ok ok this is my first time in Vegas u know...
Right 1st deepstack tourney of our trip...12K starting 40 minute clock ! wonderful stuff wot more could you ask for..
settled in nicely playing well even though i had a surfer dude next to me wearing a baseball cap with ship it ! written on it...well it was the most elegant piece of his attire as it looked like hed just fallen off his surfboard..
To be fair he wasnt a bad player and after a couple of hours he and i were the the two chip leaders of the table on about 22k...id made a couple of nice plays especially a pair of sixes against surfer dude who obv didnt want to go against me deep...but i sold the idea of a turned flush and took him off the best hand.
As you would expect in a field of some 340 runners i come 5000 miles and still end up on the same table as Celtic.
What follows may not be for people of a nervous disposition as we are about to impart some of the most horrendous poker play ever witnessed.
First Celtic got rearended by a woman who for some reason check called out of position with A 10 on a queen high board and then turned and rivered an ace and ten.
Then we saw a old american guy move allin for 16k more into a 2k pot.....yes i did say 16k into 2k with middle set muttering something about a flush draw...it was so funny u had to scrape mine and celtics chin off the cloth.
But then the most quality piece of play...to raise and a reraise old man river calls with A Q and the on a K Q 5 flop calls a check re raise allin from 2 other players for 15k !!!! OMG and he still looked a little disappointed he was behind...priceless
I also saw with the blinds at 200-400 a woman call off 16k to an allin reraise with AQ ?? I mean cmon people this is a 2 day tournament and she was in for like 700 chips.
Ah well each to their own...anyway i managed to lose a lump by making a monumental 3rd raise straight into a pair of aces and then had surfer boy crack my kings with J 8 o/s when he four flushed ...sigh..but allin all was happy with the way i played and on to the next one.
Day2 saw the same comp and similar runners.. Celtic and I fell out of bed at tourney start time after a heavy night on the cash...we both got ironed out by a man who could not miss..when i tell u this guy had 3 lots of quads and took a pair of aces willingly into 7 man limped pot and still won u know its not ur night.
So Celtic and I arrive at the Comp Hellmuth like l8 and settle in.I was sat next to a girl from the Uk called Donna who said she used to help run the gutshot..nice girl and n ot a bad player...Trouble is I was so wrecked i couldnt actually see the cards properly and had 2 have a red bull and 2 coffees b4 i could focus..fortunatly i played 2 hands in 2 hours and had a reputation of Gibralta which allowed me to make some slick moves including a 3rd raise with 4 high.
Once again I get up 2 about 22k and get moved to a table with some heavy stacks and decent players.My chips dwindle down to about 12k as im constantly reraised or moved in . Finally I get some lunatic american straight out of American Chopper go to war with A10 v my AK....inevitably he draws out on me and im left with 575 chips with the blinds 400 800 100 ante....Now that my friends is a sticky spot..
Queue the music and Steve Mqueen jumping over barbed wire......I must admit I was pissed off with American chopper..it was such an awful move and I was steaming..and announced to the table ' I was allin with the Ump blind ' .My American opponents all looked suitably puzzled as ' ump ' is obviousley not in their vocabualry...only Donna who had moved tables with me understood and was wetting herself down the other end of the table.
Any way 3 times i moved in blind and all 3 times i drew out once with 6 3 o/s v A Q......after that i moved allin 4 times in a row and no one dare call me..god this was easy..y didnt i just do this before...
Finally I slow down and discover I have over 12K.Was this about to b the comebacks of all comebacks..
Sadly not i dribbled a bit and then pushed into donna's 8 8 with the mighty K 4 ...but it wasnt good to on an 8 2 2 flop.
So today we move over to Caesars Palace for the $330 deepstack...12.5K and a 50 minute clock.
Ok some more vegas insights......Caesars Palace is bloody massive !
It has a shopping mall inside it the size of Lakeside !!!..Its crazy and vast, sprinkled with massive monuments to ancient Rome every hundred yards and never ending avenues spidering off in to the distance full of shops selling things with no price tags on...thats when u know u cant afford it..I even see Caesar himself at one point with full Roman guard shouting 'Hail Caesar! ' moving through the casino.
You got to hand it to the yanks..G Casino Luton will never seem the same again.
Also worth a mention are the casino waitresses and their attire.It would seem the waitress jobs are very sought after and lucrative with some girls reported to make a 100K a year..however the waitresses have a very strong union and the casinos cannot sack a waitress if her figure and looks start to go...now people the outfits are best described as skimpy at best and a lot of the girls in the Venetian ( as it is a relatively new casino ) are young pretty girls with legs in the sky somewhere...however going over to Caesars the difference can be seen as the casino is much older and still carry waitresses from a day gone by...oh dear i kid u not they had one woman there must have been 60 if she was a day in a white mini skirt right at the breakfast line her face painted like a shanty down hooker..it was frightening...nearly as scary as the one with the figure of a roly poly..best estimates was she was 18 stone...once again in a white mini skirt and jacket squawking 'anyone for beverages, cocktails,club sandwiches '.......it was enough to make u not eat again...
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Anyway Caesars deepstack..get off to another good start and my table has one good young player with chips but his half way round the table and i have 4 weak passive players to my left just waiting to be taken advantage of.
Also on my table are grandpa and grandma Jo from middle America.She was so funny she played 3 hands in 3 hours...2 allins and a massive reraise.Talk about tight...but the most unsettling thing about her was she was wearing a hat that said ' Hilton Head ' on it...I just hoped it wasnt her hotel job description . Anyway my passive little lambs were soon gobbled up before i had much chance to pillage and were replaced with big stacks handled by mean hombres..I then went totally card dead..made 2 minor moves and was completely crushed by the turn by a table bully.....chips dwindled and antes rose and I was forced allin twice when folded to me..( once blind ) just to try and survive.
Finally I got moved to a much softer table and the rampage began starting with calling an allin from a guy who resembled the dali Lama...and was surprised to find my K 6 in such good shape against his shortie push with 10 J.Anyhow my rivered house was slight overkill and so the rampage began with blinds and antes rising I began moving allin again and soon had avrage 30K chips...
We reached dinner break with about 120 left from a starting field of 633 ( apparently the 2nd biggest field ever to start at Caesars ) and I decided to go back to the Venetian for my shades as things were getting serious and there was 50 K on the line and I was sure from previous in the day I was giving off a tell.
During the dinner break I discovered 2 things..how to get lost in Caeasars for the aforementioned 20 minutes and the great new game in Vegas...its called crossing Las Vegas Boulevard or 'The Strip ' as its more commonly known.
This main road through Las Vegas is 10 lanes wide and i paced it roughly 145 feet wide....now you begin crossing the road when the little light of a hand appears and criss crossing traffic stops...so off i set ahead of the pack across the street ..im not even half way across when a big red sign on the other side of the street starts flashing manically and counting down from 15 telling me how many seconds I have left to live...
Bloody Hell !!!! im fairly light on my toes and im leading and i virtually have to double my speed to get across in time..pity the laggers...it was like a bizarre game of frogger...
Any way back to the comp and i finally bust in 90th AK v the Rockets...10and a half hours and still 25 shy of the money...now thats tough..who said this poker was easy...Anyway back tmmr for another shot...u gotta love Vegas.
Breaking news our very own Chompy just returned from the Rio distraught as he busted out of the 2K WSOP Event in 22nd as he got raped in a pot that would have given him the chip lead and a real shot..unlucky m8...his luck was really out as none of the rest of us wanted to join him to drown his sorrows in the bum of the nearest lapdancer..now thats really kicking a man when his down..
Unlucky Graeme keep plugging away...
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