FWIW, this sounds like an extremely profitable time of year to be a mugger in Las Vegas.
Good luck in – and getting to – Vegas! 
I withdrew my funds from Neteller as soon as I heard about the legislation: since then I’ve convinced myself that I was just being paranoid, but I guess it was the right thing to do!
Actually, it is a felony in Louisiana and Washington, and questionable in about 8 other states. Just so ya know.
How utterly ridiculous. Man.
I’ll do better than “good luck”. Varlos, here’s hoping you’re not the first one out.
Oh…CONGRATULATIONS!
Aholibah’s blog is here. Somewhere I have a link to a blog on PokerStars that gives a lot of good info for the first-timer. I’ll post it if I find it.
Even those of us who went out there and didn’t play in the WSOP had a lot of fun in the juicy NL ring games at every casino. Have fun, VarlosZ, whenever you get there!
Oh…
We’re going to be out there for a conference between July 9-15. And tickets to Penn and Teller at the Rio.
I totally didn’t realize the WSOP main event was so early this year. That’s going to be a fucking circus.
I don’t know if I should look at this as being extra cool, or a scary twist.
Mostly I’m just subscribing to the thread to see if a dopefest develops.
Hey, congrats and good luck VarlosZ! This link was from last year’s WSOP and Dopefest that ensued. There are some still relevant and useful links on that thread too.
I’ve been too busy with my wife and son’s issues to persue Vegas this year though. We had a great time last year as you can see from Aholi’s blog and such. Heh, just looking at my pic when I was 300+ lbs. is even funny to me now since I’m down to 240. Anyways, good luck and keep us posted. Aholi did a great job with her blog.
Well, I’m back. I wound up spending 4.5 hours on hold with JetBlue without ever speaking to anyone. Constantly checking online, I could see that the few remaining open flights that left that day were filling up, so I had to go ahead and just buy a new, one-way ticket. that left around 6:45 PM, 12 hours after I was originally scheduled to leave. Fortunately, I was able to sort it out with the lady behind the counter at check-in, and she refunded the cost of my new ticket, since I had already paid to fly that day and was supposed to receive the originalal rate on my seat.
Funny coincidence: the guy right next to me at the check-in counter apparently had the same exact problem that I had. His flight had been cancelled, he had to fly that day, and he couldn’t get through on the phone, so he bought a whole new ticket. However, he came up to the counter in an awful mood about it and was snapping at his counter-lady right from the start. He ran into a brick wall, as she basically told him he was screwed for now. I, on the other hand, smiled at the woman helping me and said, “Also, I have a billing issue I’d like to discuss,” then calmly explained my situation. She was extremely helpful, and my problem was solved within 10 minutes. It pays to be nice, even when you’re being screwed over.
Finally, the new flight was trying to get out ahead of incoming thunderstorms. We were 3rd or 4th in line for takeoff (so, literally about 5 minutes away from wheels-up) when the rain hit, and we had to sit on the runway for almost an hour. I finally arrived at my hotel room at 3:00 AM New York time, roughly 32 hours since I had last slept. Oy.
Okay, on to the poker. I got to the Rio at about 9:00 AM the next day, three hours before the $2K NL event was scheduled to start. I stood in two short lines to get my players club card and to register for the event, which was good since just a half hour later both lines were huge.
I started the event on fire: not playing especially well or poorly, just getting hit over the head with the deck. Twice I had QQ and flopped top set vs. someone else’s pocket Kings, and doubled through them. Once I had KK all-in preflop vs. someone else’s QQ, and stacked him. I won an all-in with race JJ vs. AK. I won a smaller all-in race with QQ against KQ. By 10 minutes before the dinner break (at 7:30), I had over 42K in chips (we started with 4K). 198 players made the money, there were roughly 500 left, and the average stack was less than $20K. I was in excellent position.
(Side note: Tom McEvoy was at my third table, doing pretty well for himself. That was cool.)
Then my collapse began. Blinds 200/400 with an ante of 50. An aggressive, seemingly solid older player in middle position (with about 24K in chips) raised behind one limper to 2000. He’d been stealing the blinds at least a couple of times each orbit, so I was happy to reraise him in late position with AK, to 8000, expecting to take it down there. He pushed, though, and, sadly, I was priced-in to the hand (getting 2:1). I called, he turned up JJ and I got no help for from the board.
That knocked me down to about 18K, still an average stack. After the dinner break, I dribbled my stack down to about 12K with some blind steals and continuation bets that got snapped off. With blinds at 300/600 and a 75 ante, a player in 3rd position who had been pretty tight raised to 2400, which was a somewhat larger than usual raise for the table at this point. It folded around to me with AQ suited in the BB. I figured he would have raised less with a great hand to encourage some action, and that there was at least a pretty good chance he was on a marginal hand that he’d have to lay down to all-in reraise. So I pushed, and he called with AK, the only had I was really afraid of that would be expected to put in the larger raise. It held up, and I busted out probably about 300th. Sigh.
