 Vegas July 2025 (WSOP Part Deux) |
| Days 1-4 - Shopping, home cooking, poker |
| Last Updated: 2025-07-06 11:30:56 |
| First a quick recap of the first three days...
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| Our flight out was delayed about two hours due to a ground hold in Las Vegas. While we were sitting in the airport Joann found coverage of what had been a massive storm in Vegas the day before, knocking down entire streets worth of utility poles! On Wednesday there were storms around the Vegas area but not actually in Vegas so I just assume the hold on all flights into Vegas was out of an abundance of caution. We saw one headline about possible tornado-force winds!
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| But by the time we got here it was mostly sunny and hot but not "Vegas in the summer hot". Got some takeout and spent the night in the room.
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| We decided to get a rental car Thursday and Friday so we could get all of our shopping out of our system and visit Heather and Glenn for some "back home in NOLA" cooking.
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| Joann was mostly looking for new clothes to wear to work and to replace some worn out sneakers and found everything she was hoping to find!
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| I picked up a few things along the way, and then managed to have a pretty good day at one of my favorite liquor stores. One of my favorite gins (I do drink things besides whisky sometimes!) is lemon infused Malfy but we suddenly can't find that at home lately. Grabbed a couple bottles of that, they had Blanton's on sale (down from exorbitant to what you'd pay on secondary market) so I grabbed a couple of those, a Willett wheated we had tasted at the distillery and liked that was at a reasonable price ... and ... the guy with the keys to the glass case the whisky bottles were in asked me if there was anything else I wanted? Had some Eagle Rare, something else and some EH Taylor hidden in the back if I'm interested in any of those ... uh, yeah!!! Can I get two of those EHTs? Sure, why not ...
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| Dinner at Eataly, and yes the bartender who remembers my name, what hotel we stay in and what we drink (and who introduced me to adding some juniper berries to a gin and tonic) was there to take care of us as always. He had lost power at home for 7 hours on Tuesday!
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| Friday we did one quick shopping run before heading up to Heather and Glenn's for some home-made Louisiana cooking. Most people know I am not a fish guy, but Glenn cooked up some pan-fried catfish and all I'm sayin' is I went back for seconds. Not fishy tasting at all, cooked perfect, having seen him coat the fish I think I'm correct to say it was a breaded coating as opposed to a battered coating but whatever it was it was great.
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| Highly recommend this restaurant! Good luck getting a reservation tho, we only got in 'cuz we know somebody...
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| Back to the room for another night of streaming and catching up on reading. This is supposed to be a relaxing vacation, especially for Joann, so far it's going as planned.
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| For Saturday we had made a dinner reservation at Gallagher's Steakhouse in NYNY, but we were both up early and decided to get a big breakfast at The Henry.
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| Joann got an "omelet", but I've only once ever seen an omelet made this way and I'm not sure either of us would really call it an omelet. Basically they made an egg-only omelet and then all the stuff that was supposed to be in the omelet was just piled on the plate and the egg was folded over the top of the stuff instead of all the stuff being cooked into it.
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| Joann was unimpressed, and I'm confident I'd never want to eat an "omelet" made that way. We want stuff mixed into and cooked into the eggs, not just piled on the plate with the cooked egg dropped on top.
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| Having done that, we weren't going to the pool after a big breakfast and by the time it got to late morning Joann was still feeling full and wasn't sure she really wanted to turn around and have a big steak dinner so we started talking about me playing poker.
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| I loaded up a backpack and headed down to Aria hoping to finally, finally(!) play some 1-3 No-Limit cash.
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| Unfortunately there was no 1-3 available, and I didn't want to just jump into 2-5 (which had a lengthy wait on top) for my first foray into cash games in years and years. I thought for a moment about 1-2 PLO, but they opened a new table and there was still more than half a table on the waiting list.
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| So what's my other option? The 1pm daily deepstack at the WSOP!
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| After a great start on the June trip things pretty much went to hell for me poker-wise in June. Still, I'll take two very deep runs in a week any time!
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| On Saturday I outlasted about 75% of the field. Unfortunately you gotta outlast another 10% to get into the money...
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| Usually the 1pm has almost an entire conference room to itself. There are usually some small satellite tournaments going on along side it, and it's not the biggest conference room you've ever seen ... but still it's a good 50-ish tables.
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| But with the Main Event going on, much of the room was taken up by a $1k satellite into the main (in fact they got about 450 entries in that!).
