My desire to recap the WSOP 2009 diminishes rapidly as the memory of Friday’s bustout grows distant and seems less relevant. The post-bustout consolation of having a couple of friends to sweat in the main event is also gone, now that Owen Crowe and Jordan Morgan have been eliminated too.

That leaves my primary rooting interest with Jeff Shulman, the only one of the 27 remaining players in the main event with whom I’ve had any social connection. Some might remember that Shulman had a really good shot at this same title in 2000, before the poker boom, and before Chris Ferguson beat him with 66 vs 77 and then Jeff ran KK into AA in the event. Ferguson went on to win, and I sometimes wonder how much different the poker world might be if Jeff had scooped the event that year.

Besides Jeff, I guess my rooting interest turns to Phil Ivey, probably the greatest natural poker player of all time whose persona doesn’t require any kind of noise to grab people’s attention.

Besides that, a handful of young “internet” players are still fighting for the big payday, and although I don’t know them personally, I would be happy to see Jamie Robbins, Joseph Cada, Andrew Lichtenberger or Nick Maimone (in descending order of chip count) go the distance.

***

Overall, the WSOP 2009 seemed to pass by in a time warp in which the entire six-week stretch felt simultaneously dense and expansive and then just disappeared in a moment, leaving whatever constitutes “reality” in its place. Playing a major tournament almost every day for several weeks offers a distinct sense of direction and purpose for the time period, but as easily as the stress and ponderous nature of the work becomes all-encompassing, it evaporates at an equal rate into the stale desert air, and now I just wonder where the time went.

In any case, I didn’t have too much fun this year. I played tennis against Tony Dunst one evening a few weeks ago, and he expressed a very positive and carefree attitude towards the whole experience: “To me,” he said, “I look at it like a win-win: either I do well in the tournament or I bust out and then go out and do fun things,” like, he told me, going to the gym, going out nights picking up women, drinking, shopping, etc. As he laid out his recipe for balance and ongoing satisfaction, I just looked at him.

I wish I could have adopted the same attitude, but I was focused strictly on making money while in Vegas, and I basically failed at that, too, having cashed in only one of the 19 events I played and spent all the money I earned in satellites on living expenses. The possibility of creating a fun, healthy balance while trying to make money playing poker freezouts every day felt miles away.

As for the fun aspects, I did get out to the movies a few times, and I also got onto the tennis court and went bowling a handful of times (but far less than I would have liked). There was also that one enjoyable day I spent with friends on Lake Mead, but that was early in the Series when the upcoming summer still felt full of possibilities.

During a brief trip home, I took my waterski out of the garage and put it into my car, expecting to have at least one more run on Lake Mead when I got back to Nevada. The zipper to the bag that carries my waterski was rusted shut, and I never had the occasion to cut it open either. Instead I just rolled around Vegas with a slalom ski in the trunk of my car for several weeks.

Of course, the WSOP is still unique on a number of levels. I can’t remember a year in which more individuals put up mind-boggling results as this year, and even without that, there is still a distinct aura that surrounds the WSOP that will probably have me returning each year even if I never cash another event (and despite the fact that the competition this year seemed distinctly tougher than any year I’ve attended since 2005).

In the end, 19 tournaments is still only 19 tournaments, and even though the energy required to put into those tournaments can leave a poker player feeling empty and lost after it’s all done, keeping perspective on the whole thing is still the only aspect one can really control.

Even during the torturous early levels of the main event, when my stack dropped to 10K and it felt like an early exit was inevitable, I looked around the room and took stock: Six years ago, I was basically just another slack-jawed poker fan working a day job, watching this unique event unfold in the form of an ESPN broadcast.

Today I not only have the opportunity to compete in the event but also a reasonable chance of winning it. I am in a fortunate spot to have been able to play poker and the WSOP for the past five years, and if I make it out in 2010 for my sixth year and have another shitty series, I’ll still consider myself incredibly lucky to have been able to participate.

