Now don’t get me wrong – I did not play the “Main Event” … that doesn’t even begin until early next month. I did, however – as mentioned in my last blog – enter into the WSOP #30 Tournament – a $1500 buy-in, no-limit Hold’em tournament scheduled to run for three days (last Wednesday through Friday). Unfortunately for me, it was over in about 3 hours and 15 minutes. I was eliminated not long after the first break…I was a bit bummed out; mainly because I had nobody to blame but myself. I’ll be the first to admit that I played my cards (as horrible as they were) poorly and basically bust out of the tournament on some very questionable maneuvers. I ended up losing it all attempting to avoid becoming a rather early short-stack forgetting the well-known adage, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” I doubt I’ll be making that mistake again anytime soon…
I arrived in Vegas early Tuesday evening – flew jetBlue from Burbank to Vegas. This was a great idea as flying out of Burbank ended up being so much nicer than flying from LAX. First off, the 45 minute flight only ran me $125 round-trip. Now that’s a bargain! The best part of it, however, was the lack of crowd at the Bob Hope Airport. I’m sure the fact that it was a Tuesday afternoon had a lot to do with the smaller crowds; however every time I’ve flown out of LAX has been a madhouse. Flying out of Burbank actually felt like air travel used to be – simple and easy…Upon arrival I contacted Sam and let him know I was in town. You see, Sam was there basically for the same reason I was – event #30. He was also staying at the Rio and I figured we could hang out together during this trip – whilst not busy with the tournament that is… He was out having dinner when I arrived so we made plans to meet up a bit later and I hopped on a shuttle for the Rio.
The first thing I did upon arriving at the Rio was get signed-in for the #30 tournament. I needed to get a tournament receipt from one of the official 57 events in order to get the WSOP discount on my suite – brought the price down to $69/night Tuesday through Thursday and $169 for Friday night. I’m actually not sure how much of a savings this is compared to the standard room rates however I do know that it’s $80 less than the pre-entrant rates I was quoted when I booked the room. Whatever the case, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Of course signing up for the tournament required a Harrah’s Total Rewards card … so I guess signing up for the tournament was the second thing I did after obtaining my Total Rewards card (I got the WSOP version).
One thing I’ve got to make perfectly clear to anybody who hasn’t been there – the WSOP is a huge event at the Rio! The entire Convention Way section of the hotel is completely devoted to the World Series. They’ve got tons of tables set up in both the Rio Pavilion and Amazon rooms for the myriad of games always underway, a WSOP store to buy your trinkets and memorabilia, a not-so-spectacular cafeteria for the players to get their much needed nourishment during the oft-time short breaks for food, a “Bad Beat Bar” to help numb the pain when your opponent sucks out on the river and lots of displays of the former year winners and current all-star players. It’s actually quite interesting when you realize that anybody willing to front the buy-in cash can partake in this madness. It’s like being at the Hall of Fame with a ticket to play. Of course I still hadn’t got my ticket … now where, exactly, would one sign up for these games…?It didn’t take long before I was directed to the registration room. This, of course, is where I paid my $1500 for a buy-in to the no-limit Hold’em tournament scheduled to begin the next day at noon. I then took the small hike back to the hotel registration and checked into my room with the proper receipt for the price reduction, stopped by my room to unpack – of course unpacking my one little duffle-bag didn’t take long – purchased some needed essentials from the gift shop and headed down to Rio’s standard poker room. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some practice in the night before my expensive (for me, anyway … the Main Event’s buy-in is ten grand!) tournament started…
Things went pretty well that first night. I sat down at a $1-$3 no-limit Hold’em table with $300. A little while later, Sam arrived and joined me at the same table. It was your standard small-blind, no-limit ring game – a couple “calling stations” that were getting hit in the face with the deck long enough for them to become large stacked, a number of rocks that basically lived there (talking with the dealers like they were long-time buddies…) and Sam and I – patiently waiting to put a hurt on the calling stations… I ended that roller-coaster ride of a night up $225. My patience paid off as I was able to get large sums from both our targets…
Now to briefly diverge from my story, one more bad aspect about me going to Vegas is the urge it gives me to smoke. You see, I quit smoking “cold turkey” last August. And if you know me well enough, you’re well aware of exactly how difficult an accomplishment that actually was. Suffice it to say that last August was NOT
a good month for me (nor have been pretty much every month since, but that’s a whole different rant…). The one good thing that came from then was that I actually did quit smoking. Sure, I’ve had this completely unexplainable issue with sporadic claudication since then (very interesting as smoking is listed as a main cause for that … and I had just recently quit…) and my life has become nothing more than an ever-agonizing struggle to pry my pathetic ass out of bed every morning; but at least I quit smoking! I think I burned through a pack a day in Vegas. I gave what I had left (about ¾ of a pack) to some dude that was smoking outside the airport upon leaving and haven’t smoked any since; however the time spent in Vegas was definitely not healthy for me. It’s just so hard to ignore the cute “cigar, cigarette” girls… Now I get to experience the excitement of going “cold turkey” again … nothing like a good challenge, huh…? Anyway, back to what I was originally talking about…So that first night was a positive sign of good things to come, right…? Well, not exactly. You see, that was the only time I left that poker room in the black. I ended up