In retrospect, both hands involved close decisions, but I really do believe I should have been more circumspect preflop. With my stack I had the luxury (unlike most players) to be patient with the blinds and to avoid risking huge chunks of my stack with good hands but only marginally favorable odds.
I tried to play in the $1500 NL event the next day, but arrived only 30 minutes before the start, and found that there were several hundred alternates already in front of me, and that I’d probably only get a seat 2-3 hours into the tournament. With the relatively high blinds in the event, that was really unpalatable (started with 3000 chips, blinds would have been 100/200 before I sat down, and my stack would have been blinded down somewhat, too). So I left and went to play in a tournament at the Venetian, and had the same problem.
I wound playing cash games (2/5 NL) at a few places saturday and Sunday. I was pretty card dead all weekend and lost about $2K over the weekend. Played at the Rio, Binions, the Venetian, and the Bellagio. At the Bellagio I saw Phil Hellmuth, Barry Greenstein, and Johnny Chan sitting together and playing Chinese Poker. At one point two young girls stopped by and gawked at the superstar players. One of them hollered “We love you, Phil!”, at which point they were escorted out of the room. Good times.
On Monday I played in the $1K rebuy event at the WSOP. There are pictures of me at the table here. I’m the guy in the brown sweater and Mets cap. (I thought that Harrah’s was just doing something nice for the players, giving them a photo to remember tha event, but no, of course not. They’re selling it for a shit-load of money: Just to download the image costs $70!) I rebought once immediately, but I found that my table was surprisingly solid. Looking around, other tables seemed to have plenty of goofballs and tourists, but I wound up with an unlucky draw, as there were maybe two sort-of weak spots, along with seven players who seemed at least as good as I. I lost all my chips in about an hour and decided not to invest any more money at a table where I had very little (if any) advantage.
I wound up playing 5/10 NL cash games at the Rio instead that day. What a revelation! Whereas the 2/5 game had a buy-in capped at 500 and was populated mostly by solid players killing time between tournaments, the 5/10 game was uncapped and was populated by fat and/or old guys with tons of cash in front of the them and the need to throw it around wildly. The games were unreal. Most pots were straddled, people treated almost every draw like the nuts, players called off many hundreds of dollars with bottom pair (and were often right to do so), etc. One player, for three consecutive orbits, put in $100 blind from the small blind. Almost everyone had at least $2,500 in front of them, and some had as much as $15,000, so there was tons of money to be won. From Monday through Wednesday, I won about $5,500 playing 5/10 at the Rio, and it easily could have been a lot more if I’d caught just slightly better cards.
Unfortunately, I continued to crap the bed in tournaments. There was a $500 event at Binion’s on Tuesday where I couldn’t get anything going. I played in a $1,060 mega-satellite to the Main Event on Wednesday, same story. I also played in $1,030 Sit-&-Go one table satellite that night, which was ridiculous. The blinds went up so fast that, an hour into it, every hand was just push-or-fold for even the chip leaders. We could have chopped it with four players left in a way that would net me a $1000 profit, but a mean-looking young Swede with a perpetual grimace on his face didn’t want to deal yet, and I lost one of the all-in coinflips a few hand later to bust out. The Rio did a horrible job running the Sit & Go’s. For a $1K buy-in there was almost no play at all, just poker bingo. The dealers weren’t even allowed to pause the clock while the players disussed a deal. Really disgraceful.
All told, I lost a few thousand dollars playing poker for the week, and about another $2K in expenses (including airfare etc.). The Vegas cabs bled me dry; I spent at least a couple hundred getting around (the meters start at $3.20, and it’s $2.20 per mile the rest of the way, with the usual fees for evening travel). Had a good time, but would have liked to turn a profit, and in retrospect I wish I’d gone to a show or two instead of just playing poker every night. Oh well, maybe next year.
Sounds like the best bet, financially, might have been to stick with the 5/10 tables all weekend. From what i’ve heard, long sessions of limit hold 'em can be pretty soul destroying, but i think i could live with it for a while if it was paying $1800 a day.
Sorry your tournaments were so unproductive. The Sit and Go’s sound truly awful.
The 5/10 was a No Limit game, not limit. Man, I haven’t played limit in a casino in years. All the action is in NL, now.
As for the Sit & Go’s, it was even worse for most people. They also ran $500 and $175 tables, which started off with even fewer chips.
I’d have gone this year if it hadn’t been for that pesky “no money and several months without online poker rooms to try to win an entry” thing. But I finally signed up for Full Tilt last Thursday, one of the few online poker rooms still serving the US market (and that’s Mac accessible), so I’m back online and ready to start working toward next year. I’m already up $1.95 so I’m well on my way.