“Wynn Poker Classic, Baby!”
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - HollywoodDave
I’m back in LA after a week in the Vegas desert. This time around I was there to play in the first few events of the Wynn Poker Classic, and finally broke my 2009 live tourney cash cherry. I wanted it to be at LAPC but i’ll settle for LV instead…
The first event at the Wynn was a no limit holdem tourney that despite the low buy in ($545) was chopped up into a Day 1A and 1B. In total almost 500 players came out, making first place over 60 grand. Nice!!
After starting off pretty quickly outta the gate, doubling up and never looking back, eventually the field caught up and surpassed me in the later levels of the first day of play. Even though it was a deepstack event (10k starting chips!!), there was the standard jumping of levels typical to lower buy-in event and after passing out a few double-ups (my JJ running in to AA, as well as losing coinflips to shortstacks with 55 two different times) I found myself on life support late in the day.
But i kept grinding and picking my spots, and finally won a coinflip with jacks to get somewhat healthy, then in a totally sweet hand got it all in against the table chipleader with AK vs his AJ to become a monster chip stack! As we were near the end of the day, I was able to use my newfound chip powers to bully the shorter stacks into becoming one of the top 5 stacks left in action as play concluded for Day 1A.
After combining with Day 1B, 50 players in total returned for Day 2 (45 got paid). Unfortunately i lost a couple early decisions against short stacks and found myself still well ahead of chip average awhile later in what would be my final pot. After raising in late position with Q7 sooooooted, I got the reluctant call from the big blind to see a rainbow 789 flop. I c-bet 65% of the pot only to get min-raised by the BB! Kinda annoying, as i almost always consider a minraise just a weak play made to act stronger than one actually is… but before i made any moves i did the stare down to make sure i wasn’t running into a flopped straight.
Man oh man, this kid was staring right at me, challenging me to call! Totally frozen, looking right at me — and i knew for a fact he was sitting on something like A8 or K9 rather than the straight or open-ender he was representing. So i called the minraise with the worse hand #1 cuz his bet didn’t price me out and #2 cuz i knew i could probably take the pot away from him later in the hand when i convinced him i had more of the pot than he did.
Well, the perfect card hit on the turn — a beautiful fucking 6, putting the 4-straight on the board, and as soon as he saw it he gave me another awesome tell. Checked nervously but then did the thing where as i reached down towards my chips, involuntarily reached down towards his own stack as if to say ‘watch out, i have it and i’ll call you!’ Well that was that, he was definitely sitting on a middle pair only and i knew i could bluff here. So i stuck in the rest of my stack convinced I could take the pot away from him….
Ooops. The good news is, i was 100% dead on with my read. He only had the A8. Bad news is, he still made the impossible call despite the 6789 on the board… god bless bad players who can’t lay down a pair, no matter what. Only in this situation he was actually good and i was on the rail in 29th place, muttering and cursing his call and the fact that my 62 grand had somehow been replaced with 900 measly dollars instead. Oh well. Tomorrow was another day and another tourney…
…which turned out to be a $545 Omaha hi-lo event. Awesome! One of my favorite events… and once again i got off to a killer start, turning my 10k starting stack into 45k by the dinner break (with a 15k chip average!). Sushi for dinner and back to watch myself go not only completely card dead for hours, but the few hands i DID had were cracked ever single time when my draws either didn’t get there, or their draws did. Ugh. Blinds shot up to 2k/4k by the end of the nite and it was only a matter of time before i was busto once again.
So hey, after doing so well in online tourneys this year, at least i added a live tourney cash. Spent most of the rest of my time playing Omaha at the Wynn and Stud at the Bellagio… not a bad life. But now I’m back in LA and back to playing online constantly on UB, so come holla… still got my 10-step prop bet with Annie so hopefully this week i will keep the fire on as I close in on that 12k WSOP prize package starting only from 10 cents!
Rock on –
-hd.
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Tags: Annie Duke, LAPC, Wynn Poker Classic