playing there quite a bit – basically due to the fact that I wasn’t spending nearly as much time as I had hoped in the main tournament I came to play – but, apart from that first night, it always ended up costing me. I will say this: If you go to Vegas, don’t go alone. Being alone in Vegas with nothing to do can become quite expensive. Heck, being in Vegas at all can become quite expensive; but not having someone else there to be a voice of reason can really cost you. Sure, I suppose if I were a normal functioning male of our species, I could spend my free-time (and what I’m sure would end up being some of my money as well…) hitting on the throngs of beautiful women that seem to flock there basically looking to be bad; but, as anyone who knows me knows, I do not possess the required skills. No … what I end up doing is primarily playing poker; and when I’m done with that (usually signaled by losing all the money I sat down with – sometimes a bit more…) perhaps sitting at a penny-slot smoking a cigarette (and I don’t even smoke…) and partaking of as much free booze as I can. Don’t worry … I tip the beer maids…The next morning I met up with Sam and his roommates for breakfast before the tourney. I believe, if memory serves me correctly, it was somewhere around 10:30 in the morning when we stopped off at the São Paulo Cafe. We got some breakfast, played a couple rounds of pick-20 Keno (Sam and I), paid our bill and picked up our Keno winnings (easily done as there weren’t any…), then headed out for a smoke prior to the start of the tournament. Sam and I parted ways here as I needed to take a leak (I didn’t need to go into the tournament with yet another distraction…) which was fine – I’d see him at the tournament. He was seated at table #70. I was assigned seat 4 on table #64.
I believe it was something like 20 minutes prior to the tournament start when I headed into the Rio Pavilion. Finding my table was easily accomplished and I was quite eager to get this thing started. I took my seat as soon as the announcement for my tournament was aired and chatted it up a bit with my table’s dealer
and the dealer of the table directly next to mine (which just so happened to be table #70 – Sam’s table). Upon speaking with these guys, I quickly realized that the quality of dealers found at the WSOP is pretty much a crap-shoot. From what I was told, somewhere around 1000 dealers are brought in from all across the country for this event although that number steadily declines as the event goes forward. Apparently (now this is from the dealers I was speaking with) the pay basically sucks and Harrah’s has a bad habit of cheating the dealers out of the full 70% of the tips that they’re due. This makes it difficult for out-of-town dealers to justify being there as they need to pay for their stay with a large portion of the income received making any profit earned miniscule. Now I have absolutely no way to verify these claims; however this was basically from the horse’s mouth – although I can’t really say how “gruntled” these guys were… I would, however, experience the divergence of quality that such a system creates, first hand, soon enough…As I mentioned at the beginning of this story, I didn’t last very long in this tournament. I lost all of my 4500 starting chips (please excuse the photos … I only had my
phone with me and the camera on my phone sucks…) in a bit over 3 hours. In this short period of time, however, two rather major dealer errors were made on our table – and not too surprisingly, I was involved in both hands… The first faux pas happened very early. Position 1 went “all in” and I called. I don’t remember what the hands were, and it really doesn’t matter – if you’ve heard one “poker story” you’ve heard ‘em all – but the end result was that I won the pot. The error occurred after the hand when the dealer informed the poor guy in position 1 that my chip-stack had him covered. It didn’t – he actually had 200 chips left after the official count however he was never informed of this. He was already up from the table and out the door long before the floor was called over and an announcement was made for “position 1 on table #64” to “please return to your seat”. Not that it mattered too much as he was seriously short-stacked at that point. It was, however, “a chip and a chair” and we all know how that goes, right…?Now the second blunder came shortly after the first break in play. I was having my usual luck (and admittedly not playing my “A” game) and was quickly becoming quite short. I needed to make a move soon if I wanted any chance to survive the marathon so I pushed “all in” with top-pair and a king kicker. I was called (interestingly enough by position 1 again … different guy, same seat…) and lost – outkicked by an ace – however this guy’s stack didn’t quite have me covered. Now the blunder occurred when the dealer was counting off the chip differential to see exactly how bad off I was. At the end, he sent 150 chips my way and was about to sweep the rest toward position 1 when the guy sitting at seat 2 said that he thought the dealer miscounted. The dealer ignored his plea and swept the pile. I, on the other hand, did not ignore his claim – I was very interested in discovering whether or not this statement was true. It was then that the guy sitting to my left (position 5) also said that he had doubts about the dealer’s count and I was getting less and less happy.
