Vegas Day ???

Yep, I'm still here but not for much longer.

Yesterday we decided to finally hit up the 2pm tournament at Planet Hollywood. It's now $80 instead of $60 but if you have a player's card you get an additional 500 chip.

I had called Katokat in the morning to see if we could get together sometime during the day. We had settled on dinner at the Rio. She and Mr. Katokat were going to play cash games at the Mirage while we played the tournament.

A woman approached me while I was waiting on DranDead to finish getting her player's card and said, "Hi Zooks, it's Katokat. We decided to come down here and play this with you guys." Wooooooooot! What a blast it turned out to be.

As usual I didn't play too many hands. Most pots I took down preflop. The blinds were getting so high that I was pretty much committed to any hand when I raised with AJ and got one caller from the SB. The flop came out KQx and she checked to me. Well I shoved it in and she says, "I guess I have to call." Crap. She turns over .... wait for it, 44. Yep. She called with bottom pair. I ended up hitting my A on the river. I'm not proud, just lucky.

I get seriously short stacked on a short handed table and I shove UTG with KTo and get a called with AX. I spike a K and double up. Then I pick up AA in the BB and it's raised to me; I only have one more chip than his raise so we get it all in. AA > AT as it should be. Another double up and now we're down to the final table.

Four out of the five of us made the final table wooooooooot! Snuffy ended up being the bubble boy due to a shortish stack and bad button draw. I got lucky and drew the button at the final table. I was in the middle of the pack chipwise but at least I wouldn't have to pay any of the ginormous blinds for quite a while (I had 29K with blinds where 3k/6k). In the mean time a player busted out in front of Snuffy forcing him to pay the blinds sooner than he would have liked. He ended up going out after the first chop deal fell through making him the bubble boy.

We kept trying to negotiate a chop; only the chipleader was reluctant. I don't think he realized how few big blinds even he had. A few hands later, when he was no longer the chip leader (and Snuffy had busted out) another chop offer was made and finally accepted. Woooooooot! I cashed for $435.

After recalling my horrible runs this week I believe that I'm now down about $350. That cash managed to offset about half of my losses for the week.

Last year my cash in the Planet Ho tournament brought me to even for the trip. I guess I just dug myself too deep. Had we actually played it out I might very well have cashed for more but I knew it would be a total crapshoot at this point. Besides, we wanted to head over to the Rio and check out the action there.

While at the Rio I was able to watch the final headsup for the PLO event that Vanessa Selbst ended up winning. What a trip that was. Her opponent was raising pot WITHOUT EVEN LOOKING AT HIS CARDS. He was/is a strip club owner from Australia and quite a character. He was also three sheets to the wind. It was only a matter of time before Selbst cleaned him out.

Daniel Negreanu was playing the final table of a limit event in the ESPN stadium. Once Selbst had one we went over there to watch Daniel play. He got very lucky and caught a lucky river to knock out the 3rd place guy and amass a huge chipstack. Unless he managed to get horribly unlucky he was bound to win the tournament. It was definitely an exciting day at the Rio.

Note: Edit to correct error regard AA v AT hand. AA > AT. All is right with the world.