HugePoker

I got up at 6AM to finish packing, Rachel took me to the airport at 7AM, flight at 8:30AM, landed Vegas 11AM, Mark collected me and took me to the Rio, where I checked in to my room … all the while debating whether I should play the $1K WSOP event at Noon. I decided that I was in pretty good shape, having slept for most of the flight, so I dumped my bags, put on my loud red Hawaiian shirt, grabbed my silver card protector and headed downstairs. I reg’d for the event a few minutes late and go to my table at about 12:20.

It was a wild day. It started off pretty badly, as I drifted down from the 3000 chip starting stack to just under 2000, then pulled in a few pots to get back above 3000, where I caught my first bolt of lightning. The button was very active, and at 100-200 he raised to 550. I looked down at 98s in the SB and decided to put him to the test, shoving my 3300 chips in, expecting him to fold. He did not fold, in fact he called pretty quickly, which made me think I was completely dead, but he turned over AJs and I had live cards at least. I was more than live on the 982 flop, and I was golden when the 9 hit on the turn.

Another beautiful hand when I called a small raise from the BB with A3s, flopped the nut flush draw, checkraised my opponent on the flop (again, mostly hoping he would just fold but knowing I had good outs if he didn’t) only to have him put me all-in. I was committed at that point, and I called, and he had KK. I had an overcard and the flush draw, so we were close to 50:50, and I nailed the diamond on the river to double up again, sending the “Pokerstars Team Pro” who I didn’t recognize into tilty fits. During the dinner break I went up to my room and opened up the Rizen/PearlJammer book to see if I could glean a little wisdom, and randomly opened to page 85, where I found PearlJammer playing almost the identical hand, check-raising on the flop with a flush draw, even with the same reasoning I had about trying to make the flop raise look stronger by not shoving all-in but still committing himself.

Lots of action after that, building my stack up to 26K, hitting a horrible slide down to 8K, moving around to 6 different tables, twice running into Jimmy “GobboBoy” Fricke, young online phenom who has turned into a live phenom (finishing 2nd to Gus Hansen in the Aussie Millions before he was 21) - very relieved to have him on my right both times. When I got down to 8K, I played a hand with him in the blinds in which I 3-bet shoved on him on the turn, he thought for a while and muttered “That’s very consistent with a good hand” but then called anyway doubling me up (I had AQ, he had A6, and we both hit our Ace). After the hand I asked him to clarify what he had muttered and he did, adding “I have trust issues - it started with my mother”.

That hand got me moving in the right direction again, and I soon doubled again with KK vs QQ, up to 33K. And on my last table of the night I grabbed a bunch of small pots, ending the night with 37475 chips, with average being around 21K. Between Day 1A and 1B we are down to 465 players (from 3128 starters), of which 324 will make the money. The chip leaders have 60-70K, so I’m in good shape.

Restart is at 2:30PM. Let’s hope for another huge day (maybe without some of the nasty downward swings).