WSOP Main Event - Day 1

Wow, that had to be the most stressful 15 hours of my life. The short story is that
I survived Day 1, in fact ended it with 61k in chips after being down a low watermark of 4k. 61k is probably around the top ten in chip counts -- far better than I ever expected! I now have two days off to recover until I have to play Day 2, very excited!

Here are some photos and more details

According to cardplayer, I'm currently 26th out of 856 for my day, which is the top 3%. There are 4 days so extrapolating means on Day 2 I should be around about 52nd out of 1712 which is obviously a great spot.

Great Timing...

Well, I finally got sick over here. Constantly switching from air conditioned
comfort to the overwhelming outside temperature of Las Vegas has given me a sore throat and stuffy sinuses, a great condition to be in when my Day 1 of the main event starts tomorrow. I will see if I can defer my starting day, but I'm not hopeful -- will just have to try and get better by then.

Not much to report...

It's been a while, sorry there isn't much to tell, I've played two of the smaller
tournaments with little result. The first was a Limit Hold'em shootout, which I have no idea why I played, I guess boredom -- it was seriously torture, every hand I made got run down, but I suppose that's limit. Today I played a smaller No Limit event, but the starting stacks are a little bit small and force you to play tight early on. I managed to double up in the first hour or so, but then I got stuck in a couple of situations that quickly saw me get short stacked. So I'm at 3000, blinds 50/100 -- a short stack of about 450 moves all in front of me and I look down at pocket sevens, I decide to call but possibly could have mucked, everyone else folds and he flips AQ, he of course hits his queen on the flop and I'm back down to 2500. I lose about 350 the following round from the blinds and a failed preflop min-raise which was re-raised, back to 2150.

I'm UTG+1 and UTG makes it 450 to go, half his stack. I make it 900 to put him all in with TT, now UTG+3 decides to shove all his chips in, he had me covered. This guy had recently moved to the table with 3300 in chips and I hadn't seen him get involved, I can assume that he's better than average since he's chipped up -- after an early raise and a structure raise his move means I'm facing JJ,QQ,KK,AA or AK. At best I'm 53% favourite otherwise I have two outs. Anyway, there was 450+900+900+1250 (3500) in the pot and it was costing me 1250 to call, but I was calling for my tournament life and I was pretty convinced he had an overpair, this giving me an insufficient price. Anyway, since the players at my table were so bad, I decided that I could give myself a chance if I folded and tried to rebuild -- the latter part of the plan didn't really work out and I busted some time after. He took me aside afterwards and told me that he had AK of diamonds, doh.

So, that's the only tournament news. I don't really like Vegas much from what I've seen, it seems a pretty empty, soulless place. I am looking forward to Joe getting here so we can get out and do some non-poker related stuff like shopping, swimming and some sightseeing.

Hope you're all doing well.

Steaming..

I'm so exhausted right now, the last 24 hours have basically been a nightmare. The first leg from Sydney to LA was massively overbooked, thankfully I got an aisle seat -- unfortunately the side of me that wasn't an aisle, but a seat, contained a fairly large man who took up not only his seat but about 15% of mine (not the first time this has happened to me) and the guy on the other side of him. I was in an awkward position for thirteen hours or so and arrived in LA utterly drained. After hanging around for two hours at LAX waiting for my flight to LV to board, we finally got everyone on and ready to go. "This is the captain speaking ... ", uh oh, you know what's coming can't be good. We stay on the plane for an hour while they investigate an issue with the brakes on one of the sets of wheels, it takes them an hour to come to the conclusion that we all have to get off the plane and wait for another 2 hours. TILT! Anyway, after a few other incredibly frustrating experiences (the hotel girl who checked me in wrote down the wrong room on the tenth floor, so I dragged my luggage up, then down, then up again before the issue was resolved) I finally entered the bliss of a hotel room. Now, I'm just chilling and trying to recover, I might just have an early night and start over tomorrow. I hope today contained all the bad beats I'll be receiving on this trip, more to come....

Leaving Las Vegas...

Quite the opposite actually, tomorrow afternoon I head off to Las Vegas to make my run at the biggest poker event of the year, the World Series. I've already won my entry into the main event, which frankly is the only way I can see myself playing it -- forking over $10,000 USD would just be too painful to play in a field of players that includes the best players in the world, ALL of them. I'll be trying to keep my expectations realistic, Vegas is designed to make people have brain explosions and eventually go broke -- I'm just hoping to play good poker and make correct decisions, if that means going really deep, so be it, statistically however it just isn't likely, you need to be lucky AND good to win the main event. The slow structure is definitely a huge advantage to the more skilled players, I just haven't figured out if it's going to help me or not. :)

My `Day 1' doesn't start until the 29th July, I'm going to spend a week just settling in and playing some of the less expensive tournaments if only to warm up and adjust to the huge fields.

I'll try to update this daily with anything of interest and my experiences along the way.