Bad News

Disaster! I'm out. AQ vs AA on Q85 flop left me with 5k. Then I went all in with 77 vs 9T. 9 on the flop.

Break #1

At 2:20, during the first break, Dave says:

26k left. Played one hand like a moron and it cost me 9k. Scotty Nguyen is on my right. ESPN cameras parked at my table

WSOP Update

We're about to get underway. I have 30k in chips to start. This place is a zoo!

(This is Jen, I'm going to post the texts Dave sends me as I get them)

In Vegas and a Little Richer

I made my way to Vegas today. The Oakland airport was almost totally empty as was my flight. As per usual we hit some pretty bad turbulence coming over the mountains into Vegas. I don't often get airsick, but I have unloaded into a few airsickness bags on special occasions. This time I managed to keep my breakfast down...barely. Landing was like the classic movie moment when the hero cuts the blue wire with 2 seconds left on the timer and saving the flight crew and passengers on a mostly empty July 4th flight to Vegas from a bomb made of eggs, sausage and pancakes.

Once I got into town my good friend Matt Lessinger who is also here for the main event picked me up from the airport. After a quick stop at the Rio (which was buzzing with poker players) to register for the tournament it was off to the Palms to meet up with the folks from pokerstars.

Part of the deal with the package pokerstars has given me is wearing a pokerstars logo at the table while I'm playing the main event. So I had to go pick up a bag full of pokerstars hats, shirts, a jacket and other swag. Also since they transfered most but not all of the money I have coming to me into my account (they're holding $1,000 hostage until I play) I had to show them my tournament ticket to prove I was actually playing the tournament.

On top of this business there was also a free poker tournament for everyone who got their entry through pokerstars. At six pm today I got to play a 6 handed no limit single table tournament (in person) that paid six spots! That's right it was free money! 6th-3rd place paid $100, 2nd place paid $300 and first was $500 plus an entry into a tournament with an $800,0000 prize pool that will be taking place online in 3 weeks.

The tournament was designed to last about an hour or maybe 90 minutes (with each player getting 2,000 chips the blinds started at 25/50 and doubled every 15 minutes). The players at my table were all pretty weak, but after 30 minutes it was go time. I moved all in with 66 and got called by 99! ACK! But, I flopped a 6 and doubled up to about 4,000 chips.

I took out another player when I got dealt AQ and my opponent moved all in with A9. Now I had a commanding stack with 6,000+ chips. After a little back and forth another player ended up with the other 6,000 chips at the table and we were heads up.

Interestingly enough this guy had on a plain black T-shirt that had four names on it in 2 inch high white letters. Another player asked him what was up with the names and he said they were characters from Gossip Girl. "What the hell is Gossip Girl?" the guy asked as I snickered. Black T-shirt informed him that it was a TV show and he wore the shirt because it often sparked conversation with girls. Clearly he didn't take himself too seriously and we all gave him shit about his shirt like we were old friend for the next half hour. "Maybe I could get pocket aces if I wore a god damn gossip girl shirt! Was your The Hills shirt dirty today?"

After we got down to heads up we played a few hands and my opponent got the better of me. I was under 4,000 chips and he had over 8,000 and I knew I'd need to get lucky to win given the structure. When we started heads up play he said he give me all the money if he could have the online tournament entry. I declined, but now that I was in bad shape I asked him if the offer was still on the table. He thought for a minute and then agreed.

So I got $800 and he got the entry. This might have been a good deal, an OK deal or the worst deal I've ever made. I know the prize pool for the online tournament, but I don't know how many entrants there are going to be. If it's 300 players I screwed myself to some degree. If it's 600 or 700 I made a fair deal and if it's 1,000+ I made a great deal. We'll have to wait and see. The good news is I got $800 that seemed like money falling from the sky. It seemed like this was a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush situation.

After a nice buffet dinner with Matt, his Mom and two of his friends it was off to the Flamingo. Which is where I am now. It ain't the Bellagio, but it's alright.

Tomorrow the action starts at noon. I'll put up a detailed post either tomorrow night or Monday morning and Jen will be putting up the text updates that I'll be sending every 2 hours when I'm on break.

Good Luck, Daddy!

Off to Vegas Tomorrow

The $10,000 buy in main event of the World Series of Poker is already underway and today 1,116 players forked over ten grand for their shot at poker's world championship. Over the next three days somewhere around 5,000 other players (including me) will do the same. We'll be playing in split groups and not playing everyday until the 10th when everyone who is left will be in one absurdly large room.