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| When I sat down to play they were on their way to 300 "players"... with only 16 tables of 10! The player count included people who were just sitting on the side waiting for a seat. They got to over 400 entries within an hour!!! Finally after more than 2 hrs of play they opened up 19 more tables in a separate room upstairs for a total of 350 available seats. I saw the number of "current players" get up around 475 with only 350 actual seats available!
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| Shortly after folding (correctly in the situation) pocket threes that would have turned into quads an aggressive player early to act made it 600 to go at 100/200/200 blinds. Equally aggressive guy two to his left calls the 600, I look down at 10-10 and decide to just call in the small blind.
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| I call raises, rather than re-raising, frequently with 10-10 preflop in almost any position but probably close to 100% of the time in a blind. I don't want to play them post-flop out of position, especially multi-way and these guys are probably not folding to a proper 3-bet from me. Instead I always want to hope to flop a set and stack someone, and on the rare occasion I get a flop of all "undercards" I can always check-raise them post-flop when I'm out of position.
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| The big blind messes with my plan, however, and makes it 2600 to go! The two aggressive guys actually fold and I call for all the reasons I said above.
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| Flop came 3-3-J. I check-call his 3,000 lead.Turn is a 9, not worried about that card and it goes check-check.
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| River is a 10! I lead out for 4k, he calls and folds when he sees my full house.
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| Get the minimum for pocket aces, then go a little card dead but just before the break I get a big blind special with a suited "happy meal" and rivering trip sixes. At the first break I'm up to 43,500 from a 25,000 starting stack. Great start!
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| I tell Joann it's not looking good for me making the dinner reservation I hadn't canceled yet, so she picks another day for me to move it to.
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| Right after the break I had a nice chip-up. Flop a set of 8s and get paid, then a really nice pot when at 300/600/600 blinds a middle position player makes it 1600 to go and I look down at AK suited. I pop it to 3500, it folds back to him and he makes it 7500. I call and we see a flop.
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| Ace in the window, he leads out for 6000 and I make it 17000 and he folds in disgust. I figured kings or queens and I later heard him say he had had queens four times and was 50-50 with them. Not long after that I also got the minimum with kings and was up over 70k, nearly triple a starting stack!
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| Then the first real hit to my stack. Blinds up to 400/800/800 and I raise out to 2000 with A-Q offsuit and get two callers, one of the aggressive guys I mentioned earlier (the other had busted by this point I believe) and a woman two to his left who almost always defended her blinds.
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| Flop 6-8-Q, woman checks, I make it 3k, they both call.
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| Turn a 10, she checks, I make it 4000, aggressive guy calls and the woman quickly jams all in.
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| You all know how much I like the snap all in as the best tell in poker. Always weak.
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| But ... this was a check-raise into not one but two people. I completely go into the tank. I actually get the clock called on me! Ultimately I decide that she probably has some kind of 2 pair with Q-10 being most likely, possibly J-9 and called my post-flop raise with the gutshot. Only hand I can think of that I beat is K-Q, maybe Q-J. I fold.
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| Just after that hand the guy who probably had QQ vs my AK gets his revenge cracking my KK with his A2.
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| Get it all back tho when my aggressive buddy tried to 3-barrel bluff me and unfortunately for him I rivered top pair. Always like snapping off a river bet and hearing the words "you're good"!!!
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| All downhill from there tho. I raise out trying to steal blinds with Q-T suited, one call, then a short stack all-in. My raise was to 3k, he doesn't even have 9k so I call ... but the guy in the middle goes all-in and I have to fold. Guy in the middle was slow-playing aces on my raise, I would have flopped a flush and stacked them both. Ugh.
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| Few hands later I call a short stacked all-in with 99, aces guy jams again so I go away again. I would have lost to the original all-ins queens but had I called the jam I would have actually made more chips because the over the top was just 66. Dumb, but what can you do?
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| So a couple hits to my stack and now blinds are getting big. 41k at the next break, only 27 big blinds.
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| I steal blinds here and there to keep my stack in the 30-45k range for a couple of levels, but eventually when I'm sitting on 45k which is only 11 big blinds at the time I go all-in with a pair of sixes in the small blind, the big blind calls me with J-9 suited and turns a flush.
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| Around 170th place out of 679 players, not a bad run!
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| Right now the plan is that I'm going to take the next couple of days off poker, definitely play in the weekly HORSE in the WSOP daily tournament area on Tuesday and most likely play the PLO weekly Wednesday. |
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