A strange thing occurred then. Position 1 had no problem with attempting to rectify the situation quickly – fair play is fair play, after all… Since nobody was exactly sure how much the count was off, position 1 offered me 300 chips. Position 2 was saying that he thought the dealer was off by somewhere around 500; however I was more than happy to take the 300 and let the game continue – either way I was very short in the tournament and had little hope of surviving much longer. Position 1 offering 300 as a quick solution seemed fair enough for me. However the dude in position 10 basically had a hissy-fit when I accepted the 300 chips offered. He slammed the table with his fist and made some sort of statement that what we were doing somehow was unfair for him. Bear in mind that this guy wasn’t in the hand, his chip stack wasn’t going to be affected in any way and the only thing that was happening was that I was going from 150 in chips to 450 – still very short at this point in the tournament. He, however, wasn’t going to allow this! The end result was that we wasted more of position 10’s time by calling over the floor and “re-playing” the hand. The result of this was that I ended up coming out of this with 750 chips. I’m sure this made position 10 feel much better about his stupidity…
He didn’t need to worry about me for long though; our table was broken down shortly after that fiasco and we were dispersed to separate tables. I still don’t know why that dude was so adamant about my chip-stack size – and I guess I never will – but he was safely away from me and free to get upset with somebody else from that point. I was moved to my final table and, within minutes, eliminated from the tournament.
So I guess I didn’t need the four nights I booked at the Rio. I could have easily flown in the morning of the tournament, dropped $1500 and made it back home in time for supper; but who knew? Ends up I needed to kill two and a half more days in Vegas. It’s a shame there weren’t any poker games to play. Oh wait, what am I talking about – it was the middle of the World Series of Poker – there are constantly games to be played…
One of the best games they had running was this daily Deep-Stack tournament that started at 1:00pm.
It was only $200 to buy-in and started you off with 15,000 chips. Other than the large stating chips, the structure was identical to the main event I played with all of the time periods cut in half. It was, at the time, not being capped on number of players and was running through to the wee hours of the next day’s morn. There were over 400 in the Deep-Stack game on the day I played my main event. I would probably have played it after getting knocked out if I hadn’t lasted long enough to miss the buy-in window; however I would now need to wait until Thursday to give the Deep-Stack a shot. I headed back to the regular Rio poker room to waste away the rest of that day…And waste it away is exactly what I did. I dropped something like $500 playing the $1-$3 no-limit ring game for quite a few hours and then signed up for the nightly turbo tournament that they were running on this set of four or five tables they had set up directly outside of the poker room. The tourney began at 9:00 and, being a turbo tournament, finished something like 3 or 4 hours afterward. It was only $80 to play and I survived to the final two tables. Didn’t make the money, but it was a decent way to eat up the remaining time before hitting the sack. After all, I was planning on playing the Deep-Stack the next day…
I woke the next morning quite early. I believe it was prior to 9:00 when I headed back to the São Paulo Cafe for some breakfast … alone this time. Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering how Sam came out in the tournament, he didn’t make the money either. He did last longer than me – I think it was an hour or two after my elimination when I received his call – but neither of us succeeded in our goal of getting filthy rich by playing a silly game … perhaps next year…? At breakfast, however, my luck seemed to be changing. Since I had time to kill, I picked up a Keno card, marked off three numbers (5,10 and 25) and put $20 down as four $5 rounds. As I was eating my breakfast, I hit all three numbers on the first round; two numbers on rounds 2 and 3; and only hit one on the last draw – I collected $220 for my $20 bet! Not a bad start to the day as I had successfully won my buy-in to the Deep-Stack tournament!
That, unfortunately – apart from the $10 I won at a “Crazy-4 Card Poker” table and the $1.25 I pocketed at the airport playing video poker before my flight home – was the last winnings I would see on this trip. I did decent in the Deep-Stack – lasted 8½ hours getting knocked out just before racing off the black (100’s) chips – but missed the money by less than 70 people – not bad considering 717 people started that tournament… I tried it (the Deep-Stack) again on Friday where they capped the entrants at 200 but only made it 2 hours before being unlucky enough to flop a boat. (Yes, you read that correctly – “unlucky” enough to flop a boat…)
All in all, it was a rather expensive trip for me. I think I’m going to be heading back next year!
bis später,
Coriolis
