Cory Albertson

I cashed in the $2k, but shortly after we were in the money, got Ace-Queen all-in against Ace-Ten for a 45k pot. The Ten was in the door. That left me with 13k. A couple hands later, I shoved Ace-Four suited and the same guy who spiked the Ten on me woke up with Aces.

Fun game.

I just picked up a plane ticket to head home on Tuesday. I’m not sure if I’ll come back out between then and the Main Event, but I’d say odds are I won’t at this point. It will be sorta painful sitting at home for three weeks missing out on a lot of action, but I gotta feel pretty good about having come out here and taken a shot in 5-6 events even if it doesn’t work out. Whether or not I come back before the Main Event could change if I hit a nice score in my last few days here.

Right now the only tournament I’m fairly certain to play is the $2,500 six-handed event on Monday. Everything between now and then is up in the air. I might try to get in tomorrow’s $5k if I can sell off enough pieces of myself, but I’d say that’s pretty unlikely meaning I’ll play the Caesars or Venetian $550. Sunday I’ll either play online, the Caesars or Venetian $1k, or quite possibly nothing.

As for tonight, I’m going to take it easy, catch up on a little work, and maybe meet up with Seb from our poker forums later for something social.

Thanks for reading.

Today was a $2k buy-in at the WSOP. I’m going to bed with 40,400 chips (which is almost exactly average). There are about 240 players left down from a starting field of ~1,650. Due to this year’s improved structure, we’re not quite in the money yet. Only 171 places pay in this event which means something like 70 people are going to play two days of poker and have nothing to show for it.

On dinner break, I joined shaniac, Cory Carrol and Owen Crowe for a pretty decent meal at this Italian place. Our waiter had an interesting way of running up the bill on us. He basically hustled us a little bit and brought a couple of appetizers we didn’t technically order. He sort of just said, “I’ll bring you some calamari and some prosciutto,” and when we failed to object to this, another $40 or so had been tacked onto our bill. He also kept pushing this dish, I forget exactly what it was called, that Cory pulled the trigger on without realizing it was $40 (when most things on the menu were like $13). The bill for the four of us at this little shopping plaza Italian place was $180 and we didn’t even order wine! Alas, a $180 dinner bill isn’t something four poker players with spending problems are going to get their panties in a knot about.

They were enjoyable dinner company. Aside from the fact that it was nice to sit down for a real meal with other like minded people, which was only the second time on this trip I had been able to do that, I’ve never really spent any time around any of those guys, so there was a novelty factor in play that made their already-interesting personalities especially entertaining.

There’s nothing too spectacular to talk about regarding my assent from the 6k starting stack. The only time I was all-in was with Ace-King against pocket Jacks for a 23k pot after dinner. A few minutes before, I spent the rest of the break watching Phil Ivey win his sixth bracelet after man-handling the poor guy he was playing heads up in the no-limit 2-7 single draw event. Ivey certainly won more than the ~$95,000 for first based on prop bets he had on himself to win a bracelet.

Near the end of the day, I was at a pretty tough table. I was laughing with the guy on my immediate left that I think might have been Nam Le, but maybe not. Basically every pot was opened for a raise and many of those were three-bet. Just as soon as I was making fun of how hard it is to win a pot at this table, I raised with pocket Kings only to watch the six players behind me snap-fold.

Hopefully tomorrow’s table draw is a little easier. Looking around the room, there definitely had to be softer spots to be at. My table consisted almost entirely of young, aggressive players.

I wish I had more interesting details to share regarding today’s play, but there’s just not much to say. You mostly fold. Sometimes you raise. Sometimes they let you have it. Sometimes they don’t. Whatever. Somehow I had 40,400 to bag up at the end of the night which allowed me to take my first stroll to the Rio taxi stand on this trip sans-frustration.