The WSOP 2009 ended for me during level 10 of the main event. I arrived back to California last night around 3AM. As soon as the empty feeling in my gut refills, I’ll try to post a recap of my 2009 series.

Despite the truncated schedule for today, eight hours of poker felt like an eternity. I’m not happy with Harrah’s random last-minute decision to make the flights lopsided, but I’ll save my gripes for later.

My table draw was, again, very bad: every one of my opponents was somewhere between competent and expert at NL tournaments and, again, the one weak player was super tight and didn’t give away any chips. Before I realized quite how tight he was, I doubled him up in level 6, four-betting him with AK when he raised my 1600 opening bet to 6K, and I put him in for around 20-25K total if I remember correctly. He thought for quite a long time considering that he had kings, and after he didn’t instacall, I actually thought he was going to lay down his hand or call with a hand that I was in good shape against.

Eventually he called and tabled the kings (I believe the kids these days call this incident a “nitroll”), and I didn’t hit an ace. In that hand I dropped from 50K to around 30K, and it ushered in the downward tumble in which my stack dipped to 11k before dinner break, a low point similar to yesterday’s dinner break. The two levels after dinner were swingy, but I managed to chip up to 25K without a showdown and my stack stayed in the range of 20-38K for the rest of the night.

I ended the day with 34,200 chips. While the action was concluding and the management was distributing plastic bags for storing players’ chips, a hand began where a very good player named Josh raised and Travis Rice, also a great player who had been at the table since the start of the day, re-raised on the button. I folded my big blind and went outside to smoke a cigarette. While I was walking back in, I saw Travis in the corridor between the Brasilia Room and the parking lot and said, “Wow we bagged up that fast?” It didn’t occur to me the hand would have been Travis’ demise, and he explained that Josh 4-bet allin with 66 and Travis called with AK and lost the race to bust out on the last hand of day 2.

Of course, he handled busting out like a professional, but there was a palpable level of heartbreak in that tinny hallway. That’s because the WSOP Main Event is kind of a crazy and unique tournament with a particular level of focus and stress embedded into it. I don’t have a lot of chips, but with almost 30 big blinds to start day 3 with, my stack is playable, and I am looking forward to extending this odyssey for as long as possible when the game resumes on Friday.

Day 2B (today’s flight) is playing four levels total, and I lost most of my stack during the first two. We were given “dinner break” around 4:30, and I am writing this from the hotel room across the street. After dinner, I will post the 800 big blind and then have 10,200 left in my stack. The situation is more dire than it was yesterday, but the process of rebuilding will hopefully be similar.

During the level following dinner break, I hit a crucial 12-outer (flush draw and overcard vs. top pair) to get some chips back, and I hovered around 25K for a while after that. The rest is kind of a blur: I remember pulling off one succesful and critical bluff out of position, I won a medium sized pot with AK vs QQ, and by the time I was moved to a new table with 45 minutes left in the night, my stack had risen above the 50K mark.

I played tight at my new table until the last few hands of the night, when I became very active and picked up about 20K chips to give me a healthy 70K to work with on day 2B, which begins tomorrow.

My first table was rather tough. The only player I knew was Dustin Dirksen, a very accomplished and talented no limit player, but the other players, strangers to me, played with surgical precision. There was maybe one weak spot, but he was weak-tight as opposed to spewy, so there were no crazy incidents of chips flying around. With the strange pressure that comes with the uniqueness of the WSOP Main Event on my mind and the tough table, it was a long day.

The reason I don’t like updating my tournament progress as the event goes on is because I try to absorb the larger picture and ignore the minutiae. This is an eight day tournament just to get to the final table, there are over 180M chips in play. Given that, early level chip counts are almost completely meaningless, and it can just be discouraging to report on having a big stack and then bust two hands later, a totally standard possibility. I don’t understand how people devote energy to twitter during the event, but I guess I will continue to update my progress in this space until the bitter end.

I never post while tournaments are in progress. What’s the point?

Anyway, I’ll change that pattern since the WSOP Main Event so far has been frustrating, overbearing and annoying and I need an outlet. I have 10K chips, a third of our starting stack, at dinner break.

