Vegas June 2019 (WSOP)

Day 16 - Last day of poker

Last Updated: 2019-06-21 12:35:54

This will likely be my last BLOG for this trip. I wouldn't say it's impossible I'll play poker again in our final two days, but the plan is to just spend a couple of days relaxing. If I do another one it will probably have the words "for completeness" in the title again.

That said there isn't really anything to tell in this one.

Atypical morning (really "atypical" not "a typical" :-) ), we decided to hit the Bellagio Buffet for breakfast. Many of the buffets only do "brunch" most of the time and brunch usually means a price not that far from their dinner price. To us, that's a bit pricey when we really just want breakfast fare. Bellagio does just breakfast until 11am Monday through Friday for a much more reasonable price.

Played in both the 11am and 7pm tournaments.

In the 11am I built my stack up over 40k thanks mostly to one big hand.

Made it 1200 to go early to act with KQ off, 3 callers. Flop came K-3-Q. Not a bad flop...

Checks to me, make it 2600, small blind calls, other person folds.

Turn a 5, small blind leads into me for over 1/3 of his stack! I guess I should have just called and seen what he'd do on the river, but with such a big bet I didn't think he'd fold so I went over the top. He quickly folded.

But...that was the highlight. The highlight for the day!

I'm in the big blind, guy immediately to my left under the gun raises out and someone else three bets and I look down at pocket 10s. I give up the 10s, there was lots of action on a board of 88JJ9 so it would have been tough for me to get to the river ... but the hands were AQ and Q9. Q9 was good, TT would have been better...

Raise out with 99 and 66, get three bet and sitting out of position in both cases I let them go. But, still, I have a stack over 30k and I'm in good shape ... until ...

Call down an all under-card board with 99 against a guy who was playing about 2/3 of hands for a raise and would keep on pounding away at pots, he hit a gutshot. Of course he did. Now I'm short stacked.

First few all-ins get through, eventually get all in with K-9 late to act, run into 66 and lose the flip.

Joann and I got dinner at the food court area at NYNY.

We knew that for the first time ever we were going to hit Platinum status with M-Life. We had never gotten too close, and looking over the benefits of gold vs platinum it never looked like there was enough of a benefit that we would spend more money then we would have spent anyway to get it. But ... if what we spent ever got us there, we'd glady take it!

Dave was platinum last year and he got better deals than we ever got (comped "Sky Suites" at Aria, for example, and you'd have to see the "room" to believe it...) so I assume we'll get better deals and maybe the occasional suite too.

One new perk this year is that all Platinum members supposedly get a free cruise! Cruise value dependent on "gaming and spending". Well we don't do very much gaming at all and we're barely spending enough to hit platinum. Expectations aren't high, but a free cruise? We've never done a cruise and if it's free, it's for me!

I was watching the points go up every day between the room charges and the meals, and it was awfully likely we were going to get over the top just through our meals on Thursday.

We were something like 2500 points away, which basically means we need to spend about $100. Not too hard to hit that number if you eat a couple of meals at the MGM hotels. And since we still have three nights of hotels to pay for at that point, we don't actually have to do a thing. That said, we were having a little fun checking the total every day watching it get closer and closer...

The breakfast buffet got us half way there, about 1300 of the 2500. We need a hair under 1200 more. Then Joann played a little slots and got us a little under 800 away. And here we are at NYNY getting dinner. Joann gets a sandwich at the NY style deli, I get my usual couple of slices and beers.

We sit down to eat, check the app and we are 42 points short. Not 420, 42. You get 25-30 points per dollar you spend (25 plus bonuses for status, using their credit card, etc), I need to spend like $1.75.

I took one for the team and got myself another slice :-)

Over to the M-Life desk at Aria to pick up our shiny new Platinum cards!!!

On to the 7pm. Should have gotten another beer with that 3rd slice...

I got nothing for you. Nothing worked early on, stack was going down rather than up, got all my chips in on a board of 789A with A-10 (so top pair and an open ended straight draw) and ran into J-10. 3 outs to chop, no luck, done.

This has been a rough trip! I've been mindbogglingly unlucky and I haven't really gotten lucky. I lost way more coin flips than are statistically probable, I had very few draws hit (and, in one case, hit a rare draw and then got drawn out on on the river!). And over time you also expect to be the one to hit the lucky card once in a while and I don't think I ever once did after all the chips went in. Countless times get 'em all in ahead, often way ahead, and lose, the times I got 'em all in a little bad I never hit once. Brutal 15 days of poker.

I could probably find a few cases where I could have done a thing or two differently, but all in all I'm just badly at the wrong end of "variance" on this trip. It happens sometimes.

Thanks for reading tho!