Thanks! I was beginning to wonder if anyone is actually reading this.

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Day 8, Part 2 - 7/02

I went back to the Rio to check out the featured table. Antonio Esfandiari (pink shirt in the pic) was the big name there. Gaelle Baumann was at one of the secondary tables.

I found Scotty Nguyen and Erik Seidel seated at the same table out in amazon orange. Pic of that below.

Sweating live poker is actually really boring though, so I didn't stick around for long. Instead I registered for the $150 turbo deep stack and ran well until the first break when I couldn't find a fold with trips against a monster.

I was tired in this tournament and playing too much on carefree autopilot mode. It was another reminder to stay focused at all times and really think through the big decisions. Poker will punish you if you let your guard drop.

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Day 9, Part 1 - 7/03

I'm out of my hotel, but my flight isn't until late tonight, so I have some time to kill. I was hoping to play some cash at the Rio, but no luck. They are using all the space for the main event.

The field is much, much bigger today. Spotted at the tables so far: Action Dan, luckychewy, Shaun Deeb, Kenny Hallaert. Mike Sexton and Jay Farber at the same table. Chris Moneymaker and Phil Laak are afoot as well.

I'd like to see the legend Phil Ivey make an appearance, but I'm guessing he might not be here until tomorrow.

Now I'm sitting around watching the World Cup and trying to figure out how to spend this day.

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I have enjoyed this!

Thanks buddy!

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We finish our trip with another crack at PH 1/2. Let's hope for some rungood.

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PH sux for us once again. Make a bad call to lose a pretty big pot with AK tptk vs. turned flush. Double back with jacks. Then run cold for two hours. Weaker table than last week with lots of limp/callers, but we never catch anything to punish them. We leave the table with $50 remaining from our starting $140.

Didn't really enjoy the cash games this trip. Never had a clean session where I ran hot and got paid. On the other hand, never really had a nightmare session either. Basically broke even for the trip.

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Good stuff bro. Thanks for sharing


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Enjoyed the TR

Thanks guys. Glad some people enjoyed following along.

I'm finally back home and appreciating the clean air. As much as I love poker, I hate almost everything else about casinos. The food is overpriced, the air is full of cigarette smoke, and it's loud all the time. Not really my ideal environment. I'm not that into partying, I don't go to clubs, and I don't gamble besides poker and the occasional small sports bet. Still, for better or worse, there's nothing else quite like Vegas. It's its own thing.

Let's see how I did on my trip goals:

play in a WSOP event [x]
check out various casinos [x]
sweat the main event for an hour or two [x]
play in some other tourneys [x]
get my first Hendon Mob entry [x2]

Managed to check every box. Not bad at all, even if the goals were modest. I was prepared to lose $1k in this trip on MTTs and another $1k on cash, so coming out of everything with a slight net profit is quite nice, even if I'm not exactly stacking Bugattis over here.

I'm gonna ramble a bit now. Here are some various trip thoughts:

- The food prices in the Rio are simply extortion. $3 for a banana. $5 for a bottle of orange juice. $11 for a smoothie. FFS they have a captive audience and they sure take advantage of it. I tried the Indian buffet and Guy Fieri's place as well. The food was okay, but the prices were jacked up compared with the real world. I ended up eating at Ping Pang Pong three nights in a row in the Gold Coast, which is solid Chinese food for not too crazy prices. I had the Port O' Call buffet for lunch or dinner more than I'd like to admit, less because it was good and more because it was convenient. I also made three visits to the Chipotle in PH. I don't even particularly like Chipotle, but it's reasonable quality and it wasn't marked up like everything else. Can you tell I'm a nit?

- I hadn't really played a lot of poker since 2011, so this trip was like working off the rust after a long time away. I feel like I improved throughout the week and became a lot more comfortable at the table, although I still have a lot of areas to shore up. I need to get better at folding good hands against obvious strength from random opponents (they're almost NEVER bluffing in these spots), finding chips in tourneys when card dead, and navigating marginal spots against tricky players. I'm definitely not a mark. I would say that in a typical 9-10 handed table at the tournaments I played in, I felt like I was one of the top 3-4 players. I'm too cautious and savvy to be an easy out. On the other hand, I can see that I'm missing a lot of spots and that there's still a lot of room to get better.

- I thoroughly enjoyed The Giant because it was my first real WSOP event and such a huge spectacle with 4000+ runners crammed into the Rio, but most of my time and focus on the felt in this trip came in the daily 1pm $250 tournament at the Rio. I really enjoyed the challenge of this event and I feel like each time I played it, I got better at navigating the various challenges. I wish I had the time and bankroll to just play this every day during the summer. I bet I could've made at least one pretty deep run. There's a lot of value in the fields because, in addition to the many quality players who enter, there are just lots of people in there who have big leaks (even bigger than mine) and are basically dead money unless they run amazingly. Still, there comes a point where the blinds start to get so high so fast that you're largely at the mercy of the card gods. The same thing happened in The Giant. It started out great, but you needed to accumulate steadily or you would be forced into shove bot mode. I'm jealous of the main event with its 50k starting stack and 2 hour levels. So...much...structure...

- It was really interesting to sit at a table with the same people for 3-4+ hours and see how they play. I'd heard so much about the "OMC/old man coffee" stereotype coming in that it was pretty hilarious to find 2-3 of these guys at my starting table in most of the afternoon tournaments. Sure enough, they played exactly as advertised. Weak/tight to the point where they never get action, never win big pots, never lose big pots, never take enough risks to accumulate without mint cards, and gradually blind down to nothing over the course of a few hours when they invariably go out with a whimper or make some kind of puzzling spew out of frustration. When you see these guys at your table, you just know they're not a threat at all.

