Forgot to mention yesterday that I saw Martin Kabrhel twice! between the time I got to the Paris and the time I got registered for the Big O Satellite. If you see him three times in five minutes, it means bad luck.

Orleans Summer Open $100K Guaranteed NLHE Seniors

Got up bright and early to get ready for this one. Since I was a late arrival to poker (at least in my current incarnation), I’ve been playing seniors tournaments as long as I’ve been coming to Vegas for poker. My first Hendon Mob entry is from a Seniors tournament at Caesars.

Maybe I did see Kabrhel three times, because somehow despite having kings three times and flopping quad sevens once, I never managed to get over the starting stack in more than three hours of play.

I was seated across from Bill Stabler, whom I’d never met but whose name I was familiar with, as he’d been a feature of various write-ups here over the years, including where he’d finished second in the WSOP Seniors event. Bill mentioned that he’d driven up to the Orleans with someone who pointed me out from behind and referred to me as “Simpsons”, presumably because my card cover is modeled on an accessory to a Professor Frink figurine.

Bill busted out, I made a bit of a recovery from 1/4 starting stack, ran what may have been an unknowing bluff, then immediately blew it all with a nut flush draw vs. a set of kings.

Something that was on my radar was the WSOP Online #9 PLO PKO 6-Max bracelet event at 3:30pm, which had a satellite at 1pm. But I could not get the WSOP NV app to run. Issues with the servers? There was no indication what the problem was. I didn’t want to schlep over to Paris/Horseshoe just to find out there was a systemic problem, but it did occur to me that there might be an issue with other players in close proximity, which I know Caesars exempts for their own properties but maybe not Boyd?

I got a sandwich and planned my next move. Which ended up being re-entry into the Seniors tournament. I signed up just before a break and found myself at a table two seats from Bill again, only this time he had a stack that must have been over five times the starting stack.

Again, things just didn’t go well, and I was out in about 90 minutes when I shoved J♣ T♣ and was called by ace-rag from a big stack who caught an ace on the flop. Didn’t even make the end of registration.

Orleans Summer Open $10K Guaranteed Big O

There were only about 20 minutes before the start of the Big O, so I signed up for that. Things were going on reasonably well. I watched a hand where a player potted on a Kx Kx 6x flop and was re-potted. She folded, showing a pair of sixes and her opponent showed he just had trip kings, which led to some self-recrimination. Not long after, I flopped a set of jacks on a Qx Jx 7x board and pushed hard on the flop. On the 5x turn, I was all-in and she called for less, making an 8-high straight and low on the river, leaving me with about 10bb.

I did manage to run that up to about half a starting stack before the end of things. I headed back to the Rio.

WSOP.com #9 PLOSSUS PKO 6-Max

When I got back to my room, I checked in on the status of WSOP NV, and, indeed, the app was running just fine, so my guess about why things weren’t working at Orleans appeared to be right. Fortunately, I was able to use my debit card to add some money to my account and jump right in, though perhaps that’s not the best thing to do when the average stack is already double starting stack in a PKO. My table had one player with a 4x stack, and in the half-hour I was in the tournament, players were dropping like flies. Eventually, I fell, as well. Fun format, though.

And that was it for the day. I made calls back home, got a chocolate shake, and came back to the room just in time to catch the last 30-seconds of fireworks over New York New York celebrating the Knicks championship win.