I’m just back from the WSOP (although I’m still hoping that I can make it back there before it ends…). I entered Event #4, the $1000 buy-in Hold-em tourney. Over 6000 people played, which is the largest field ever for a non Main-Event WSOP tournament. I made it through 80% of the field, which is better than my Main Event performance last year, but once again I finished just out of the money, a bit of a disappointment overall.
I don’t really have much of a structured message with this particular blog entry, so let me just share some random things that happened while I was there over this long weekend.
· I stayed at the Rio (I’ve stayed there several times before). They were charging $40/night which is appallingly low. They must truly be desperate for business.
· I rented a car, drove it to the Rio … and ended up not using it again until I drove back to the airport. I thought for sure I would be taking a couple of trips to the Strip or downtown, but I never left the Rio the whole time.
· Even though I didn’t make it to any other poker rooms like I expected to, I did talk to a lot of other players about what the local scene was like. It’s pretty sad. Apparently the only room with much activity is at the Venetian. The Bellagio crowd has been so sparse that they’ve started to spread lower limits just to get people to come into the room. And at Caesars, they hired a new manager late last year who has jacked the rake up to $7/pot. Seven dollars!! Who would ever play in a game like that? I was particularly sad to hear about that, because I’ve always enjoyed the poker room in Caesars.
· It was almost exactly a ½-mile walk from my hotel room to the Amazon Room, where all the poker was being played. I walked back and forth two or three times each day. Who knew poker could be so physically demanding!
· I learned that “Gamma-O” is the official testosterone supplement of the WSOP. Hmm. If there is any group of guys less likely to suffer from testosterone deficiency than poker players, I don’t know who it would be. (Although somebody I was talking to about this made the serious and cogent point that the WSOP didn’t have much sponsorship of any kind – where is Apple, he wondered? What about Expedia or Travelocity? Good question.)
· Almost nobody at any table was wearing a wedding ring. At first glance, this seemed a bit odd. But thinking about it further, I realized it wasn’t. After all, what kind of woman is going to marry a poker degenerate? One kid at the table said that his girlfriend broke up with him via text message at 2am – while he was playing poker. Somebody asked him if he left the game to go try to fix things. He said, “No, it was a really good game!” We all nodded with complete understanding.
· I bought a copy of the book Check-Raising The Devil by Mike Matusow, personally signed by the author. He wrote “Steve: Best of Luck. Mike Matusow.” Cool.
· I bumped into one of the home game regulars at the Poker House, Brandon, at a cash game. It was pretty cool to see him there, and ironic to actually bump into him. I learned that he had also gone to Pendleton last spring, but I didn’t see him there.
· I tried out a fascinating new meta-game strategy with incredible success: Go to bed at, say, 10pm. (For an old guy like me, that’s not a challenge.) Set your alarm for 2am. When it goes off, wake up, don’t do anything to clean yourself up, and go down to the cash games for about four hours. Everybody else at the table will be drunk or tired or otherwise off their game. At 6am (or whenever the game finally breaks up), go back to bed and sleep until 10 or noon or whatever. What a great piece of advice! I made more in those four hours of play each day than I did in twelve hours of daytime play.
· I folded pocket Kings preflop against pocket Aces. Seriously! I got dealt the Kings under the gun in a $2/$5 game, raised to $20, and got one caller. When the action got to the cutoff seat (a guy who was really, really tight), he immediately popped it to $100. My jaw just dropped open. I literally turned and stared at the guy. I sat and thought about it for maybe two minutes, which for me is an eternity. Then I said, “Wow, I am the biggest donkey that ever played poker,” and I folded my Kings, face down. The other player mucked immediately, and the cutoff tabled his Aces face up. I said, “Wow, you wouldn’t believe what I just folded.” He said, “What, Jacks?” I said, “No, Kings.” He said, “You’re right, I don’t believe that.” Nobody at the table did, they just laughed like I was making a sick joke. I was in shock for quite a while after that.
· This last has nothing to do with poker, but it did happen during the trip. Walking through the airport on the way back to Seattle, an announcement was made over the intercom at a decibel volume slightly higher than that of an air-raid siren: “ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS!! IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY, PLEASE DIAL NINE ONE ONE FROM ANY TELEPHONE!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION!!” Huh? Could any piece of noise pollution possibly be less obvious?
Anyhow, back to reality, for the time being at least. I am still hoping to make it back to Vegas before the end of the series.
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