Where you been, J?

Wow, so much to report, and I haven't gotten around to it until now. It's pretty sad really. I am a poker blogger, I decide to play in the World Series of Poker for the first time ever, and it takes me nearly a month to write about the experience! Pathetic!

Well, where to begin? The flight into McCarran was choppy as usual, but, other than that, uneventful. I played just over an hour of $1/$2 No Limit at Planet Hollywood before hopping over to the Rio to register for the tournament. +$285. I pretty much decided then and there that I wasn't going to play any satellites. I would just buy into the event, and play cash games to earn as much of my buy-in back as possible.

At about 10:30 The Wife and I took the free shuttle to the Rio. I noticed that the tokes to the shuttle driver were not as forthcoming as they had been in the 2008 WSOP. People just sailed on by. Sign of the economic times, I suppose, but I made sure to take care of them on each trip. A buck for shuttle service across the freeway isn't too unreasonable, in my book.

It turns out that you have to get a (free) Harrah's playing card before you can register for any tourney, but that actually turned out to be not bad at all. Because the buy-in was so large, it meant I got hooked up with some nice meal comps and such at Harrah's-owned establishments like Paris and Bally's. Pretty cool. Once that was done, it was on to the tournament cashier's kiosk to make the buy-in. It was anti-climactic, really. I had thought that plunking down fifteen $100 bills to gamble would feel more ominous than it did, but it was more-or-less like any other tournament I've ever played. You pay the money, you get a seat card and a meal comp, end of story. Still, as I walked away, I couldn't help feeling a little giddy. It was official, and there was no turning back now. In a few short hours, I would be playing in the one and only World Series of Poker.

As we made our way back to the strip, however, I could feel that airy giddiness turning into a major headache. The Wife and I grabbed lunch at Paris, where a smoking-hot hostess gave us a really great seat and was generally very nice to us. Of course, as a result, I had to fade all kinds of annoying accusations of checking out said hostess, which did not help my budding headache one bit. But the food was good, and I decided a nap would be a great final preparation for my first step onto the big stage.

When I woke up around 4, the headache was REALLY POUNDING. I was also ridiculously dehydrated. I popped 800mg of ibuprofen and gulped down a liter of water on my way back to the Rio. By the time I got to my seat in the Brasilia Room at 4:30, I felt fantastic. I was alert, but calm. No pain anywhere in my body, I was rarin' to go.

But it was early. I didn't even have anyone at my table to talk to yet. I decided to wander over to the Amazon Room to see what big names were playing. It turned out that Huck Seed and Todd Brunson were final tabling a mixed event, while Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu were seated close to one another and going deep into a limit hold'em event. The $5K pot limit Omaha event nearby was also chock full of big names ... a quick sweep showed me Victor Ramdin, David Pham, Humberto Brenes ... the list goes on. I happened to stand next to Michael DeMichele briefly, and I let him know that he was on my fantasy team and that I was rooting for him to do well this year. He seemed to be flattered, but I don't think my words really helped him much. After seeing him make strong showings in early events (cashing if not final tabling), he has been M.I.A. in the latter half of the WSOP. Was my speech too much pressure? Or was he just low on funds after buying into the $40K event? Quien sabe?

5 o'clock eventually rolled around, and it was a quick dash back to the Brasilia Room, Table 247. I honestly don't remember too much about specific hands, at least not in great detail. It is more or less a blur, but I do have these general impressions to share:

- The game played very much like my books describe Stud cash games. Specifically, the players were generally much tighter than I am used to seeing. Makes sense, as most of the examples in the books are $15/$30 bet limits at the minimum. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the books prepared me very well for this tournament, even more so than they had for the Stud cash games I have played in my career. For instance, certain isolation plays and bluffs that simply don't work at the $4/$8 tables at Commerce were a gold mine here;
- I was one of the two strongest players at my starting table of eight. The rest were competent, save for one total idiot. But these competent players all had very exploitable tendencies that I picked up on pretty quickly. For such a high buy-in, this was not a shark tank by any stretch of the imagination. Had it been a higher-stakes cash game, I would have made a boatload in short order;
- Much like tournament hold'em, the value in playing draws drops off significantly. You don't see nearly as many straights and flushes shown down as you might in loose cash games; there were a lot more hands that were won by a single pair or two pair;
- The one-hour levels and the deep stacks made for a lot of play, and as such there was no real need to gamble early on. It also provided a great feeling-out period for the table. I had never played in a tournament with levels so lengthy before, so I was more used to just having to play my cards because the blinds go up so quickly.

Early on, I played really aggressively and I read every situation perfectly. Nevertheless, I got dangerously short-stacked very early when my strong starting hands got drawn out on. But the structure allowed me to survive those hits and make a huge comeback to become chip leader at my table. I kept with the good reads, and had a good run of cards to be solidly above the average by the dinner break. I even had the satisfaction of knocking out a couple players. :)

After dinner, however, things did not go so well. We got two new players, who were both as aggressive as I am -- one on my left and one on my right. The new guy on my right was constantly stealing pots before I could do so (disrupting my earlier mojo). And the new guy on my left was more difficult to steal from than his predecessor had been. So it was much tougher for me to put pressure on the table like I had been doing throughout most of the tourney.

One of them was actually more aggressive than me, as hard as that may be to believe. It took me a few hands to figure it out, but he was four-betting me with nothing on several occasions. This was a shock to me, as I am not at all used to players trying to run over me ... it's typically the other way around. On one hand in particular, he four-bet me on 3rd street, four-bet me on 4th, then called every single bet on every street including the river. When he called me at the end, I shrugged a little because I thought there was no way my unimproved split kings were good. When he didn't turn his cards over, I eventually showed my single pair, and he mucked angrily. He thought it was a slowroll! We had a bit of a heated discussion after that, as I tried to calmly explain to him why I thought my hand could not possibly be good once he called down after being so aggressive early on and I was representing a pair of kings the whole way. He just kept repeating that if I shrug like that, it means I don't have anything. Argh, whatever. Ship the chips.

The long and short of it was that I lasted my way into the sixth level, where I was sadly shown the exit. I made Aces and 8's on 4th street (how fitting), and got into a betting and raising war with the new, aggressive player on my left. He ending up making Kings full on that hand after starting with Kings up on 4th. Bad beat. That hand crippled me, and on the next I got it all in with three diamonds on 3rd street. I eventually made Jacks up, but my foe made a straight to knock me out. 209th out of 359 runners. D'oh.

More to come.