WPBT Trip Report: Part Deux - They play poker in Las Vegas

The Winter Gathering is an event that needs to be experienced to be believed. Like I mentioned in the last post, Thursday night is all social for me. Meeting people and drinking way to many Sam Adams is the only item on my agenda. I should apologize to Otis for commandeering his phone to do this. Not sure how many of those Sam Adams where in me, but one should never drunk tweet from another man's phone. Sorry dude.

For the first time in my life, I was in Las Vegas without my better half, OhCountess was home recovering from a tonsillectomy she received two weeks prior. She's an awesome lady, for those of you that have met her, I'm proud to admit I did the blogger thing and married up. I'll be forever grateful to her, but since she wasn't there, I didn't feel any pressure to ever not just sit down and work on thickening my leather ass. On this trip, I actually played 5 session of cash poker and one tournament.

After a lovely breakfast at Bellagio with Astin, Astin's friend, Lightning36, Katitude and JJOK, I played that one and only tournament; the blogger game.

I had high hopes, my team rocked. PokerPeaker and Lightning36. Peaker and I final tabled last year and Lightning is as good as they get in donkaments. Personally, I found the structure a bit steep for my taste, but you usually think that when you are card dead. I never really got anything going and busted out just after Peaker, we were both around the 2 hour range. Lightning fought on for a while, but he too went down early.

My starting table consisted of poker legend Dr. Pauly, Astin (the winner of the whole damn thing...CONGRATS!), Penner3, Melissa Hayeden (Melissa was the only pro in the tournament. She's also Allen Cunningham's girlfriend. If you didn't know, she's currently 17th in All-Time Female Money Winners. - taken from Dr. Pauly's blog- I had to ask who she was, I'm such a noob.), and Joe Speaker. There were a couple of other people at the table, but I had no names. Pauly had a bit more detail.

I basically sucked the life out of poker. When my stack dwindled to ~3200, I shoved the preflop raise of Elissa Harwood, her QQ was more then good against my A7o. She liked my bounties. Pauly and I explained the history of the bottle of Wild Turkey. Good times. Now it's up to her to give it back next year. Hopefully VinNay gets to sign it too.

I think that recap of the tournament took longer to write then I was actually playing. Hm.

I played 5 cash session of $2/$4 LHE. The goal of this trip was to prove to myself I could beat a game. I know, I shoot low but hey, we have to start somewhere.

My first session was Friday night. I had spent some time walking around with Lightning talking about life and stuff and we kinda decided not to head over to the Hard Rock Hotel to play the $1/$2 mixed game hosted by Pokerati. I kinda waffled back and forth on that one. I'm kinda glad I went to the MGM. I didn't want to miss the Blogger Mixed game (even though I did) but I did get to witness #Table16 (also documented here & here) Holy crap that was one wild table. At one point, I believe there was over $3,000 on a table of $1/$2 NLH. Jeebus. I was sitting in the minors one table over playing $2/$4 LHE. Me likey my spot. I finished up a $100 buyin in about an hour and a half.

My next session came after the night out at Steel Panther (this is a whole other post, I took a ton of pictures here - stay tuned). After the concert, DrChako, Drizz, myself, Cuban, F-Train, CK, TheWife and I'd swear I am missing someone or two or three. I'd just like it known for the record that they had Red Stripe beer for sale at the concert for cheap. While I had a good buzz on, I still knew to sit to the left of the Doc and Drizz, they were well lubricate. I made a few sets in this game and walked away up $60. Not too shabby. Blogger money is pretty sweet.

After busting out of the tournament on Saturday, I found myself in uncharted territory. I had no idea what to do with that much free time on a Saturday afternoon. Last year, finishing 5th got me out of the tournament at 11pm. It was 3pm this year so I figured I should go spew some cash since that short run had barely started to scratch my poker itch.

I felt good about the MGM session from the night before and headed back. The table was full of tourists, not like I'm not. I was sitting in the 4 spot. There was a really large English guy on my right and a Dutch kid two to my left and down at the other end were a pair of drunk middle aged guys. One of them kept bragging about how rich he was. I figured him for a Car Dealership owner. He probably had some money, but dude. You are playing $2/$4 at the MGM...whipping out the nice little cigar kit was cute, but...

This session wasn't nearly as good as the night before. I ground it for about 4 hours to lose $7. I guess there are bigger losses to be had in Vegas. I though I had played pretty well. At one point, the drunk guys and the Dutch kid were folding to my raises post flop. The large British guy called every raise of mine to the river with jack high. I had pretty much stuck to TAG poker.

I left the MGM looking to catch the tail end of the tournament but I didn't make it. Everyone at Caesar's had left. BloodyP had been twittering looking for other bloggers. Since I was now wandering alone I suggested he join me for $10/$20 NLHE at Caesar's. Har, har! Yeah, like we are bankrolled for that. Ppfffttt. Without sufficient funds or skill to sit at that game, we headed back to the IP's Geisha Bar. We were back to boozing it up.

I learned a valuable lesson this night. After busting from the tournament playing poorly, grinding to a tiny loss at the MGM, I decided to go over to the IP's $2/$4 LHE game in their poker, um, room? (It's more like a little fenced in area off the floor, not sure what you call that) I should have never gone over there. Feeling toasty and REALLY tired from not sleeping and pretty much going solid for the last 36 hours, I dusted off $80 and left it with some of the world's worst players. I remember one particular hand, I put a guy on KJ. The flop come KKJ...so I cap the flop with him. Not one of my better moments.

I played one more session of cash the last night. It was one of the funnest live session I have ever played. This session was so much fun, I'm gonna save it for another post. Here's the teaser, Drizz and I sat down at a table being run over by Teddy "KGB", a drunk Russian guy. I'l leave you with that and go play a little online poker. Poker After Dark is playing on my DVR and I've got that itch again.

Stay tuned!