- One of the things I would do in every tournament is observe how everyone played, try to build a profile of each player at the table, and then predict who would still be around in another 2-3 hours. Usually you can get a pretty good feel for it right away. The old men don't last without getting smashed by the deck. The maniacs may suck out or bluff people for a big pot here and there, but sooner or later they implode. It's the solid, steady, tricky, patient players who thrive.

The table draws add a huge variable to the variance though. I realized in hindsight that my starting table at The Giant was very tough. Lots of young guys, a bracelet winner, and some tricky play. No old guys, clowns, or rec old ladies. Everyone seemed like a serious player and while that made it a fun challenge, it also prevented a smooth ride. My second table was like a completely different universe and if I'd started there all along, it might have been a drastically different night. My best run in the $250 came when I had the softest starting table of my three attempts at that tournament, which probably isn't pure coincidence.

- Having never really been to a huge poker tournament before in my life, the enduring sensory impression is the ubiquitous sound of chips riffling. I've heard it described as being like crickets and that's so true. I guess what's surprising is how LOUD it is. You can sit outside the Amazon room during the main event and actually hear it through the walls. I swear. It's everywhere down in the bottom of the Rio. When I close my eyes I can still hear it.

- For a long-time poker fan, being at the WSOP with money to spend was kind of like being a kid in a candy store. So many options to choose from. Should I spam STTs and try to stack up some lammers? Should I play a mega satellite for the main? Should I play cash games? A deep stack? Take a punt in a bracelet event? When you factor in other stuff going on around town like the WPT500, Wynn series, Golden Nugget, and Venetian, there was really an almost paralyzing amount of poker options. That was a good thing though.

- I definitely want to come back next year, but probably with a slightly different plan. The more tournaments I play, the more I like the idea of a slow, deep structure where you get some actual play for your money and aren't as reliant on catching cards when the blinds skyrocket. Dropping $10k on a poker tournament might not be a good option for me next year, so the main event might not happen, but I can probably build a trip around something the like the marathon or monster stack and supplement it with a steady diet of daily deep stacks in the $200-250 range. As someone who enjoys tournaments more than cash games and plays mainly for fun and not purely for profit, that seems like a good way to get nice bang for your buck. I probably won't bother with the cash games next time, as the money isn't that important to me at 1/2 stakes and I don't find the format as exciting as the forced action of tournaments.

All in all, it was an interesting week+ that went by quickly. I could have used my time more efficiently, but I was able to play a variety of events and experience a lot of different things. Hopefully I will be able to get back out there next year with some bigger goals.

Nice TR so far. I just got back from Vegas and I played the same $250 1 pm daily Deep Stack and had a very similar run to yours. I was able to chip up to about 180,000 chips right before the bubble but that lost 3 flips against short stacks and finished in 85th Place.

Nice run. Unlucky finish. Hope to see you at the final table next year!

Nice TR. Thanks for taking the time.

Very enjoyable read. Thank you.

This TR was really well written. I wonder if the OP is some kind of writer/journalist/... by trade.

Hah. Thanks for the kind words guys. Really glad that people were following along and that I wasn't just talking to myself in an echo chamber. Felt that way for a little while there when nobody was responding.

And yes, I have indeed worked as a writer before. Newspaper stuff and some sports writing. I do a lot of creative writing as well. Actually, I'm working on a project about old Vegas right now, which was part of my excuse for going on this trip.

Great TR. Can't wait to read the next one

Hope it worked out for you man. I'm a 1/2 player who's never understood the tournament attraction. It just seems like BR spewage to me

Same here. In my opinion at some point a tournament turns into a somewhat skilled form of bingo. Even the final table at the Main Event turns into something like the equivalent of $200 for the chip leaders and maybe $60 for those in middle of the pack at the final table (FYI - I computed this using the fact that it cost $3 to make one orbit around the table in 1-2 and considering both the blinds AND antes at the final table of main event).

Sure, but there are lots of weak players in the field of a lot of tournaments, so you can massage the odds in your favor. When you put in a lot of volume, you will eventually get positive results if you are a strong player in the typical field. I built up my whole bankroll on Stars from MTTs. MTTs are what I've always enjoyed about poker.

Poker is a hobby for me, not a profession. I find tournaments a lot more fun than cash games. Cash games just feel like work to me, like punching a clock. I don't enjoy them very much and they're not productive or fulfilling.

I understand that if you just want to go pro then cash games are probably more lucrative and consistent. They're just not my personal preference though. I could spend 9-10 hours at a tournament on this trip and still be laser focused. On the other hand, after 1-2 hours at the cash table, I'd be looking for the exits. Just don't find it as engaging.

Great report! I feel slightly motivated to write up my own report from the trip I just took.

Nice response. Those are all good comments and reasons. Best of luck to you. I am enjoying your thread.

Thanks for sharing, glad you had a fun time!

After playing a ton of those STT's, I finally figured them out somewhat right at the end of my trip. They changed the structure this year by removing the 25/25 level. But they also added in a 3rd (I think) level, which only matters if you survive that long. You have to change your idea of what short-stacked is a little. But your idea of using the winnings to seed bigger satties is probably what I'll do in the future. I won a lot of lammers this year and had a very hard time selling them. I had to give big discounts.

You spent $125 on the last STT and $150 throwaway on the last deepstack, that's halfway to a mega seat for the main.

You should have taken the free shuttle from the Gold Coast to the Orleans. There's a much wider variety of tournaments and cash games over there, to include a ton of non-NLHE games, if that's your thing. I think most of the NLHE tournaments were held earlier in the Series, though. Very good structures. A wide variety of cash games as well. BTW, that shuttle also goes to the High Roller on the Strip.

Next year my plan is to go later in the Series, about the same time as you. No more Seniors events for me, tired of playing with those guys. I want to try a different approach to the STT's too.