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There are thousand of poker players at the WSOP so it's amazing that you bump into so many familiar faces from DTD & elsewhere back home.

No sooner had I sat down than along came Raggy & Martin Frey, who soon had a kalooki school on the go. Not for me thank you, they'd skin me alive.

Next up, today, was the $1,000 WSOP Seniors NLH. I think it was just my third NLH WSOP event & the score prior to today was 1 cash, all the way back in 2005, when I ran 31st of about 800 for just over $4,000. Attempt 2 was last year I think & I had a dismal time. All my other WSOP's have been Omaha variants.

I should add that Phil Quayle put me in that 2005 thing on behalf of Wm Hill who, via him, had employed me for Poker 425, he was in charge of Wm Hill poker at the time. One day I'll tell the story of how Phil changed my life 21 years ago in so many ways, in fact, Julian Thew is part of the same story & it was probably down to him that Phil signed me up. That's a whole other story for another day, but if I'd not met Phil, life would have been very different. 20 years of work & play in the Poker business for starters, all down to a combo of Phil & Thewy.

That aside, there's nothing quite like playing a WSOP, & I'm blessed to be able to do so. You need a combination of factors to do it - financial, (aided in my case by a most generous & understanding significant staker), domestic arrangements - I'm single with no family, Gill is low maintenance & supports whatever I do - & health, where I've started to accumulate a few problems which threatened, at one point earlier this year to derail everything, but the NHS did a great job.

All set then, & whatever happens I planned to enjoy it.

10am start, but with such a huge field (3,529 entries today!) I decided to arrive nice & early, just after 8am, then find a nice quiet corner to sit & read my newspapers.

As you probably know, the WSOP are staged in adjacent casinos, Paris & Horseshoe, though the playing areas are quite close, maybe 200 yards apart. Halfway, there's a bar with nice comfy padded chairs, so I settled down there with my newspapers & a $8.50 Starby.

After all that scene-setting, I don't have too much to report about the Tournament.

We started with 30,000, & at the first break I had 37,200, 2nd break 54,500, 3rd break 83,000 (blinds now 2k-2k/1k) before progressing further to briefly rise above 100,000.

After Danny, to my immediate left, departed, I was badly handcuffed in the PLO orbits by a really good PLO lad who FT'd for 6 figures in a WSOP $5k PLO a fortnight ago, & he took Danny's seat. I just could not handle him in PLO, he raised & re-raised relentlessly and had well over 300,000 which was triple average at the time. In a way, a delight to watch, he always knew where he was in a hand, & played what were, to me, some weird combos & had great PLO imagination, which I lack. If I had found the right PLO hand I'd have gone to war with him happily, but I didn't.  So I concentrated on the Big O orbits once he started getting all aggro, I know where I am in a hand much better in Big O.

But after proudly topping 100,000 I'm not sure I won another hand.

I did just about smell the money, but was getting short so went for a Big O flip (A-2-7-J-Q) only to run into our man who flopped trip Kings v me on a high only board (pre-flop a flip) & that was that, 16 places paid & I was going home 24th of 103. Nothing to be proud of or ashamed of. 

Decent effort, but continues the trend of deep but not deep enough.

Very enjoyable though, tempered only by digging my 2026 Vegas hole $400 deeper. At least I swerved a rebuy. Gotta take the positives...

By a remarkable coincidence I was seated next to a British chap, Danny Newman.

His Hendon has cashes dating back to around 1992, with results all over the UK including the long-defunct Rainbow, London, Vegas, Paris, I.O.M., and a handful of WSOP cashes including an 8th place in a $3000 Omaha 8 or Better WSOP affair no less than 28 years ago.

https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=568


The weird thing is I've never once seen him in the UK, but see him every year here. He has family here but he still lives in the UK.

Note the happy Dealer too. It's that kind of place.

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The Golden Nugget cardroom really is one of THE most pleasant cardrooms I've ever been in. Not as well-appointed or furnished as, say, DTD, Venetian, Wynn, the (now closed) Aviation in Paris or some of the Grosvenors, admittedly, but everything about it is near perfect.

Big high ceiling (in USA-speak it's technically a ballroom), perfect light levels (it seems like natural light but it's not), loads of space, it's just a relaxed & comfy room to play in. I think it's just the ambience created by the high ceiling & wonderful light levels.

It just relaxes you to play in there.

There was a Seniors Tournament in progress, & I struggled to recognize anyone with the obvious exception of Greg Raymer, who had quite a bunch of chips when I saw him.

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Fremont Street - for better or worse - is like no other place I've been, so I sat in the open-air Starbuck's enclosure with my $8.72 coffee & watched the Fremont St world go by for an hour.

The "new" Circa Casino (surprisingly, it's approaching it's 6th birthday) has completely changed the Glitter Gulch end, but apart from that & the zipline which whizzes up & down overhead carrying lunatics, everything else is much the same.

So, first up, the $400 Big O/5 Card PLO at Golden Nugget.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a combo before & I was looking forward to it immensely. I adore Big O, and it's a great poker regret that it's almost impossible to find a Big O tournament in the UK. I have a UK PLO Tournament Spreadsheet (all Omaha variants) which a gentleman on this thread kindly sent me a while back, & it's completely devoid of Big O. Preferably not mixed with PLO, but I'd take it.

I'd not been Downtown so far this trip so I arrived a couple of hours early & had a mooch, before buying a Starby. Medium Size, & it set a record price for a medium latte....

$8.72? Yikes.

Apologies for the radio silence to those who may marginally enjoy a daily morning squeeze from Vegas.

As Northcote Parkinson famously said, "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" although in my case we need to replace "work" with "leisure" because I've not done a jot of work in just over a year.