Tomorrow, my run of mooching off of Palazzo comes to an end. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to play blackjack while I’ve been here, so I doubt they’re going to be able to help me continue my streak of staying in Vegas hotels without paying for it which currently rests at seven nights. In the morning, I’ll check out what kind of offers the Wynn can throw at me. My hunch is that it won’t be much thus forcing me to be a little less ambitious and hope that MGM can comp me at one of their reasonable properties like T.I. or Mirage.

It’s 2:00 a.m. here and I have to wake up around 10:00 or so to check out, so that’s all for now.

In the second level of the $1,500 six-handed event today, I re-raised to 1,200 with Jacks after there was a raise to 325 and a call. One came along and I shoved all-in for 2,400 on a Queen-Nine-Three flop. He had Queen-Ten.

Nice hand, sir.

I’m getting pretty proficient at busting out in the second level of WSOP tournaments. Three for three now.

During the first level, a good poker friend of mine, Ray “Exitonly” Coburn, texted me asking if I wanted to do a swap. At that point, I was down to 3,500 in chips and didn’t feel like trying to have some complicated conversation about a swap via text, so I told him let’s just address a potential swap in the hallway during first break.

When I busted, I walked over to his table and said, “hey man… still interested in swapping 5%?” He laughed knowing there was only one reason I would be standing next to him while cards were still in the air.

I just received a text from him saying he has 26k. I feel like he’s probably 30% or so to take this tournament down right in my face. But I won’t cry over my lost thousands for too long; Ray is an incredibly nice young guy who has helped me out a lot with my game and deserves (not that anyone ever truly “deserves”) a big score about as much as anyone I know.

One of the upsides (or is it a downside?) to busting out so early is that you can still catch the daily Venetian tournament where registration closes at two. Today, I did just that. One player at the table, a kid who fits all the stereotypes of a young online player, not that I’m one to talk, insisted on berating a young lady at the table who won two big showdowns against him despite making a questionable call or two at some point during the hand. “How can she ever call on that flop? That’s fucking unreal!” This went on and on for a while making me very uncomfortable. Eventually I suggested to him that he let it go. He replied that he can complain about it as much as he wants. “True, and I can have the floor come over and ask you to stop berating this other player if I want.”

Sure enough, he made me do it. “It’s unreal to me that you ever think fucking calling there is okay!” To his credit, he shut up once asked politely by a floorman. However, there’s just really no excuse for that type of childish behavior. The reasons should be obvious why one shouldn’t behave in such a manner at the table. Aside from the fact that it makes you look like an annoying bitch incapable of swallowing his beats like the rest of us, it also creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to keeping people interested in the game. He seemed like a capable enough player to know better than to condition a young lady against making questionable calls on multiple streets in multiple hands.

But even all of that aside, this is another person you’re talking to. I don’t care if you disagree with their play to the very core of your existence and have ran worse than anyone in the history of the world leading up to today’s tournament: letting that affect you to the point that you speak to a complete stranger as if they’ve just done you an injustice on par with slitting your tires is as low as it gets.

These barely-21 online players with bankrolls that vastly outmatch their maturity seem to flock in droves to the Venetian Deep Stack series. This has to account for a significant explanation as to why I don’t particularly care to play at the Venetian despite having moderate success there in the past. It just seems like the average participant in a $330 deep stacked event has a high chance of annoying me. If it’s not some bratty kid coaching players on how to play their hands, it’s some know-it-all degenerate that has been relegated to the small-time action after running out of people capable of being persuaded into backing them across town at the Rio. (Taxi drivers also annoy me a lot in this same vein). And no matter where I attempt to escape to during breaks, there is almost inevitably a group of three kids in Ed Hardy clothes within five feet of me blabbing to each other about some hand they just played.

God poker players can really be the worst sometimes. What scares me is that I’m not discernible from the rest of them to a distant observer. I need to figure out how to better answer the question “what do you do?” moving forward. That, or pick up some Ed Hardy gear and just embrace it already.

