Las Vegas ... so good to me

So another year and another profitable Vegas trip. Who would have thought it would be this good?

Last year, you may remember that one of the guys in my poker club (Mike Eise) won a bracelet and as a result, I got a check for $12,000.

Then, earlier this year, another member of our poker club (Jordan Portel) won $46,000 and I got a check for $750 (and Hawkette got a $750 check too).

Now, my wife (Hawkette) cashed in a $1500 event, after she won the buy in based on her play in our monthly tournaments. So we get a check for $2464 after we pay back the dues to the poker club. Not too shabby, I say...

She finished 212th out of 3,097 players. I was so much more nervous watching her than I ever am playing myself. Crazy stuff....

I played the Deepstack Venetian tournament on the first full day we were in Vegas and really loved the structure. I thought it was fantastic. I played with CK and we got to talk/hang out on each break. I played for 12 hours and then got knocked out around 90th of 696 players. I played between 15-20 bb's most of the day. It made a lot of my decisions difficult. I was really bummed to play for 12 hours and miss the money by just about 30 players, but it was the warmup I needed for the next tournament to come. Congrats to CK for finishing 4th for a payout of $21K. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

So the next day, I played in the RIO deepstack. It's a $175+$25 buy in with 469 players that day. $15,000 in starting chips and 25/50 blinds which will move up every 30 minutes. My first table was looser than anything I had seen the entire day before. Even the dealer was saying this was the craziest play she had ever seen in a deepstack tournament this early. With 300bbs pots were raised and reraised and we even saw 2 all in's during the first 30 minutes. There wasn't a single pot that someone won by buying the blinds during the first 2 levels. It was crazy. I won  a big hand early when my draw got there putting me at about 400bb's, so I just sat back and watched the crazy action after that.

Unlike the previous day, I rarely got below 20bb's. Every time I got close, I was able to chip back up to 25-30bbs. I kept the pressure on the average sized stacks and my favored hands held up against the shorties.

Next thing I knew, we were talking chop with 14 players left. It would be about $4,000 per player. It literally took 45 minutes to negotiate a chop, so finally with 12 players left, we decided to give the 3 chip leaders $5569 each and the rest of the field $4902. I was 3rd in chips at the time so got the bigger end of the chop. I was thinking about the first prize: $18,000, but even as one of 3 chip leaders, I only had 11 bb's. Overall, I was happy with my payout for a $200 tournament.

I wish I could find more tournaments like that one in Saint Louis. I guess I just have to wait until next year. If you are going to be in Vegas during the WSOP, you should definitely check out the deepstack tournaments. I thought the RIO was much softer than the Venetian, but the Venetian had much better payouts.

Oh, and don't forget the tournaments at O'Shea's. They are great for drunk play. I played 3 of them while there this past weekend and chopped for 1st in 2 of the 3. $45 buy in usually gets you a $300 payout if you chop the final 3 spots. They run them almost every 2 hours every day. You can usually find some very loose play in the 12am and 2am tournaments. So fun!

Hope you run well. Stay patient. . .