Clearing the Decks: Vegas Trip Report

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I wrote this back in June and never put it up, Figured I’d better get it posted before…you know.

Something the Sat Dragged In

I made a quick trip down to Vegas over the weekend that may be my last for the summer, since it didn’t go so smoothly.

I headed down with one of my co-workers, Ben, who was seeing the WSOP for his first time.

We got a room at the Rio, since we just had a couple of days, getting into town at 7pm on Friday. We got a Lyft to the hotel, got checked into a room  in Masquerade with Trump’s hotel in the middle of our view, then headed down to the floor, where we immediately ran into Kevmath. After a brief chat I hustled over to the cage to buy into the evening’s $585 Mega Satellite, I made it all of 40 minutes until I bet my pocket tens that were good to the river when [as ks] made a backdoor flush.

Ben and I headed over to the Strip, starting off at Planet Hollywood, where I introduced him to the Mutant Poker Original Friend of the Blog Brad Press who was enjoying some cash game action.

We walked up the Strip checking out the Friday night crowd, as Ben displayed for me his strategy for winning at video roulette, then headed back to the Rio.

Saturday morning we headed down for the 9am WSOP $185 Mega Satellite, where Ben made it about halfway through and I busted 17th, with 8 places paying $100 cash and three $500 tournament buyin lammers. The single-table satellites were going off all around for the Millionaire Maker, but they also ran a satellite for that afternoon’s Eight-Game Six Handed bracelet event, and eager to play some games I don’t get a chance at at home, I jumped in. Amazingly enough, I was (a distant) second in chips by the time we were down to three players, but I ended up going out third.

Ben headed out on his own adventures most of Saturday, ending up in a small tournament at Treasure Island where he chopped for what would be the only cash of our combined weekend. I headed to the Venetian Deepstack Poker Championship $40K GTD NLHE Survivor hoping to pick up one of the $3400 payouts. I wasn’t the only one, as my table had a couple of pros I recognized. Over at another table was Carlos Welch. When I came back from break, I had the scare of my life, as another famous name walked past my table, I thought he was looking for his seat, but he was on his way out.

Played a couple of games on WSOP.com, then did the Mega Satellite again on Sunday morning. Busted out of that, headed to the Orleans and jumped into a tournament there.

I guess I’m lucky that I busted, because even though our flight (on the wretched Spirit Air) was an hour late Sunday night, the game still hadn’t hit the money by the time we were originally scheduled to take off.

So that’s probably Vegas for me for this year. I think trying satellites was the best strat—any one of them would have made the whole trip even, and the big one on Friday would have been fantastic (with a $50 cash payout and $5K in lammers). On to the next attempt.