Vegas June 2011 (WSOP)

Day 5 - WSOP PLH/PLO mix

Last Updated: 2011-06-23 06:16:08

The first goal has been accomplished. I played in the WSOP today and I got to put all my chips in a bag when I was done instead of pushing them over to someone else.

Now the goal is to get into the money.

I got about four hours of sleep going into Wednesday, Joann only got about an hour more. I was very anxious about playing today. Not sure why, not the first time, but for some reason I was chomping at the bit to get started. And I was awake at 6:30 am and I wasn't going to play until 5:00 pm.

Joann went to the pool while I went to the bank and then over to Rio to buy in.

We then went to the local outlet stores to kill some time, Joann picked up a couple of purses and wallets at Coach and I picked up a shirt at the Spyder outlet.

Lunch/Dinner at the Rio buffet, but honestly I couldn't enjoy it. Just too worked up about the tournament.

So into the Pavilion room I went, and no big deal. I just had high stakes cash player Lex Veldhuis sitting directly across from me (he of 3 cashes in this year's WSOP already) and Josh Arieh (he of over $6 mil in career cashes) sitting down at the other end of the table.

By the 6th hand we had already had a 3-way all in and a two-way all in. It seemed like every 15-20 minutes someone was busting out of our table. These people are freakin' nuts...

Oh, wait, it gets better...

So I'm pretty card dead early on and I'm playing fairly tight. Veldhuis is playing like Tom Dwan, raising a lot of pots from any position and playing almost every hand. He built up a nice chip stack, but then started to blow it. Meanwhile I started complaining to Joann about the fact that since I'm hardly playing any hands, I'm not going to get any action when I do. Well, thank-you Mr Veldhuis.

I get pocket kings and Veldhuis raises into me. I reraise, he goes back over and we get all the chips in. All he has is 8s, Kings hold up, I have more than double my original chips. The very next hand I busted Veldhuis out when I flopped a pair of aces and he only managed a pair of 9s.

Over the next several hours I win enough pots to gradually build my stack. Unlike my last foray into Omaha, I didn't have to buy pots at all. I was getting just enough big hands that I was slowly building a stack. For every 1000 pot I would lose I would win a 2000-3000 pot. Everything was going great.

But then my table broke. And where did I get to go?

Why two seats to the left of David freakin' Williams. He was one of the tournamnet chip leaders, and eventually Annette Obrestad came over to the table and sat directly to my left.

So here I am surrounded by big time professionals, and it started out well. I took someone out who had a small stack and got myself up to about 30k (above average at the time, starting stack 7500).

Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse for me after that, however.

I got caught making a continuation bet against a guy who apparently is a calling station and lost back what I gained in the takeout, and then I contributed to Mr Williams stack in what I considered one of ther very few bad decisions I made. And given the timing and the chips involved, it was definitely the worst decision I made.

Playing Omaha I had flopped top set of Kings but with three spades on the board and no spades in my hand. It checked around and I started to get the idea my Kings were good. Williams made a bet on the turn and at that point I should have done one of two things: committed to the idea my kings were good, or gave up on the hand.

I did neither. I called, did not catch a full house on the river and had to give it up.

After that I went completly card dead and by the time I bagged up my chips I had fallen to just under 18,000 chips.

It's not the end of the world. I am 96th of 131 paying 63 places, but I still have 20 big blinds and I got the luckiest draw (at least on the surface) for the new seating assignments tomorrow in the amazon room.

In spite of being 96th of 131, I will be fourth in chips at my table! None of the pros will be there, the biggest stack is 72K-ish but the next biggest stack is only in the low 40s. Point is that: A) there's only one person at the table who can afford to make a mistake to me; B) I will still be able to sort of play poker instead of milking my stack into the money. At least until they break us or bring us new players...but we'll worry about that when we get there!

So tomorrow I will be seated at Amazon table 281 seat 4. All I need is one double-up and I'll be fine.

Wish me luck, we start at 3:00pm local time.

You can check out what's going in the tournament on at the WSOP website HERE. Since we won't have any big names to start I don't expect us to get covered too well, but I don't expect it to take more than a couple of rounds to get to the money. Once we burst the money bubble, with any luck you'll hear my name mentioned.