WSOP 2006: More tournaments

Ok, continuing with the WSOP 2006 story. I left off with busting out of Event 37, $1500 NL on Tuesday, July 25th. But I still had a few more days to get in some more tournaments before the Main Event, as I didn't start playing in that until Sunday, July 30th.

So on Wednesday, I decided to play in the 7pm $220 tournament at Caesars Palace. They run a great tournament, one of the best smaller buy-in, daily tournaments on the Strip. Decent starting stack (4500), slow blind levels (40 minutes), and a great room to house all the players.

I think this tournament generally gets about 80-100 players. But this was WSOP season, which means Vegas is on steroids. The field for the tournament this day was around 300 players, with a first prize of ~$17,000 and top 30 getting paid.

After finding my seat and chatting briefly with those around me, I discovered that the two guys to my right had both won seats into the Main Event. Now that doesn't prove that they are good, but after some play it was clear that they were, as the three of us were in pretty good control of the table. I was feeling great to be in the best table position among us though, and about an hour in, the one furthest on the right says sarcastically, "I wonder who I need to thank for putting me to the right of you two." hah. Even worse, then we found out that the guy to my LEFT had just cashed in the WSOP stud hi-lo event earlier that day! Oy. Not an easy table. He seemed a bit too passive to cause any real trouble though, so maybe Hold'em wasn't really his strength.

At any rate. I don't remember a whole lot of hands from this event. I do remember opening from UTG with KQo, a rather dubious move in NL Hold'em. A total sign of me being primarily a Limit Hold'em player, as that is a reasonably standard move in that game (though still debatable). Anyways, in this hand a short-stack moved in on me, I was getting like 3-1 on my money so I had to call, but he had AA and I doubled him up. bah.

I did have a good number of hands go my way though, as I was cruising through the levels and found myself with a healthy stack about 4 hours into the tournament. I didn't even realize that we were down to about 70 players at that point, so the money was coming in sight.

Unfortunately, I started dwindling a bit, and the blinds did take some huge jumps that started to catch up to me. I got it all-in as a slight underdog in one hand and managed to suck out to stay alive.

But then about 5 hours in, we're down to 5 tables and I'm really holding on for life. I have QTo on the button, it folds to me and it doesn't even really matter what I have, I'm all-in. The small-blind folds but the big blind calls and I know I'm in trouble because she had been playing rather tight. She turns over QQ and I need a miracle board, which does not come and I'm out in 50th and no cash.

So now it's midnight, fairly early by Vegas time, but this was pretty much the end of that night because I wanted to get up early the next day to play in a satellite at the Bellagio for one of their $1000 buy-in tournaments going on at this time at the "Bellagio Cup."

Next post will start there.