On the last hand of the final preliminary event of the 2009 WSOP, the $5K 6-handed event, I lost with AKs to French pop star Patrick Bruel‘s pair of tens.

This was shortly after dinner break, around 9PM. By 10 o’clock, I decided to drive home to Santa Monica despite having played three full days of poker and being exhausted. I had no real reason to go home, except to clean out the mailbox and take care of a couple errands, but I had a yen to spend a night or two in my own bed. Making the drive at midnight enabled one extra night and despite a fatigued, four-hour trek through the desert, it was worth it.

When I stopped by the Vegas rental apartment to pick up a couple of items for the drive, the living room looked barren, paper cups full of soda and remote controls decorating the area. The preliminary phase of the WSOP definitely felt over. Whatever wishes and dreams lived in that furnished sublet had now evaporated into the flat desert air.

Prior to the $5K event, I had my first and only cash of the 2009 WSOP event in the $3K “Triple Chance” event, which was added to the 2009 schedule as a superficial attempt to fill the absence left by the elimination of rebuy tournaments.

“Triple Chance” is basically a dumb gimmick that has nothing to do with rebuys and just allows players to start with 3k, 6k, or 9K chips, or to take the extra 6K chips whenever they feel like it. It seems clear to me that the best move 99% of the time is to just start with the full 9k, but many players experimented with different proportions of chip allotment. I generally think the gimmick, while nothing even close to a substitute for rebuys, did make for a better tournament, since it added an extra layer of strategy (however illusory) and that caused people to over-think things and basically to play worse.

After the first day of play, I had exactly 100K in chips and by the time we were near the money bubble the next day, I had well over 150K. After dinner on day two, I lost with AK to KK, which brought my stack down to the 50-60K range. I doubled up with JT vs A7 to a young, annoying player who celebrated at literally every street of the deal and then cringed when my ten hit the river. I couldn’t even see the winning river card from the one-seat, but after watching his reaction, I knew I didn’t have to get up from the table and instead counted my stack down.

I had 115K or so and two hands later I got it allin with AK vs the 77 of Jon Van Fleet, a famous internet player also known as “Apestyles.” He won the coinflip, and I took 46th place for $9145. As I was collecting the piece of paper needed to claim my cash, the annoying kid approached his entourage on the rail and said, “at least I made a little bit more money” indicating the slight prize jump from 46th to 45th place.

***

I returned from California on July 2nd and mostly vegged out at my room at the Palms, where I will be staying until I am done with the $10K main event, over the following two days. They gave me a nice spacious room, and the bed is extremely comfortable. I saw Jay-Z perform at the theater here last night, my first time seeing one of my favorite MCs perform live, and it was a great show. So far this seems like a good spot for me to be during the main event.

I finally made a day 2 this series in event #39, $1500NL. In prior WSOPs, making day 2 usually meant you were in the money or at least close, but the increased starting stacks have created longer, more stretched-out events, so we were still 40-50 players out of the money when the second day began. Although I had a nice 60K starting stack to begin the day, I busted before the money (around 285th with 270 places paid) after losing two big hands to the heavyweight boxer Audley Harrison.

On the last level of play the night before, there was a hand where a guy raised and then got re-raised. The original raiser went into the tank for a while and then, in a burst of acute misplaced anger, turned over a pair of jacks and threw his cards in the muck so violently that one of them almost bounced off the felt and into my neck. He quickly calmed down and changed his tone to the extent that the rest of the players at the table could joke about the situation without fearing further outbursts, but his reaction to making a big-ish laydown of his own volition was bizarre and unpleasant nevertheless.

Meanwhile, I was chatting with a nice guy named Mark who was originally from the Bronx and owned an adult novelty business. “Dildos,” he clarified. With just minutes left in the night, Mark re-raised the same guy who had mucked his jacks super-aggressively, and this time the guy decided to go allin with the same hand he had before, a pair of jacks. Mark had aces and called. The guy almost did the same violent-mucking thing as the time before, but instead regained his composure, placed his cards in front of his stack, and made some kind of “one time” speech. He spiked his jack on the flop and then did some kind of lame celebration. Given all the aspects of the situation, it was one of the worst beats imaginable.

