Road to Recovery

- I ended up cashing in the Tournament. 38th place $802. I won some pots, but never got the big double up that you need to go deep. Towards the end of Level 22 (12k/24k/3k), I raised to 60k with KJ on the Button. The BB goes All-In, and has my small stack crushed. I'm fairly certain that he's pushing back with a real hand. I could fold, but that would leave me with 180k, or just over 7 BB. The Antes and Blinds are extremely high, and we're near the end of this Level. They paid 64 spots, with small pay jumps every 9 or 10 spots. There was another pay jump of $90 ($891) in a few spots, but the $1k payouts didn't come until there are 27 players left. So I decided that in order to go deep, it's time to gamble. I shipped it All-In, and the BB turned over AK. The board ran out 8-high, and head over to the Cage to collect my $802.

- On the Cash game front, I played some $3/$6 for two hours before the Tournament restarted. I won $100. In the evening, I played $1/$3 for a while, and was down $370. They opened up a $5/$10 Omaha-8 w/Kill table, so I went over there. I played about three hours, and then I stared to hit "The Wall" about 1 AM. I left the table up $135.

Also, throughout the day, I played various session of Blackjack, both the Video machine and Live with some CPMGers before they headed home. All the session combined for -$25.

- Because of coming back for Day 2 of the Tournament, and the giant hole I dug on Wednesday, I never did play in a satellite for the WPT Main Event. It also seems that nobody else was playing the satellites either. Every Mega-Satellite they ran today gave away only one or two seats. The $270 gave away one seat for every 40 player. They only got around 60. There was a $530 at Midnight (1 for every 20). A buddy for one of the players at my table signed up for this one at 11:40, and he was Entrant #1.

This may set the record for the smallest WPT field ever. Hollywood has done a crappy job of running Satellites. They should have been running a Mega for the Main Event every night. Instead, they were running Megas for the next day's tournament. Why do you need to run a Mega-Satellite for a $340 tournament? That's a Buy-In for the $1/$3 game.

$10k is a lot of money in this part of the country. The biggest regular Cash game is $2/$5 NLHE and $1/$3/$5 PLO, with occasionally a $5/$10 NLHE on weekends. Even with the Pros coming into town last night, the only Big game was a $5/$10 NLHE table that was barely kept full, and was playing 6-handed after Midnight.

- Speaking of Pros, I was standing in line at the Cage right behind some tall dude that was taking forever. As it turns out, it was Erik Seidel buying in to the Main Event. Kathy Liebert was at the next window. Bryan "Devo" Devonshire was playing in the $5/$10 game, and Ron Rose was playing $1/$3. Other sightings included Hoyt Corkins, Greg "FBT" Mueller, Andrew Lichtenberger, JJ Liu, and Alan "Chainsaw" Kessler.

- I've decide to check-out today, play some more Cash today, and head home. I'm not sure exactly what time I will leave town. It will probably depends on how many draws and sets I can hit. With my success of the last two days, I could actually break into Profit for this trip with a good day today.

- This will probably be the last Blog entry about this trip, unless something news worthy happens today. I've been posting for about ten straight days, and I'm a little Blogged out. I do have a bunch of Hands Of The Day that I will be posting over the next few weeks, as well as a Review of the Hollywood Casino.