HugePoker

I’m laying in bed at Bellagio, laptop on my lap-top, propped up on pillows watching CNN, trying to shake the nasty cold that showed up 48 hours ago. It’s both good and bad timing - obviously it sucks to be sick for day 2 of the main event of the WSOP, but it didn’t really hurt my focus too badly yesterday, and I feel very fortunate that I don’t have to be playing poker today. I’m hoping that the peak of my illness was 4:00 this morning, and now I’ve got two days off to get over it before I go back for Day 3 at Noon on Monday.

I ended Day 2 with 63,900 chips, which will be a little below average going into Day 3, but a perfectly healthy, playable stack. I’ve got my seating assignment for Day 3 - I haven’t researched my opponents yet, but the chip lineup doesn’t look good - I have 4 much larger stacks on my left, so it’s going to be hard to raise through them. There’s a tiny 10,000 chip stack on my right, which is sort of good and bad - I’d rather have more chips on my right because chips tend to flow clockwise around the table, but at least I should be able to make good decisions when he shoves instead of having to worry every time I raise whether he will take a stand and shove over the top of me.

Yesterday was about as different from Day 1 for me as I could imagine. The table was relatively conservative, with not a lot of fireworks early in the day. Even later in the evening big pots generally were only played with big hands, and no-one really took on the mantle of table-captain. We only busted two players, and the chip leader coming into the day lost ground, so no-one built a massive stack. Given all that, and my sickness, I’m pretty happy to come out of the day with 63,900. I probably could have benefited from some more selective aggression, since I seemed to be getting a lot of respect from the table and had a good feel for who I should tangle with and who to avoid … it’s possible I could have extracted more from that setup (but it’s always possible that I would have just gotten myself into trouble trying).

The key hand for me early on was another full house … I’m in the BB with QT facing three limpers, and I’m happy but not crazed when I see a QJ3 flop. I check, one of the limpers bets, and two of us call. The turn is a nice but scary Ten. I’m not really worried about AK in a limped pot, but K9 or 98 are possible. I need to worry about draws more though - if someone has KQ or KJ or AT or 99 or A9 (the list goes on) I’m ahead of them but they have a lot of outs. I’m prepared to lay the hand down if it really looks like I’m beat, but I think I have to charge a solid admission price to anyone who wants to outdraw me. I bet 2/3 of the pot and only the UTG limper calls. I get ready to just check-call the river unless a 4th straight card falls (in which case I’m probably check-folding), and then BINGO! A Ten hits on the river, giving me a full house. I don’t know what UTG has, but he called the turn so I think I should go for value on the river. I bet 5200 and he tanks forever, finally calling and claiming he had AK. If true, he limped AK preflop and then slowplayed the nuts on the turn, and he deserves the bite I took out of him.

That hand took me up to 58K, and I got up as high as 75K before running TT into JJ and luckily only losing about 12K.

We started with 2412 players and finished with 1200. When today (2B) is finished we’ll have the total numbers and average chip count for Day 3. The tournament as a whole had 7300-ish entrants, and 1st prize will be $8,944,138 (actually I’ve heard ESPN is chipping in the extra dough to round it up to $9M). They will pay down to 747th place, who will receive $19,263.

While writing this I just received a scouting report from Chad, who knows a couple of the players at my Day 3 table - pretty nice to have a top pro giving me intel about my opponents.

Monday Noon, Day 3, stay tuned.