HugePoker

It’s been a rough one, and I’m both sad and relieved it’s over. Everyone I know who was playing the main event has busted out without cashing. Though my Series as a whole was quite disappointing, I ended it on an up-note with my cash in the Caesar’s Mega-Stack Main Event today. I finished Day 2 with a VERY short stack last night, so short that it seemed almost silly just to come back at 2PM, shove my chips in after one or two hands and then walk away with my meager $2500 prize. Instead I walked in, tripled my stack on the first hand, then built it up to over a million chips (my first time in a live tournament with over 1M), and then went out with guns blazing on one ambitious bluff and one not-so-bad-underdog race with Q2o vs AKo (I was only a 40-60 dog). If the bluff had worked (and I think it often would) I would have had 1.6 million and been in strong contention for the final table. As it was I finished 20th out of 705 starters for a prize of $3898 - not enough to soak up my losses for the trip by any means, but enough to take a little of the sting off.

I’m particularly pleased with some of my play in that tournament, much of which I posted on my twitter page … I made a couple of good moves in situations where I was playing the situation and not my non-existent hand; and I abused the bubble aggressively but not excessively, increasing my stack from 350k to over 600k without ever showing down a hand. All this without running particularly well - I think I won two coinflips and lost three, I had AK beaten by 84o for a big pot, and I never delivered a bad beat to anyone.

I’ll be leaving Vegas in the next couple of days, taking a (hopefully) relaxing road trip back to Seattle and the real world. 6 weeks is a long time in the land of fake cleavage, massive parking garages, 108 degree heat and constant slot machine noise.

Here’s to a better WSOP in 2010…

-huge