Some of these players will lose all of their chips and be out of the tournament in a matter of minutes. Their $10,000 gone. One bad hand can derail even the best players. In fact 90% of the players that enter will lose their $10,000. For a fortunate few the tournament will last until July 15th.

Finishing in the top 10% will earn you a $10,000 profit. Finish in the top 1% and you're looking at $100,000+. Of course it only gets better from there. The final 9 players will all earn at least a million dollars for their efforts and (depending on the number of entrants) the winner will win close to ten million dollars and will be this years world champion!

I'd say I'm about 20-25% to make the money, have a 1 in 300 shot of making the final table and a 1 in 3,000 shot of winning. Those might sound like long odds and they are, but they're much better than the average entrant. 1 in 300 is close to the odds of drawing an ace and a king of the same suit (any suit) from a standard deck of cards. 1 in 3,000 is close to the odds of pulling two specific cards from the deck in order (ie pull the ten of clubs and then the 3 of hearts from that deck and we'll give you $10,000,000 - doesn't sound quite as impossible does it!).

I'll be blogging from Vegas with details and recaps and while the tournament is going on I'll be texting updates to my wife Jen who will then post them on this blog. If you want to check out broader covereage of the event check out pokernews.com, pokerpages.com or cardplayer.com.

My next post will be from Vegas. Maybe this is the year something crazy is going to happen!

Plans for the Near Future

After coming back from Vegas I had to work 12 out of the last 13 days of June to earn the points I needed to keep my Supernova Elite status on pokerstars. I won 10 of those 12 days (and won big) so it wasn't too tough to wake up and play everyday.

These first few days of July feel like a period of limbo for me. My latest crusade for points is over, the first leg of the WSOP is a few weeks behind me and the main event is just ahead. I'm leaving for Vegas on Saturday the 4th with the plan of playing my Day 1 of the main event on the 5th.

For those of you who don't know how it works the first day of the WSOP main event actually takes place over four days (Day 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D - Day 1A is tomorrow, July 3rd). They do this because they don't have the space or the staff to handle the 7,000+ players they expect all at one time. In fact there is a hard cap at 3,000 players for each day 1, although it's very unlikely that they'll hit that on any given day.

The players who make it through days 1A and 1B will come back for day 2A which will be on July 7th. Likewise the players who make it through days 1C and 1D will come back for day 2B on July 8th. July 9th is an off day for everyone and when we (hopefully!) come back for "Day 3" (a week after the tournament actually started) on July 10th everyone who is left will be playing at the same time. The players who make it to the end of day 3 should be in the money. Days 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 then take place on consecutive days.

By the end of day 8 there will be 9 players left. These players will all win at least $1,000,000 and won't resume play until November 7th. This is the second year that they've done this major break and they do it so ESPN can show however many weeks of tournament coverage without everyone knowing who the winner is. The final table will play out and then ESPN will air a special program the next day.

You might think since this is a $10,000 event that it would be a very tough field. WRONG! Sure all of the best players in the world will be there, but so will thousands of amateurs. The good players will be totally diluted by the weak ones. Just about every casino in the country and online that offers poker runs at least a few satellite tournaments to the main event. All of these qualifiers will come to Vegas with champagne wishes and caviar dreams and most of them will leave with nothing but a story. I suspect with the possible exceptions of the $1,500 7-card stud event (which was just ridiculous) and the 2006 main event, the 2009 main event will be the softest field I've ever faced at the WSOP.

Since all of my usual hotels are booked solid, I'll be staying at the Flamingo which I found a little depressing the last time I stayed there (I'm spoiled after all my time at Bellagio). But it was free so it's hard to complain too much. I'm booked through the 7th so if I make it past day 1 I'll have to make more hotel plans on the fly. Also there is a $1,500 tournament at Bellagio on the 6th which I might play. If I make it through day 1 I'll have two days to kill before play resumes for me and hopefully the town will be buzzing with soft poker players looking to hit it big.

In other news I saw that the FTOPS XIII schedule came out recently. Fulltiltpoker.com will once again be offering a slate of 25 online tournaments with buy ins ranging from $130 to $1,060 plus one $2,500 event. Action gets underway in the first week of August and with a few minor changes the list of events looks just like that of past FTOPS. I suspect I'll be doing my standard $10,000 bankroll looking to make at least one final table. More on that later.

I might put up one more post before I leave for Vegas, but if not wish me luck!