Cory Albertson

I’m pretty tired, so gonna keep this kinda short.

I mentioned before that my Uncle is in town for his first live tournament. I thought it’d be a pretty good idea for him to get his feet wet in something other than the $1k WSOP event tomorrow, so we made our way to T.I. for their 7 pm ‘Head Hunters’ tournament, a $125 buy-in. I’ve played this tournament a few times before and really enjoy it. Despite the $25 vig, it’s very beatable. $50 of your buy-in goes to the prize pool and $50 is put on your head as a bounty. The field size is usually pretty small; tonight was bigger than normal with 39 entrants.

My Uncle and I were at the same starting table. He cracked my Aces in a hand where I paid him off on the river despite it being pretty obvious that he made his flush. After that, I re-raised him each of the next three times he opened a pot. From his perspective, you’d think I was probably playing ‘personal poker’ and picking on him because I was steaming from having Aces cracked. To his credit, he never fell for the bait which was good because each time I just so happened to have a huge hand (Aces, AK suited, and Queens). Every time I re-raised him I thought, “oh he’ll definitely spew to me here… I probably look so tilted in his eyes right now!” Haha… no dice. He folded every time.

The same thing happened last year in the WSOP against Ray Henson on day four. I re-raised Ray each of the first three times he opened the pot and each time I just so happened to have something really strong (Aces, and AK twice if I recall). He folded all three times, but it set him up to send his stack my way a few hands later when he flopped middle pair vs. my top pair.

Anyway, back to tonight. I made a raise on the button with Ten-Four suited. My Uncle flat-called from the small blind. The flop was King-Ten-Six. He checked and I bet enough to put him all-in. It was an overbet, but with the value of potentially getting a bounty, it makes sense to try to get people to play for their whole stack. He called me with Ace-King and I truly felt really bad when I hit a Four on the turn to bust him out. Something tells me he won’t be letting me forget about that hand at any upcoming family reunions.

Before he took off, I told him to make sure he re-raises that with that hand in the $1k event!

Okay I’m still tired and this entry isn’t getting any shorter. I’ll breeze by a bunch of fairly insignificant details to say that I took down the tournament (after starting the final table with just five big blinds!) First was $850 plus I had seven bounties, so I came away with a net of something like $1,100 which pays for my presumed washout in the $1k crapshoot tomorrow.

T.I. is a small, friendly poker room that tries to give their players a complete poker experience despite the stakes usually not being too large. As a part of that effort, you get your picture taken with all your chips and hole cards if you win an event:

Yes, I wore sunglasses in a $100 tournament, but it’s only partially because I’m a tool. The rest of the explanation is that they’re prescription lenses and a few days ago I lost my regular glasses forcing me to wear these anytime I need to do something that would otherwise involve straining my eyes (and thus triggering a headache). I’m hoping to have a LASIK-sized score at some point this summer.

All for now. The next entry will recap Day 1B of the $1k buy-in ‘Stimulus Special’ from my perspective. Thanks for reading.

Last night at the Rio, we were told Day 1A of the $1k ‘Stimulus’ event was sold out. At that time, I was reluctant to believe that. Last year, I registered for the first day of a two-day event and found out from some friends that they had been told earlier that day one was sold out. I figured this might be another such case of Harrah’s trying to balance out the two day ones. Despite contemplating coming back later to see if Day 1A was magically no longer sold out (so I could be free to play online on Sunday), I went ahead and registered for Day 1B on Sunday. It’s a good thing, too. I awoke to a text this morning from Dave Irish that the event completely sold out with 6,000 players!

I’m really glad we went to register last night rather than waiting until this morning. My Uncle flew all the way out here from Chicago primarily just to play in this event. I would have felt really bad if we had showed up to register this morning to be told we couldn’t play. I’m in the Miranda room at table 269 (or something) tomorrow.

Before going to bed last night, I had an itch that needed a scratching so I took a seat at a blackjack table at Bellagio. I escaped an $850 winner which afforded me a bit more of an easy time falling asleep than TwoGun probably had after dropping quite a bit at the craps table. This morning, however, he won back quite a bit and I took the blackjack tables for another quick $300 while we waited on hunger to overtake our need to gamble.

I’ve been to a lot of the buffets in Vegas, but one I had never been to prior to today was the Bellagio. It was already great before ever eating a bite of food; we circumnavigated the lunch crowd and got seated right away on a comp thanks to our degeneracy. Growing up, I always associated buffets as something that is sort of white trash. To me, a buffet was the $5.99 highly-processed meal you’d get at Old Country Buffet or Golden Corral. Vegas does buffets entirely different. Most of them cost between $15 and $35. The food quality and presentation puts the aforementioned feeding troughs to shame. Bellagio runs a great operation. My only disappointment was that they didn’t have any mac’n'cheese, but I had a hard time dwelling on that thanks to the pesto mashed potatoes.

I’m focused on trying to eat responsibly on this trip. It’s so tough to maintain any semblance of a disciplined workout schedule in this city that the best hedge you can make is to eat as healthy as possible. However, this is also really challenging since the food here is pretty good, options endless, and portions huge. I think the best play you make is to choose walking over taking a cab whenever reasonable and avoiding overeating. Yes, I know I probably sound like one of those adamantly anti-gay officials that get caught soliciting sex in an airport bathroom or something by talking about how much I enjoyed the Bellagio buffet one paragraph before pontificating on the importance of controlling portion size!

TwoGun and I made it to Vegas about an hour ago and I’m already down $800. We checked into the Bellagio about an hour before the Nuggets vs. Lakers tipoff, so I made my way over to a $50 minimum blackjack table. If you play perfectly, the house edge in that game is pretty small. I don’t have a problem doing a little intelligent gambling in the name of trying to land free hotel rooms at various MGM properties.

I was playing by myself for the first twenty minutes or so before this obnoxious guy and a couple of his friends sat down. Normally I’d be put off about not only no longer having the table to myself, but having to play with drunk, annoying guys to boot. However, this instance was a little unique. The loud guy pulled out four $5,000 chips and said “yellows please” (yellows = $1,000 apiece).

As far as I’m concerned, you can be as annoying as you want if you’re going to be playing two hands at a time of $2k per hand, which he did. The table actually got a bit of a crowd gathered around because he was shouting with joy everytime he won a hand. I talked to him a little bit. Apparently he’s from Iran and claims to be the best poker player in the world. He said he’d play me heads up for any stakes I wanted. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not, but I didn’t have enough energy (nor did I really even care) to inquire further.

After getting dusted off for 13 bets in that game, I’m back up in the room watching basketball now with TwoGun. We both have a pretty big rooting interest in the Nuggets in this series (he moreso than I). Anyway… hopefully they can force a game seven so as not to compound my nearly instant frustration after stepping off the plane in Vegas tonight!

My Uncle arrives in an hour or so. I’ll probably meet up with him after the game is over to head to the Rio and register for tomorrow’s $1k WSOP event. My mind isn’t really focused on poker right now, but I’m optimistic that will change once I sit down at the table tomorrow.