WSOP '11: First Impressions

First, some good news...

I played at the Atlantis on Friday night. They spread their first ever $2/$3 NLHE / PLO game. I won $491 in 3.25 hours. The deck was very kind to me, and I could have won more except players started to avoid me. My only bad hand was his Straight vs my Flush Draw & Open-Ender to a better Straight. The Atlantis won't let us run it twice, and I missed my big Combo Draw. I only lost about $120 on the hand, so it was just a flesh wound. It feels good to leave Reno on a winning note.

The ride to Las Vegas was rather uneventful, which was a good thing. The most interesting part was I went over two hours without seeing a gas station, or much of any civilization. It's a good thing I drive a Prius. I also went through various dead zones for my cell phone reception. The longest was over 45 minutes.

I pulled on to the Strip, and headed straight to Caesars to sign up for tomorrow's $240 4pm Heads-Up tournament. It's a good thing that I went there first because I got the last spot in the 64 player tourney. Although, my receipt says I'm Entry Number 75. I'm not sure what that's about.

After checking in at the Rio and grabbing a quick bit to eat, I headed down the WSOP to check things out. Through listening to various poker podcasts over the last few years, I already had an idea of just how big this place was. But in reality, it's even bigger than you can imagine. The main room is the Pavilion. It's divided into four sections, with around 275 tables. This is used for Cash games, single table satellites, and WSOP events. Today, it was used for this weekend's $1000 event.

The other main room is the Amazon room, which has over 100 table in it. It is used for the three daily deepstacks, the Main TV stage, and other WSOP events. Today's events included a $1500 6-max, and a $1500 HORSE which was down to ten players, including Victor Ramdin, David 'ODB' Baker, and a couple of other players that looked familiar. I have also seen at least a dozen of other pros either walking around or sitting at a table.

Since the Caesars Corporation is so cheap, they are charging $13.95/day for Internet. I will get it for a day or two while I'm here, but most of the posts will be from my iPhone. That means no pictures, links, or other fancy stuff. I'll fill that stuff when I splurge for the Internet.

Anyways, enough typing. It's time to play some poker.