Mark was left with very few chips and just a few hands remaining in the evening. He was visibly dejected, and I thought about people who think there such a thing as “karma” or “justice” in poker. After the hand, Mark said stuff like “I just wanted the guy to fold, that’s why I re-raised so much.” I told him, “Look, you didn’t want him to fold, that was a great situation, and you just got very unlucky.” He then looked at his 8K stack and facetiously said he shouldn’t even bother coming back to play day 2.

I saw him on day 2, lingering outside the Rio Pavilion with his wife before play resumed, and we chatted. Ultimately, he managed to finish the tournament in 46th place for $9k while I, who came into the second day of the tournament with a strong stack, basically bubbled the event. That’s actually part of what makes NL tournaments awesome.

Ray Foley, who won the event, was an extremely friendly guy from Michigan with whom I had played earlier on day 1. Congratulations to him and to Alex Jacob and Brandon Cantu, who finished 4th and 2nd respectively in the same event.

***

After busting event #39, I wasn’t sure what to do. It’s that typical, yet indescribable, WSOP feeling of directionless emptiness. I called my girlfriend Sheila, who is working on a TV production in Detroit and whom I have not seen since late May, and asked her to look into flights from Vegas to Detroit. It was 3PM and the only direct flight left at 4PM, the next one being some overlong connecting flight leaving at 11PM and arriving in Detroit at 9AM the next morning. All flights cost well over $1,000, making the option of visiting Sheila untenable.

While she was browsing internet travel sites and I was walking through the parking lot, she started to complain that her iPod was incomplete and she couldn’t find a particular song from our shared library.

“You know, the Jay-Z song with 8Ball, where he talks about his friend’s baby dying.”

“‘This Can’t Be Life‘? And it’s Scarface, baby, not 8ball,” I told her.

“I knew you’d know it,” she said.

***

I got in my car and started to drive, briefly entertaining the idea of playing the remainder of the Sunday online tournaments, but it was too late to register for the FTP 750K, so I scrapped that plan and decided instead to play a single-table satellite in the Brasilia Room. I entered a $275 satellite and won a big pot right away with aces vs. someone who decided to bluff off his entire stack with jack-high on one of the first few hands.

Around this time, players began filtering into the room for the 5PM event, event #42, labeled the “Mixed Event,” aka the 8-game event, a $2500 buyin. I have been playing a bit of low-stakes 8-game on PokerStars and sort of spontaneously decided that if I won the satellite, which I did, that I’d put myself into the event and take a shot.

I wasn’t under the illusion that I had a huge edge in the event, but I thought I had at least a slightly positive expectation, considering that some segment of the field would be less skilled in more of the eight games than I was. And with the exception of a few spots, particularly in the hi/lo games, where I made mistakes, I felt pretty comfortable playing the format, which switched from game to game every eight hands. Each table played the same cycle at its own pace, so you could conceivably be at a table which was playing 2-7 TD and then get moved to a table that was in the middle of the PLO segment. It was definitely a change of pace from the vanilla NL tournaments that I’ve been grinding.

On the very first hand of the stud (high) portion at our table, I was dealt rolled-up aces, the very best starting hand in stud, and possibly the first time I was ever actually dealt rolled-up aces. I completed the bring-in and got action from former Survivor contestant and notorious poker world figure Jean-Robert Bellande. On fourth street, Bellande had open tens and bet, I raised. By seventh street, he made a straight to beat my unimproved trips.

I built my stack up to 17K (from 7500) at one point after the dinner break, but ultimately met my demise after being moved to one of the toughest tables I’ve ever played at, consisting of Doyle Brunson, Eugene Katchalov, Joe Tehan, Amnon Filippi, Bryan Devonshire, Nick Frangos, who complained constantly about various procedural aspects of the tournament, and some young “online player,” who complained constantly about various structural aspects of the tournament.

