April 22, 2009

  • Vegas Trip - Day 1 - Venetian Deepstack

              

                 Woke up early this morning to finish packing and arrived at the airport a little after 10AM with my flight departing at 10:30AM, cutting it close.  I was last to board the plane and was thankful I didnt miss it.  Landed at 11:30AM and a limo guy was awaiting my arrival holding a sign with my last name in huge letters.  Gotta love having a host at a classy hotel that takes care of you.  He rushed me to the Venetian as I had a Noon tournament to catch.  I arrived to the hotel just in time to head straight to the poker room, I didn't even have enough time to check-in to my hotel room.  Today's event was the smaller stake tournament in the Deepstack series with a $340 buy-in, which was a really good warm-up for me.  I played my A-game and chipped up really well the first 6 levels.  I was chip leader throughout my first three tables and used my stack to put power plays on my opponents.  Two levels before the dinner break I raised 2.5x the BB under the gun with QQ and the opponent to my immediate left re-raised 3x my raise, leaving himself with 11k in chips behind.  At this point I had around 50k in chips at the 600/1200 level.  I decided to 4-bet shove with my QQ hoping to have him dominated or at worst flipping against AK.  It turns out he woke up with Aces and I blanked off, depreciating my chip stack to 30k.  The next two levels I ran card dry and dwindled my stack down to 20k in chips with blinds at 1000/2000.   Shortstacked at 10BB I was ready to shove with anything that looked decent, but what do you know, dinner break!  Now I had to kill an hour and come back to my shorter stack at the 1500/3000 level.  I used the hour dinner break to check-in to my hotel room and settle in.  Got back to the tournament area just on time and folded about 5 hands before I shoved UTG with K2s which was the best I've seen and didn't want the blinds to hit me which would make my stack look like next to nothing.  The chipleader woke up with KJ and easily called my shove, and busto!  I was KO'ed in 48th place out of 291 players, 27 players would make the money, and 1st place prize was $26k.  Making the money in these top-heavy tournaments is pretty much worthless as you make about $60 more than your buy-in, the real money is in the top 3 spots.  So I'm never too mad at myself for busting out close to the money.  I definately got a lot of practice and feel my live tournament play is still up to par.  Tomorrow the gameplan is to play satellites all day for the Deepstack Main Event which is kicking off on Thursday.  Hopefully I can win my seat for cheap rather than buying in direct for $2500.  The structure for this tournament is great with hour and a half levels with 20k in starting chips and blinds starting at 25/50.  First place for this tournament is usually around $200k, let's hope I run deep in this event!  If for whatever reason I get done playing satellites for the ME, I'll probably go up to my room and try to catch the $100k rebuy on FT.  Gotta get some sleep and prepare for a long day tomorrow.  Good night!