Vegas June 2015 (WSOP)

Days 1&2 - Arrival, WSOP daily DS

Last Updated: 2015-06-08 10:12:39

We've had a fairly quiet first two days.

Nice drive out. A little rain in CO, not much construction and no traffic. Gas is freakin' expensive out here tho. At least compared to the Denver metro area. I thought I was paying a lot spending over $3 a gallon in southern Utah...then we got to Vegas...wow!

After checking in we cleaned up and went to Smith & Wollensky's for dinner. Even though its a month late Joann and I always think of that as our anniversary dinner since we go there every June trip now.

It seems I was pretty worn out from the drive...since I passed out on just two drinks and a very full belly. Unfortunately we had a problem with the a/c in the room and Joann had to deal with the maintenance guy while I was semi-concious at best. Apparently the air filter hadn't been changed since Aria opened and something was wrong with the thermostat.

I decided to start the trip with the daily deepstack at the WSOP on Sunday, but that meant lots of time to kill since it didn't start until 3pm. Aria was running one of the 10 or so "day 1s" of their WPT event, Planet Hollywood is getting great turnout for a poker series they're running but they also had a $500+ buyin (outside of the WSOP I do try and keep buyins on the lower end) and Golden Nugget didn't have anything to get me excited either. <SIGH> if I have to go over to Rio to play I guess I can force myself...

So with plenty of time to kill we hit the pool for a little while, grabbed a shower and headed over to the buffet at Bellagio for brunch. Then on to WSOP.

Card dead.

The good news is that I likely busted out on a number under 300th (the board had been showing "320 remaining" for at least 15 mins after very quickly going from 500 to 400 to 320) out of a field of 1171 in spite of having really no cards (which is the bad news...).

In 6.5 hrs of poker my pairs were TT, KK, 55, 77, 44 and 55. Not even a pair an hour. Never had AK once, had AQs once, had AJo twice. Got nothing but blinds with my Kings, did flop a nut flush once with A-9 in a 5-way pot that had been raised but couldn't extract another chip out of anyone. The painful one went like this:

I'm UTG+1 or 2 and I look down at the first 55. I think about raising out but it looks to me like the guy on my left is ready to get chips in so I think better of it and lay it down. Situationally 5-5 is marginal early to act, I had too many chips to shove but not enough that I could raise out if I couldn't stand a reraise so there's little doubt it was a proper laydown. Sure enough guy to my left makes a sizable raise and gets one very quick caller. I'm thinking I'm a genius for folding the 5s.

Flop comes 5-5-4. Can't make it up. And there's action post-flop...ugh...yeah, yeah, focus on the decision. Of course I did the right thing folding...still sucks tho...

I did win a flip to double up (one of the A-J hands, guy asked me if I wanted a call and I answered it was time to double or go home, he called with 55, I caught the flop) so I did at one point get above starting stack.

But blinds kept going up, my stack didn't, got away with a few all-ins, then busted out because of what I thought was a bad call by the player who took me out.

Guy raises out, I look down at 55, I'm so short that I don't have a whole lot of fold equity but I figure I'm most likely flipping and I can't wait any longer so I go over the top all in.

The guy immediately on my left thinks for a while and calls, the original raiser also calls. Board runs out A-T-A-X-A. Original raiser had two overs to my 5s as I expected but the guy just to my left rolled over 88.

Raise and a shove in front of you and you call with 88? I dunno...whatever, he stacked what was left of my chips and I was done.

Went over and watched a little Razz. The 10K Razz Championship was going on and we walked over just in time to see a former Razz World Champion go into a rant. Can you guess who that might be?

Poor Phil. I actually do have to feel for him on this one. I later went to the WSOP website and got the whole story, obviously we walked in just after Phil lost a hand but there was some additional back-story to it. Apparently Mr Hellmuth had just doubled up two people back-to-back on hands that neither of the other two guys had any business being in. I'm not saying Phil should act the way he does, but he wasn't wrong about the poor play by his opponents who were very fortunate...

You can read a much better description here at "Angry, Angry Hellmuth" (hehe) but I'll summarize:

First Eric Seidel called him down with 10-8 showing when Phil started out with small cards and Seidel drew out. But the second guy, OMG. Phil had a board of A-4-3-6 and the other guy had a board of 9-5-5-4. How you even think about throwing out a chip with 9-5-5 showing against A-4-3 in Razz I'll never know. But dude must have had a read as the normally very tight Mr Helmuth had paired the ace and had two face cards underneath and the caller's 9-low was in fact good. Wow.

Phil then turned over cards with action pending, a big no-no, and they called the floor but Phil stopped ranting long enough to admit he shouldn't have done it and got off with a warning (appropriately I think). They went on dinner break not long after that so we went back to the room and had a relatively early night.

One more note on Razz, since Joann and I LOVE Razz...Phil ended the night 3rd in chips, Seidel 4th with 12 remaining...and Mr 9-5-5-4 is the chip leader!!! One more quick back-story there...we had gone and watched a little of the Razz before the deepstack as well...I had been telling Joann how badly Mr 9-5-5-4 had been playing...and he kept dragging pots, so Joann wasn't believing my "expert analysis"...there is NO justice in poker :-)

Two nights in Vegas and I haven't made it to 11:30 yet. That should change in Day 3!