Monday, June 04, 2007

More Vegas Trip Reportage

I'm probably not goign to go into as much detail in this post just an update mostly. On Saturday I couldn't play the $1500 NL so I was thinking of just playing the online tournaments, but I ended up going to the Venetian instead to play their $540 deepstack tournament. The tournament is pretty good, players are soft etc.... It becomes a huge crapshoot pretty suddenly though because the antes are enormous. Anyways, some people donated me chips early, but then I did nothing for a while before luckboxing 63>KQ aipf on the last hand before the dinner break. I ended up cashing and then eventually pushing JT into KQ and losing. One semi-interesting hand of note:

Some guy limps at 100/200, he's generally just loose/bad. I find JJ and raise 4xBB to 800 in position. I've been playing very aggressive so far so this is a great spot as I'm likely not going to be given credit for much of a hand here. Folds back to the limper who calls. The flop comes K98. He checks and I check behind. The only bad cards that can come off are an A or Q so I'm not too worried about a scare card, but I don't really want to bloat the pot or give him a chance to do something stupid and bluff me off the best hand. Then turn is a 5, he bets 1300 and I call. The river is a 6, and he bets 2K. At this point I still kind of think I might have the best hand. Obviously he can have a king, maybe some kind of bluff that backed into a straight or something, but I also thought that given our history he could have nothing or he could be blocking with a worse one pair hand because people suck at playing the river properly. Eventually I call and J9s is no good. His river bet is a standard thing you see from weak players. He gets confused and thinks he might still have the best hand so he just bets smallish and hopes something good happens. If you think the hand through from his point of view you'll realize that on the river it's really hard for me to ever call with a worse hand, so there's no point to bet unless he's hoping I fold a better hand. His hand has lots of showdown value though so there's not really any point to turn it into a bluff, and betting 2K into 4500 isn't going to be a very effective bluff anyways.

OK after that I drove back to the Rio and sweated Steve until 3am or something when they finally made the final table. I bumped into AaronBeen, Kush, and MrTimCaum also railing the final 2 tables. Steve caught some cards and finished 2/9 going into the final table. On Sunday I ended up heading over to Aaron/Kush's place to play Sunday tournaments. Everytihng went pretty bad and I lost even more money playing cash. I was in a pretty good 25/50 game on UB and stacked some really bad player to get a 10K stack but then I didn't leave and played a really tough hand against another guy who I only barely covered, and lost a 20K pot, when as usual lately I couldn't find the fold button. I don't know why I'm such a call station lately in cash games but I've got to get that fixed. As you prboably know by now, Steve finished 4th for 120K or so. He got pretty unlucky to go from chipleader to bust in like 3 hands, but the blinds in the limit section were so big that's the way it goes. The plan for today is to relax, prbably run some errands like getting some food in the house, and then either go play live cash games or more likely stay in and play the $1k tournament on Full Tilt and other online donkaments. Oh yeah I finally got my wire transfer late Saturday night so at last I have lots of money here. My next big live tournament is the $1k rebuy WSOP event on Tuesday. I've got a pile of $1K casino chips ready to go.

Mike

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