|  Vegas June 2006 | | Day Four(Wednesday) | | Not a terribly interesting day four. Lunch at the Mirage buffet, excellent of course. Then we went down to MGM to check out their poker tournament (format sucked, we left) and the Titanic exhibit at Tropicana. Titanic stuff was cool, but $20 to get in was a bit steep. Then we had to make the obligatory visit to M&M World.
| | After that it was up to Harrah's to check out their tournament and found probably the best format on the strip for $100 - long rounds, extra rounds (like a 75/150 round between 50/100 and 100/200) and 3K starting chips. We had two hours to kill so we decided to check out the buffet at Caesars. Took us 40 friggin' minutes to navigate their bizzarre series of hallways only to have what was probably the worst buffet on the strip. Certainly the worst we had. All due respect to any fans of Caesar's Palace out there, every time I go into that place (except to walk through the shopping mall) I swear I'm never going in there again. Once again I was reminded why...
| | Worst of all, with all that time wasted by the time we got back to Harrah's we learned that they cap the tournament entries at 60 and they already had a bunch of alternates. We hung out for 30 mins to try and get in as alternates but by the time they were getting close to us on the list we decided that we didn't really want to come into it late and took off.
| | Then it was on to Rio for a little more (I assume our final) WSOP action. The $1500 no-limit game from Tuesday was down to 22 when we got there, Harmon and Mortenson were still alive. Mortensen had a rather impressive tower of chips when we got there, was probably the chip leader or around the chip lead. His tower appeared to have a nice, wide 1K chip foundation, with 3 (maybe 4) 100+ 1K chip towers. On top of each of those was a roughly 20-chip stack of 5K chips and finally a single 20-chip stack of 1K chips. The tower started to crumble while we were there, however, he doubled up two players and moved back into the pack by the time we left. We heard that this tournament had 2800 entries, 2200 players and 600 alternates. About 60 alternates got in, top prize like last year was $750,000 or so.
| | Behind that was Wednesday's $1500 pot-limit tourney, down to about 230, there lots of name players still alive there including Ferguson, Greenstein (who busted out while we were watching the other one), Corkins, Juanda, the Grinder, Lindgren, Deeb and Allen Cunningham...plus a bunch more that we recognized but didn't know names.
| | Just hanging around we saw at least one Brenes brother (I think there were two watching and one in the Tuesday tourney, Joann thinks I'm wrong), Robert Varkonyi and Rich almost bumped into Sheiky.
| | After Rio it was back to Orleans to finish our night in some cash games. Rich and Joann played $2/4 limit without much success, apparently they had a fun table until three(?) assholes came over who were obviously collaborating - betting everyone out of pots with raises and re-raises and then checking down to the river when it was just them. I went right to a $1/2 no-limit cash game ($100 min buy-in, $300 max). I had kind of a weird run, never hit a monster hand with a monster pot and ended up just a little ahead. But what was weird was that every time I led out into a pot with a big starting hand (say slick, A-Q, etc) I never hit a single flop but bet out anyway and took the pot. Every time I actually caught a flop it was when I was in one of the blinds with absolute junk, like one time holding a 7-5 and getting a flop like 7-4-3 (top pair and a gutshot). The biggest pot I won was about $50 (which put me ahead for the first time) when I had a 9-4 off and the flop came Qs-9c-6s. I bet out for $15 and got two reluctant callers, I immediately put them on draws. Turn came a four of clubs and I pushed with my two pair. Both of them hated to fold and admitted they were on draws.
| | Joann and Rich both came over to my table after leaving limit and it was Rich who had the hand of the night when he got cowboys. Preflop someone raised to $7, there were 4-5 callers including Joann but Rich came over the top for $21. Original raiser came over the top all-in for about $35, one original caller came over the top all-in again for about $10 more and Rich of course called. Original raiser only had pocket 4s, second over the top had just a 6-7 suited (believe it or not, not a terrible decision if Rich only had two overs instead of an overpair, at that point he was getting good odds on his money I believe) so Rich was dominating and took down the pot. Joann later said she had folded pocket 10s and a 10 ended up coming on the river. Joann's best hand at the table was a set of 9's, unfortunately for her by the time we got to the river it was just her and myself and I only had the case 9 for a middle pair which she bet me off of anyway.
| | But with Rich busting those two out there were only 5 left at the table and we didn't want to play for mostly our own money so we called it a night around 1:30am. That and Joann had to pack for her return flight. | | Post a comment |
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