I played day one today of the Main Event. I think the best way to approach day one is to pretty much just be a nit in any medium- to large-sized pot. Of course, it’s fine to be aggro in small pots, but there’s really no excuse not to have the goods when you’re getting all your chips in on day one. The structure is just too good and the competition is just ridiculously bad. It’s really quite amazing some of the people who in one way or another come up with ten thousand dollars to wager on this tournament.

I was at about the cushiest starting table one could ask for. There were four solid, but harmless guys, two total nits, and one guy with spewy tendencies on my immediate right who helped me get off to a good start by paying off my full house overbet with the King flush on a four diamond board. My low point for the day was the starting stack of 30k. High point was 52k. Bagged up 44k which is almost exactly average.

At the beginning of the last level, our table broke. As I made my way to my new seat, I noted the player on my left was a woman. “Oh nice, some chick at my table,” I thought. I sat down to find “some chick” was Jennifer Harman. Karmic bad beat for being a sexist. She won two small pots off of me but laughed at my jokes and genuinely seemed like a good natured person.

In the last level, I min re-raised a guy with pocket Kings, checked behind him on a Jack-Six-Three flop, and called his turn and river bets. He flipped over Sevens and commented that I “won the maximum” off of him with the way I played that hand. Ten minutes later he betrayed where his focus was at by asking me, “how can you ever check behind on that flop?”

“You said I won the maximum off of you, right?”

Poker players can be pretty silly sometimes. There were a lot of them at the Rio today, too. Some 2,800 players participated in Day 1D which sabotaged some under bets I had on the number of participants this year. Breaks were a nightmare. It would have been considerate of Harrah’s to have allowed this flight an extra 5 or 10 minutes for breaks so that those of us in the back of the line to use the urinal didn’t miss a few hands by the time we got back to the table.

I heard rumors that 800-some players were turned away from registering this morning. Ridiculous. Pretty much everyone is talking about it, so I don’t know how much I want to go into it, but obviously it’s an organizational nightmare that Harrah’s had to turn away hundreds and hundreds of players, many of whom flew in from overseas, with $10,000 in hand ready to play this tournament.

Alright that’s enough for tonight. Day one of the Main Event is pretty much about not doing anything stupid. Mission accomplished, day two up next.