| Updates: Events 41, 42 and 45 |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|04:41 pm] |
I busted in just over an hour of play in Day 2 of the $10k PLHE, so as penance I will now get caught up on blogging about the last few tournaments.
So as mentioned, I got sick a couple days after the limit hold'em. I have gotten at least mildly sick at some point each of the last four World Series. It is just a gross environment with thousands of people packed into the same room, unhygienic conditions, people playing while sick, and so on.
My timing was bad since I had a friend coming from out of town, and I killed the end of last week just sitting around the house and watching movies. Our house does have a pretty solid home theatre system though. Saturday was our annual house party, which was awesome as usual, and also Iana came into town for 3 nights. Saturday night I started to feel better, so on Sunday morning I got there early to sign up for the $5000 NL Shootout.
Event 41: $5000 No-Limit Hold'em Shootout
I got to the Rio about 11 AM. I wanted to register early because I did not want to join a table comprised totally or mostly of late registrants, which are typically some of the tougher players in the field. Success: I registered and drew Table 9. I arrived at my table on time at noon and was told at that point the tournament would be delayed 30 minutes so that they could sell more seats. They then broke a whole bunch of tables and made all the shootout tables 9- or 10-handed. I really dislike it when management decides to change seating policies with no prior announcement.
Anyway, we play the whole table with a (unsold) stack blinding off in Seat 9 (the shootout is the only tournament where you cannot register late and come in with a full stack). This made for some interesting hands, like a hand when I opened in the cutoff for 1000 with the dead stack in the BB, the opponent on the button called and the SB squeezed for 3800. I held AQ. What would you do? I called and now the button insta-shoves. The SB got out of the way. I have 13000 more (he has me covered) and I call. He shows KQ and I win.
At one point we were 3-handed and I had nearly half the chips in the table, but I got a bluff called down and then ran KQ vs AQ and I had another disappointing finish. However, it is interesting that the shootout is the only format of tournament where you can go deep without cashing and not be extremely disappointed or crushed, because it only takes up a few hours to "go deep". Even if you get heads-up and lose, it often is only 4-5 hours of play. It is an extremely efficient way of playing tournament poker and definitely my favourite form (apart from heads-up).
Event 42: $2500 8-game mix
Before I start, nothing I say will be as important as the fact that Jerrod won this tournament! Which is so fitting since he is one of the few guys I know that plays and understands every game well. It is a demonstration of the idea that there are proper frameworks to think about poker that allow you to apply what you know about poker in general to specific variants of the game.
This tournament was very possibly the most value of any non-NLHE tournament in the entire WSOP. Most people played a lot of the games quite poorly. Even I only feel really strong in half of the games. At one point during the last break of the day we were all gathering around talking about hands and discussing our chip counts, and I realized that there were like 10 of us standing around talking, and we all hand decent chips -- that is so rare for the last break of the day! Also, when we were having dinner conversation, we kept sort of one-upping each other with tales of ridiculous plays that we witnessed at our table. I saw a player cold-call a completion and a raise in razz with a king up. We had players in triple draw showing down T9xxx. I busted a player in PLO when he pushed with A753 on a Q95 flop. It was awesome.
I busted in the first hour of Day 2. I was a somewhat below-average stack when we played a huge razz pot. I started (25)A against a 4, 8 and 6 and we all capped it on 3rd with one player all-in. I finally got all-in on 6th with 8542A but the guy who started with the 8 made a 64 and I failed to catch a 3.
Event 45: $10000 Pot-Limit Hold'em
I considered not playing this tournament: I figured small field and full-table pot-limit is really, really boring. But I signed up anyway. Once again I showed up on time at noon. Once again they pushed back the start of the tournament a half hour to get more players registered. Hey, Jack Effel? If everyone KNOWS the tournament is going to start a half hour late, guess what? They will only start showing up half an hour late! If you want to start the damn tournament at 12:30, start it at 12:30 -- but you might want to tell us this before 11:50, ferchristssake. Stop punishing those of us who actually give enough of a shit to show up to your tournament on time.
Anyway, I ran good at the start of the tournament, getting to double my starting stack in Level 4 without any big pots. Almost every chip I won in this tournament on Day 1 was just sort of someone deciding to give me more chips when I had a big hand. On two hands, someone decided to shove into my QQ. One was somewhat questionable and the other was terrible (he basically called my re-raise all-in preflop with 64s). Not much bad happened all day, yet I still only finished with 81600 at the end of the day. Part of it was due to some unsuccessful bluffs, part was just because I folded the last two hours (pot-limit is stupid), but most of it was because my table was extreeeeeeeemely sloooooooooooooow. We had a very slow-playing table. Until yesterday, I had not called the clock on anyone in the 2009 WSOP; yesterday I called it twice and should have called it a third time except I had just called it on the previous hand. We had the clock called probably six times at my last table. Even when the decisions weren't very big people were just playing really slow. Pot-limit hold'em is definitely a game for nitty-ass people with extremely high tolerance for boredom.
Day 2 was again short, nasty and brutish. After celebrating Jerrod's win with some late-night Korean BBQ, I overslept and did not wake up until 1:30 PM. I raced to my car without brushing my teeth or my hair and started driving. And as I got on the I-15, for the first time the entire WSOP, the 15 was backed up all the way from the 215 to Tropicana (the traffic advisory sign at Blue Diamond Boulevard said 25 minutes to Tropicana, where usually it says about 8 minutes). I detoured and zig-zagged my way to the Rio and ended up only six minutes and two hands late (luckily my Day 2 table was only slightly faster than my Day 1 table).
I won the first pot of significance I played, but after that it was just a disaster. Every time I put money into the pot I had the bottom of my range for doing so, and folded to the raise or reraise from the opponent. I finally flopped a straight with K9 out of the blind, and got paid off...by K9. Finally I shoved over Bill Chen's open-raise with 77 right into the BB's aces, and after racing down to the Rio in a vain effort to arrive on time, I was out the door an hour later.
I will probably play the $1500 PLO8 tomorrow, but what I am really looking forward to is the $1500 limit shootout on Friday evening. That tournament is the same day as the $50000 HORSE, which means I will be playing a $1500 limit shootout tournament with 200 of the best limit players in the world removed from the field. How big is my edge in that spot?! |
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