I could take $700 and he would take $420, but that wasn’t quite good enough and I thought I could make better decisions than he could, and sure enough a few hands later we got all the chips in with his K-3 vs my A-6 … King on the flop, Three on the river for good measure and he sucked out to double up, later catching trips on the flop to knock me out with … zero dollars. But I don’t feel bad about my deal-refusal – in the long run I think I’ll make more than $700 in that spot, so turning it down made sense.

In other tournaments I…

- Flopped a flush and got all my chips in, only to be beaten on the river by a royal flush

- Got all my chips in pre-flop with Queens, lost to a set of deuces on the river

- Had this old codger give me a stern lecture about my reckless play after I shoved Ten-Three suited (with five big blinds mind you) and got lucky against A-K … then smugly laughed and taunted me about how beautifully he had trapped me when he raised with A-K and I reshoved with A-Q (9BB this time) and his hand held up to knock me out. Yep, nice trap sir – very sneaky – you totally outplayed me.

Today’s cash tournament at Caesars was my first pretty good run. I got off to a great start, nearly doubling up on the second hand, built a very healthy stack for several hours but then dwindled by the dinner break, quickly recovered from 10,000 chips to 35,000 but then ran my Jacks into Aces and was out in 55th out of 240 starters, with 27 making the money. Sigh.

Tomorrow is my Day 1 of the $1000 WSOP stimulus package event (Day 1a just finiehed). This will be the largest non-main-event tournament in history – it’s completely sold out at 5800 players and my first real WSOP event. They’ve improved the structure of the lower-buyin events this year, but because this is “only” a $1,000 buyin event, things will still be flying pretty quickly, and it’s likely that I will have busted or doubled up within the first hour or two.

There are various ways to follow the action if you are so inclined. I’ve just set up a “twitter” account (yes, my first social networking account of any kind – I overcame my paranoia since all the cool poker players are doing it) which you can get to by CLICKING HERE. If you don’t know how to use twitter, well, neither do I. I think the way it works is that I can text message in short posts, and if you’re “following” me you’ll get an update via the website, email or text message. If you’re twitter-versant and have advice for me or others trying to use it to follow my WSOP progress, post a comment on this thread.

There’s also the trusty old PXF live updates page. It doesn’t look like anyone else is posting WSOP news there yet, so I might have the page to myself.

More general coverage will be at PocketFives but they may have news of me because I’ve registered with them – in fact they’re supposed to be following my twitter account and re-broadcasting anything I post there.

I’m sure cardplayer.com and pokerpages.com and probably others will have more-or-less live coverage, mostly of the famous players’ progress and not so much of people like me, but who knows… You’ll have to find the exact pages yourself, as it’s past my bedtime.

So … Noon Pacific Time … May 31 … First shot at a 2009 WSOP bracelet … would be a good time to get back to some serious winning.

I’ll be in touch. Somehow.

-huge