While I’m ranting about poker players, I’ve got one more angst to vent. What is up with poker players thinking that getting together to play Chinese poker counts as “doing something social”? Honestly, can we just put the fucking cards away for one hour? One aggravating aspect to me regarding the WSOP is that I seem to have a hard time organizing an enjoyable social outting. If the suggestion isn’t to play Chinese poker, than it’s to go to some over-hyped, overpriced club where the music is played too loud for there to be any chance at engaging in a rewarding conversation with someone. Does anyone ever just go play mini-golf or something anymore?

I should end this by clarifying that the tone of this post does not give an accurate picture of my complete mood. When not being exposed to the unsavory attitudes of some spoiled kid in his first live tournament, I’ve generally felt very refreshed, focused and content on this trip notwithstanding my shrinking bankroll.

Tomorrow, it will have a chance to shrink further in the $2,000 WSOP event.

It’s midnight, and I just got back to the Palazzo after a long day of poker. I IM’d shaniac, who is blogging on PokerTips for the summer and is also one of the best poker writers and my personal favorite (with the only significant competition being Pauly from Tao of Poker):

Me: man…
Me: after i busted today a friend texted me telling me to come play the $200 at binion’s
Me: i went, despite my better judgment
Me: and just now finished…
Me: …. 11th…
Me: for $500….
Me: fml
Shaniac: sounds uplifting, don’t see the reason for “fml”

Of course, I don’t mean “FML” in a literal sense here. It’s more of an expression, like how sometimes (most of the time?) when you say “lol” you didn’t actually laugh out loud. I guess the reason I can’t quite jive with his upbeat spirit is that, for the day, I was a $1,200 loser. I’m two for two now on busting out of WSOP events before the first break. Today, I got Ten-Nine of diamonds all in against Ace-Queen on a Queen-Eight-Seven two diamond flop and airballed it.

Not too upset about this, after all, it’s a long summer and there’s no sense in wasting a bunch of energy feeling frustrated about losing a 52-48, I made my way to the Rio taxi stand and instructed the driver to take me to Palazzo. En route, I texted Dave Irish informing him I had busted (he had 5% of me). He told me it wasn’t too late to join him in the $200 tournament at Binion’s.

I had planned on coming back to Palazzo, hydrating up, and paying what would have likely been an arm and a leg for a taxi to the nearest Bikram Yoga center. But what the hell, I thought. Might as well dust off another $200 real quick first and go to yoga in the evening.

“Let’s go to Binion’s instead,” I told to the driver. On the way, I quipped with him that the taxi to and from downtown Vegas might erase whatever edge I could expect to have in a $200 tournament. That’s not really a joke, either. About $40 in cab fares take a big slice out of the value I’d expect to gain from playing a $200 at Binion’s. This is something that failed to occur to me before we were already north of the Stratosphere.

Still, it had to be +EV. Tournaments at Binion’s are probably about as soft as online poker circa 2003. I made it to the dinner break with about 10 big blinds in a spot where two-thirds of the field would make the money. The twenty minutes after I polished off my cheeseburger and before the tournament resumed tested my patience. “I’d better at least cash,” I kept thinking as I stood on the stinking sidewalk outside Binion’s uninspired on what to do other than pace back and forth feeling marginally sorry for the predicament I had put myself in.

Dave had long since made his way home after busting from the tournament and the thought of striking up a conversation with someone else only to be asked “what I had on that one hand” made standing on the sidewalk and refreshing my email every two minutes seem palatable.

I did manage to remain at Binion’s for another few hours and make it into the money. With 11 players left, I realized that 11th actually meant more to me than 10th as a result of a complicated and insignificant swap I had made with Dave. And yes, I remembered to factor in the value of the free ‘Binion’s Final Table Participant’ hat I would have received for outlasting one more person. But the hat couldn’t quite dissuade me from shoving 13 big blinds with Jack-Eight from the small blind while we played five handed. I think I would have made this play regardless of Dave and I’s goofy arrangement and my free hat equity anyway. And I would have ran into Ace-Jack just the same.

