WSOP Recap (and massive complaining)

First of all, thanks to Jen for the updates that she posted to the blog. Not surprisingly I wasn't in the mood to rehash the details of my defeats right after they happened.


If I had to sum up my trip to Vegas in one brief phrase it would be: IT SUCKED! In the past 6 years I've made roughly 15 trips to Vegas, 10 gambling trips to Reno or Lake Tahoe, and 2 trips to Atlantic City. I have NEVER had worse luck. I've had trips where I lost more money on the whole, but I've never lost so much betting so little.


When it comes to gambling on stupid casino games I am a realist. I know in the long run I am going to lose. In fact I can probably tell you more about the math of exactly how much I can expect to lose over a given period of time with a given bet size than anyone you know. I've decided the entertainment value is worth more than cost, but man I have never had a trip where I've been so universally screwed. Not once in the 5 days that I was in Vegas did I leave any table with more than I started with. No matter how bad things are going, you should run into a little streak of good or even average luck somewhere.



I'll try not to bore you too much with the details, but I will point out a few of the low lights. The game of choice for our group is Pai Gow Poker. I won't explain too much about it, but the important point is you're playing against the dealer and it's a very slow game (speed is your enemy in the casino) with a small house edge. In this game 28.61% of the hands the player will win, 29.91% of the hands the house will win and 41.48% of the hands will be a push (or a tie) and no money changes hands.



When we made it to our hotel (The MGM) around midnight my good friend Chrissy and I immediately sat down at the Pai Gow table each with $500 and each betting $25 a hand. By 2:30 we were both down to the felt. At a Pai Gow table you get dealt 25-30 hands an hour so at most we saw 75 hands. If you played an infinite number of groups of 75 hands on average you'd lose 1.84 betting units. Yet somehow we managed to both lose 20 betting units (well over 10 times the expectation) in that time (it's not surprising that we shared the same fate since while we each have our own hand we're both playing against the same dealer hand). This was pretty extraordinary.

I lost $300 playing at a $5 craps table in about 45 minutes. Enough said.


In another Pai Gow session at The Mandalay Bay I sat down and immediately lost 6 hands in a row with no wins and no ties. The chance of losing 6 in a row like that are 1 in 1397.



Now that I've got that out of the way I can talk about the poker aspect of the trip. I got to Vegas late Thursday and my plan was to head to the Rio on Friday to sign up for my first tournament which wouldn't start until Saturday at noon. I knew from past experience that the line to register for tournaments is crazy in the hour or two before the event and I wanted to bypass that entirely.



After that my plan was to head to Treasure Island to meet with the folks from pokerstars. Since I paid for one of my entries with FPP's I had to sign a contract and pick up a load of Pokerstars gear which I was supposed to wear during the tournament. In order to ensure that I did what they wanted, pokerstars only gave me 85% of my buy in initially and once I proved that I actually played or was going to play in the event (by showing them by nonrefundable tournament entry card with my name and the event # on it) they gave me the rest.



Unfortunately when I made it to the Rio, I discovered a line so long that looked like they were holding American Idol auditions inside. Some people were sitting in chairs that they'd found someplace which to me meant that not only was the line crazy long, but it was also slow. The slowness made no sense to me since last year the longest I had to wait to sign up for an event was about 20 minutes and even then the line was moving quickly. I decided that my best bet was to wait until the middle of the night or early the next morning and come back. I had my fingers crossed that there was some reason other than massive incompetence for the delay and whatever it was would get resolved quickly.



So I went on with my general misfortune had a bunch of drinks and went to sleep by midnight. At 3:30, POW! I was wide awake. So I decided to head over to the Rio, sort out my business and then head back to the MGM for some more sleep. When I got there I saw that while the line was shorter, it was still fairly substantial. I went to the front of the line and asked one of the guys standing there how long he'd been in line. Immediately a half dozen people chimed in, said that it had been three hours and talked about how pissed they all were. To make it worse one of registration windows had just closed leaving only 4 left, meaning it could take even longer to make it through the line. If it had been my first year at the WSOP I would have manned up and waited, but for my 14th career event it wasn't worth it.

The next day (Saturday) I decided I would just have to brave the line and sign up. While the rest of the gang went to dinner I headed off to the Rio to wait for hours in a slow moving line. When I walked in the door and looked down the loooooong hallway to where the end of the line should have been I didn't see anything. So far so good. I turned a corner and still didn't see anything. Great! Then I walked into the tournament area and right up to the cage where there were THREE OPEN WINDOWS with people waiting to sign me up! It was like a Christmas miracle. After planning on skipping dinner I made it back to The Mandalay Bay where I'd just been 20 minutes earlier and sat down at dinner before anyone had even ordered.


I'd had a couple of snifters of Grand Mariner starting about 3 in the afternoon so after dinner I was ready to call it a night. We all made it back to the MGM and while most of the group hit the tables I watched a movie in my room by 10 p.m and asleep a little after midnight.

The next day I got up started my parade of visiting 5 hotels in 7 hours, 4 of them with my luggage in tow. I left the MGM (#1) a little before 11 (While waiting in the cab line I did see a guy who I can only assume was crazy rich or who just won a ton of money or both get into the back of a shiny new Maybach and tip the bell hop $100 for putting his two bags in the trunk). I made a brief stop at The Treasure Island (#2) to meet with the pokerstars people who gave me a very nice set of two shirts, a hat and a jacket which went directly into my suitcase where they remain at this very moment. I got a splash of VIP treatment when one of the people in the makeshift office told me that because I was a P0kerstars Supernova if I wanted to eat at a particular restaurant in the Rio anytime during the WSOP they she would make reservations for me or if I was in a hurry I could call her ahead of time and she'd order me whatever I wanted ahead of time.

Then I hauled my ass (and my suitcase) over to the Rio (#3) where I dropped my stuff off in my friend Matt's room. The I actually played in a poker tournament. Crazy I know. Interestingly enough the poker tournament was totally uninteresting. I think Jen did a nice job of summing it up. I was at a great table with a bunch of week players for about 2 hours where I ran my stack up to about 5,000 after starting with 3,000. Then I got moved to a new table with better players and ran into two tough spots.

On the first hand that led to my demise I had 4,500 chips with blinds of 75/150. Two players called the 150 chip big blind, I looked down at KK and raised to 600. To my surprise the first player who just called the big blind reraised all in to 1,800. Of course I called and was not please to see that my opponent had the only hand I was worried about - AA. I lost that hand and was back under where I started.

I dribbled away chips for a while and found myself with about 1,500 on the button with blinds of 100/200 when the following hand came up. The first player to act, who was probably the worst at the table made it 600 to go. The next player to act who was a very tight player immediately went all in for about 2,000. I could tell he really liked his hand, but when I looked down at QQ I knew I couldn't throw it away when I had a stack that was about 1/4th of average. The player in the small blind who had been left with around 300 chips after losing the previous hand called and after about 60 seconds of thought the original raiser also called. The small blind turned over 99, the original raiser turned over K-10 and sadly the other player turned over AA. When the flop came with three spades I was left with only one card in the deck that could make me the best hand. Unfortunately a 4th spade came out on the turn and the player with K-10 made a flush with the K of spades and took the whole pot.

I trudged over to the tournament registration area, signed up for the next day's tournament and after getting my bags from Matt's room I left the Rio. After waiting in yet another cab line I headed to Harrah's (#4) and checked in to the room I'd be staying in for the next two nights. After a quick turn around I made about a 10 minute walk over to the Paris (#5) to play some more Pai Gow with my friends.

I'll pick up here in my next post (this one is getting crazy long!) which should be coming in two or three days (I'm very busy tomorrow).