HugePoker

I arrived in Vegas Wednesday after a three-day drive, played two tournaments on Thursday - the $350 Deep Stack Extravaganza at the Venetian and the $160 nightly at Caesar’s, both with sort of dreary results - never got much above starting stack, took a couple of routine bad beats, bled down enough that I had to start shoving marginal hands, and sooner or later ran into big hands. Today I went for the $550 “Mega Stack” series event at Caesar’s, similar to the Venetian’s “Deep Stack” events but with much smaller fields. Last year I decided that the tournaments at Caesar’s were softer than Venetian’s, partly because better players want to play with bigger fields to have a shot at a truly big score. I tend to like smaller fields because I think a big part of my edge over weaker players comes at the final table, and I’m much more likely to make a final table in a 100-player tournament than in a 700-player event.

So I went to Caesar’s, with somewhat excessive 25k starting stacks and 25-50 blinds, but they go up pretty fast after that. By the end of late-registration and re-registration (they’re so desperate for bigger fields that if you bust out of the tournament they let you buy back in for the first 4 hours and 40 minutes) we had a whopping 69 players. Things were mostly quiet for the first three hours or so, and I made slow progress up to around 30k. A hand came up where a player raised from middle position to 2400, super-loose Asian kid to his left flat-called, I look down and find AQ in the small blind. I’m out of position with a pretty good but not superpower hand, and I’d love to just take the pot down right away, so I raise to 8100. The initial raiser folds, but the S-L.A.K. immediately shoves for more than my 30k stack. So I’m in a weird spot … if the initial raiser had shoved I would have a pretty easy fold, but the S-L.A.K.’s play smells really weird. Of the 4 hands that beat me, if he had AK I’m pretty sure he would have 3-bet right away, likewise with QQ and probably KK. Maybe with KK or AA he flats to induce a squeeze, but maybe not. So why did he flat for 2400 and then shove for more than 30k? I don’t do this very often, but this was definitely a situation where a big bet really smelled fishy and made me more inclined to call. So in the end I think forever and then call off my stack and hold my breath until he turns over A-T-suited. I get in one breath and then hold it again until the board fills up with no Ten and no flush for my opponent, and I more-than-double up. I work my way up to 75k, which was about double average at the time, but I can’t get any more chips than that, and things started turning sour. I lost a big pot when my AK lost to KQ after we both flopped a King but my opponent made a one-card flush on the river - yuck. I made it to the dinner break - BBQ brisket is covered by the $10 food voucher you get with your tournament buy-in - yum. I get moved to a new table and it becomes clear pretty quickly that this is a much meeker bunch, and I commence immediate aggression, which makes me some progress, until I look down at AQ again, which is a lot better than all the other hands I’ve been shoving with, so I shove again with 40k (blinds 1k-2k-300). An old guy on my left agonizes for 3 or 4 minutes and finally calls, turning over 99. I’m hopeful that I might double up again with AQ, but that hope is dashed quickly when the flop contains no Ace, no Queen, and a big fat nine-ball. So I’m out in 24th (only 9 people got paid) on an annoying coin-flip, but at least I feel like I put together a decent run and got a flip away from a well-above average stack with 24 left.

Tomorrow is day 1A of the $1000 WSOP event at the Rio, and I’m about 80% sure I’m playing (if I don’t feel like playing tomorrow I can play day 1B on Sunday). It should be a massive donk-fest, and hopefully my tables will be filled with random tourists taking their one shot at WSOP glory.

Noon Pacific time … cross fingers (or whatever).

-huge