It Was A Good 24 Hours

Grand Sierra is currently running it's quarterly tournament series, Summer Pot Of Gold. I went up there on Sunday to sign-up for whatever tournament was running at noon. It ended up being a $240 NLHE tourney with a $15k guarantee (that's 75 players) They had no problem with the guarantee, as they had 96 runners with re-entries.

It wasn't planning on doing any blogging for this one, either a Live Blog or a Running Log. I got off to a slow start, and I was down to 5100 at the first break. (10k starting stack). However, I doubled up twice in the first orbit back from break, and got to just over 20k. First one was me raising with ATo, and shoving on the T-high Flop. The other player didn't believe me, and called with Bottom Pair. The next double-up was with a Set of Tens vs Nut Flush Draw on the Flop.

After that, I never looked back. I had good table draws, good cards, and good timing when I made the occasional move. When we got to Dinner Break. there were 20 players left, and I had a Top 3 stack of 96k.

Since I wasn't doing any blogging, I decided to use my Twitter account to document the rest of my tournament. You can check it out for the details, as I'm not gonna repeat them here.

The short story is we got down to three players, and the deal making commenced. It was 12:30 am, and we were in the 5k/10k/1k level. I was Chip Leader with 382k. The others were a 40's guy with 357k, and a Kid with 257k.

At first, we did ICM calculation, which was number of chips equals amount of money. I got around $4325. The 40's guy got around $4200, and the Kid got around $3725. The Kid didn't like this deal, and would rather play it out. Even though he would have gotten about $175 less than 2nd, and more than $1k than 3rd, I wasn't surprised that he didn't want to deal. He's a "Pro", and he would rather play it out rather than lock up equity. I understand what he's thinking. I normally wouldn't care either way, as I certainly think I'm good enough to win this.

The key word in that last sentence was "normally". That's because it's 12:30am, and I have to work at 8am. I want to make a deal, and get out of here. I'm 42 yrs old, and I can no longer stay up until 3am, and then go deliver mail in 95 degree heat all day.

The Kid was negotiating from a position of strength, and I was in a position of weakness. As the discussion was starting to break down, I suggested that we just do an even chop, and that was eventually agreed by everyone. Yes, I did give up equity, but I wasn't gonna stay here another hour or two just because of a couple of hundred dollars.

I collected $4050 after the Dealer's Tip, which is my largest tournament score so far.

I had another tourney score on Thursday. Peppermill changed their bounty tournament by raising the buy-in from $65 to $85, giving out $20 bounties, and adding $400 to the prize pool. It got a big crowd of 54 players. I finished in 2nd place (no deal) with five bounties for $645, which is a sweet score for a Reno donkament.

I never did an official total for Las Vegas losses last month, mostly because I really don't want to know. Quick math in my head tells me that the grand total is a little over the $5k mark.

These two scores (+$4370) means there is actually a chance that I might break even for June & July, and that is simply amazing. I thought it would take all year to grind out of that big hole.

The other great thing that happened to me over those 24 hours has nothing to do with Poker. I got a call on Monday morning from my old trailer park in Ohio, as I still own my luxurious double-wide. I drastically lowered the price on my trailer to get rid of it, and someone made a cash offer. I won't get back anything close to what I paid for the trailer, but I don't care. It is costing me a little over $5k a year, including lot rent, taxes, lawn mowing, and keeping the electricity on. Law Of Diminishing Returns says there is a point where it just not worth the possible pay-off to keep the trailer, and I'm way past that point.

I figure I'll be getting a check for around $3000 in a few weeks, and that will go towards a down payment on my first house, which I'm planning on buying sometime this year.