jzpiano's massive TR covered most of it, so I'll throw in a few of my personal highlights:
Thursday
After a couple weeks of long second-shift days in southern Kentucky, I hopped a plane to Phoenix on Thursday morning and arrived about an hour before jzpiano and Breich. The timing was good - I got my luggage and the rental car, made a short phone call to my wife, and picked them up.
The first evening was great - good beer, a fun mix of games, and a 5BB profit after an evening of 3/6 mix. We returned to Harrah's and jumped into the 3/6 full kill Omaha8 game that jz mentioned, and my luck was not as good as his. I got into a four-way kill pot that was capped preflop with JJxx (I think it was JJQK) and the flop comes J55. It goes three bets on the flop with one fold, ace on the turn gets two bets, and the preflop capper leads out on the blank river (no low) after simply calling flop and turn. Something smelled, and I just called. Of course, he had AA and scooped. I ended the session down $190, but considering that it was effectively a 6/12 game due to the high number of kill pots, I really only lost about 16BB.
Friday
After lunch at Harrah's and some geek-out time talking about Ingress and visiting the gaming store that jz mentioned, we got to Pali's and bagged chips for the tourney, then got a 3/6 10-game mix going. I did okay, going down for a while but running back up to a 12BB profit before moving over to the $1 single blind NLHE/PLO/PLO8 table and sitting down to jz's right. This later proved to be the single worst decision I made all weekend.
To quote Breich, I was living in second-best land all night long. It was agonizing, and I had to leave the table a couple times after getting stacked because I was so ridiculously tilted. I had a couple things going against me, of course. First, I have very little PLO experience, and my play certainly showed that. I was playing hands that I shouldn't have (largely out of frustration at being card-dead) and getting run over by the more experienced players, particularly jz sitting to my immediate left. I paid for some education this session, dusting off three full buy-ins over about eight hours. I was more than a little grumpy for the last couple hours of the session, and I hope nobody took it personally.
Saturday
After licking my wounds and getting a good night's sleep, I felt much better the next morning. I woke up a little earlier than the Chi-town boys and headed downstairs to find a 3/6 full kill LHE game running. I got on the list and it only took a few minutes to get a seat. I had some rungoot on a
very loose-passive table and cashed out two racks up after just over an hour of play (+33BB). Since you had to win two in a row for a kill pot, this game played much closer to 3/6 than the Omaha game of a few hours ago.
We arrived at Pali's just a few minutes before the tourney was scheduled to start and jumped in. I drew a seat at table 3 in the garage, and I was the chip leader at that table for most of the time, except for a short period after the hand where I gave 1/3 of my 45K-ish stack to Kenny on a well-played bluff. I ran it up to about 60K by the time table 3 broke, and hovered around that stack size for a very long time, taking about 70K to the final table.
The rounds were long for a home format (35 minutes) but the structure was brutal with the blinds doubling every round at this point. Everybody was tight on the bubble, and Kenny was playing his button pretty aggressively as he should have with a massive chip lead of around 200K. By the time the bubble burst, I was up to about 105K and in second place. We briefly discussed a chop, then played only one or two hands before my 88 went down to Kenny's JT AIPF. After I was gone, the remaining players decided to give Kenny first place money and chop the rest - ouch.
After that, we got the $1 NLHE/PLO/PLO8 game going again, and as jz mentioned, the focus was more on Lodden Thinks than the poker itself for most of the evening. I played a lot better this time, nursing a single BI all night, running it up $100 at one point but giving a good chunk of that to Breich and the card rack across the table whose name I can't remember. I ended up cashing out just below even, well after sunrise on Sunday morning.
Sunday
We got to the hotel about 6:30am, said our goodbyes, and I caught an hour of half-sleep. I got my stuff together, degened off another $20 in the casino slots, then jumped in the car and headed to the airport. The flight home was bumpy as hell, and we sat on the taxiway for an hour after landing thanks to the lightning storm that was sitting over the airport. Finally we were able to deplane, it took another 45 minutes to get my luggage - they were backed up because of the storm - and Mrs. S and the rug rats picked me up and took me home.
I was in bed before 10pm and slept a solid 12 hours.
TL;DR
I had a blast this weekend. We couldn't have asked for a better host - thanks a million, Palimax. You were accommodating and extremely generous.
I would have happily stayed for another three days of poker if reality would have allowed it. But after a month on the road, I must admit that I'm very happy to be home. Now it's time to start planning for HPI 2014: ORLANDO!
Last edited by Schmendr1ck; 07-31-2013 at 06:19 PM.