So I traded yoga and an evening that could have been used to catch up on a little work for a min-cash that I suppose was accompanied by a little confidence in knowing that I can still navigate through a live tournament field. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get to find out what it’s like to make it past the first break in this year’s WSOP. The $1,500 6-Max event will be my third try. If I fail, I suppose there’s always the 3:00 Bikram class.

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——

Okay, I’m kidding. But seriously, I busted out in the second level of the $1k today. Standard stuff. Built up to 4.5k (3k starting) then lost a flip for a 7k pot with AK vs. QQ and re-raised all-in a few hands later with 99 and ran into JJ. Nothing you can do and I walked out of the Rio not the least bit upset about washing out in rapid fashion as opposed to playing all day only to take some bad beat near the money.

Before the tournament started, Dave, my Uncle, TwoGun and I were standing out in the hallway. I suggested that the over/under on the number of us that will make the dinner break is 1. Dave disagreed thinking it was 1.5. I don’t see any value betting over 1.5 there. He offered to put $100 on over 1 and I booked his bet. I did my part by busting in the second level. My Uncle and TwoGun went down in the fourth. Dave sabotaged his chance at pushing on the bet and busted out in the fifth level (I believe). Ship it!

I did a little shopping after I got knocked out at the Forum Shops in Caesars. Later, Dave and I went to T.I. to play the $125 ‘Head Hunters’ tournament again. I started off well but went out 10th after getting KK all-in against 33 on an 883 board. I picked up three bounties in the early going though to make it a marginally profitable venture. For fun, I bought 25% of Dave in a cash game he played after busting the tournament and made another $100 through that, so no complaints.

While I was in the tournament, ‘kid hustlr’ and ‘brendo’ from our poker forums stopped by to say hello. I’ve hung out with kid hustlr in Phoenix before, but had never met brendo before tonight. I forgot to ask them if they’ve been doing any chip dumping at the OnGame tables lately. ZING!!

This is my last night at Bellagio. I visited the host desk and gave them an opportunity to retain my action. The host looked at my play for this trip: 5 hours at an average of $80 a hand so far. What was their offer? Nothing.

I realize 5 hours of $80 a hand doesn’t make me a whale or anything, but you’d think they’d offer me at least a little something being that it’s the middle of the week during the summer in Vegas. They can’t claim to be occupied either. Hotels.com has a rate of $150 for the next four nights at Bellagio, which is definitely on the low-end of their typical range. Another hotel with a rate of $150 was the Venetian, so I called them up to see what they’d offer me. The lady on the phone said, “we can give you 2-4 free nights.” Ship it!

If I thought it would have any impact on anything other than my temporary happiness, I’d go visit the Bellagio host again and tell him I’m taking my $80 a hand over to Venetian and to have fun going bankrupt, but that would just be in vein. Those guys don’t really give a damn and are also probably stupid enough to think the economy will magically recover later this year since “recessions only last an average of 14 months.” News flash: there are no rules that state the economy can’t remain in a state of turmoil for years. End rant.

One final note: I registered for the $1,500 6-Max event on Tuesday. At least I thought I did. I asked the Asian lady behind the counter a couple times, “the $1,500 event on Tuesday is 6-Max, right?” She kind of acted like she didn’t understand me and gave me very vague responses. I decided it wasn’t worth shouting my question very slowly to her since I was 95% certain Tuesday is 6-Max. Turns out I should have shouted. Wednesday’s $1,500 event is the 6-Max event. Oops. Oh well… worse case scenario is that I can’t play it because I made day two of Tuesday’s event. There could be bigger problems to have.

That’s all for tonight. Taking a day off of poker tomorrow and playing golf at this awesome par 3 course at Angel Park with my Uncle and Dave. The holes are modeled after famous par 3s from around the world. Of course, we’ll have some prop betting action going which should make for a fun afternoon baking in the desert heat.

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.