Matt at the Shooting Star

Every March Bay 101, the largest of the Bay Area cardrooms, hosts a World Poker Tour stop called "The Shooting Star." This tournament has a $10,000 buy in and 50 of world's best players (the "stars") have a $5,000 bounty on their heads. If you bust one of these players you istantly get $5,000 and a T-Shrit that says "I busted So and So."

Coming off his glory at in Reno, my good friend Matt Lessinger collected a pile of money from his usual backers and entered this event. On Day 1 he busted Layne Flack (Who I busted once in the WSOP! We own your ass Flack!) and picked up one $5,000 bounty. They started the day with 20,000 chips and by the end of the day he was among the chip leaders with 108,000.

Today is day 2 (there was actually a Day 1A and 1B) and they are down to 54 players from a starting field of something like 400. Matt just picked up another bounty meaning he's already got his buy in back. He's a little short of average with about 90,000 chips and the blinds will be 1,200/2,400 when he comes back.

The tournament pays 45 spots with the edge of the money being $12,500 and first place being just over $1,000,000. I have 3% and I'm thinking about all the things I could do with $30,000. I also have Jake on the hook for a trip to the Royal Hideaway (A resort in Mexico where my wife and I had our honeymoon) if Matt actually wins. He has 10% and said we should all go to celebrate and I somehow got him to agree to spring. So that's an added bonus.

You can follow the action on pokerpages.com or cardplayer.com if you are so inclined and I'll let you know what happened when it's over.

Shifting gears I'm going to quickly respond to my sister's comment on my last post. She wrote: "Considering your last post, does that mean that your goal when gambling in Reno or Vegas is to get as crazy as possible for the maximum fun factor?"

Gambling is always more fun (in my opinion) when you are with a lot of people and you are drinking and acting stupid. We all know that we're going to lose in the long run playing craps and Pai Gow and black jack. The goal is to lose as little as possible and have as much fun as possible. You would think that would mean betting the minimum and drinking the maximum, but everyone has an amount they can wager where the get a little excitement when they win, but it's not devestating when they lose. That amount is not the minimum for me. Since I make best just about every day the amount I need to bet to get any excitment at all is relatively high - about $25 a hand (or a spin or whatever) on most casino games. For some people that would seem insane. For E.B. who plays at least $100 a hand, that amount would be boring. Before I go on any gambling trip I have a certain amount of money with me and that's the absolute max that I would ever lose but I usually have a plan to "go big" and try to generate a ton of comps or "go small" and make sure I don't lose very much. Reno was a go small kind of trip.