Playing with Doyle is actually a pretty cool experience for all the obvious reasons. He’s a living legend, an old man who resembles a Chinatown-era John Huston and has been playing poker since before I was born, but who is extremely sharp and still one of the best poker players in the world, possessing an indefatigable ability to maintain his card skills despite how radically the game has evolved over the decades.

Even though the man seems at least halfway uninterested in most of the conversation and goings-on at the table, he is still very engaging when the topic interests him, and will come alive when, say, discussing the one strategic aspect of 2-7 TD (drawing or standing pat with a J7432 when your opponent draws one) from Super System 2 on which he differed with Daniel Negreanu, the author of the book’s excellent lowball chapter.

I lost most of my stack on two hands in the limit hold ‘em section, first to Brunson, who made two pair with KT to crack my A8 on a board that ran out AKx-T-Q, then to Tehan, whom I doubled up preflop A5s vs his KQs. Filippi busted me in the next round of 08.

***

The last four NL events are taking place Saturday through Tuesday, and I will probably play Day 1D of the $10K Main Event, which starts a week from Monday. In the downtime, I’ll probably try to grind out more of those single tables, and hopefully Sheila will be able to visit me around July 4th.

Thank you to all my friends and readers who inquired about my father’s health: He was discharged from the hospital in Poughkeepsie earlier this week, and he is back in his NYC apartment doing fine. When I talked to him, he told me he was probably going to switch doctors to deal with his heart problems going forward, making a change from the Cardiologist Acquaintance whose house he was visiting when my father started to feel chest pain. Citing among other issues the fact that his cardiologist is semi-retired, my dad commented, “I thought maybe it was time to find a wartime consigliere.”

My father was also not pleased at his Cardiologist Acquaintance for reporting that my father resisted the idea of going to the hospital for one or two hours, and he thinks that the doctor should have insisted in no uncertain terms on that course of action (although my father does admit that he himself didn’t go out of his way to insist upon this either). In a letter to the doctors at Vassar Brothers Medical Center addressing some followup issues, my dad finished by writing:

Now, and this is the big point. I was led to understand by 2 people who had spoken with [Cardiologist Acquaintance] that I had somehow waited an hour before suggesting we get to the hospital. [The Vassar doctor in his report] writes that “The patient refused to go to the hospital.” The corollary to that would be [Cardiologist Acquaintance] insisted I get to the hospital the moment I felt discomfort.

Granted I was a house guest. Perhaps [Cardiologist Acquaintance] was in host mode, not doctor mode. The feeling I had I have never had prior. I hoped it would go away, yes. [Cardiologist Acquaintance] would have been happy to have it go away. His wife thought I had eaten too much sharp mustard. We talked about who to call. [Cardiologist Acquaintance] went to take a nap. I went outside to walk it off. Finally I asked him to make some calls. Then we drove to the E.R.

Had a cardiologist, even any physician, told me to get to the E.R., I would have gotten to the E.R. I sense there is a defensive posture here…in case there would have been an “if only we would have gotten to the hospital sooner” component to that day.

It all ended well. I am grateful. However, I never, ever refused to go to the hospital.

***

As for me and the World Series of Poker, I can vaguely remember building up a 20K stack in last Saturday’s $1,500 NL event before three-bet bluffing off all my chips shortly before dinner with Jh9h on a board that contained 864 and one heart. I managed to turn 15 outs for what would have been an epic suckout, but I missed them all. After Monday’s $2K NL event, in which I suffered my first bona fide cooler of the WSOP (QT vs 22 on a QT2-3 board), I took a trip back to my home in Santa Monica that coincided with a stopover by a childhood friend, now living in Thailand, who was heading from Bangkok to New York for a month.

Needless to say, it was nice to be home and breath in Pacific Ocean air, catch up with my friend and with the DVR, and going back to California during the WSOP is always a necessary respite that helps put things in perspective.

Even with four years’ WSOP experience behind me, Vegas in June always seems to have a disorienting, depleting effect. I am amazed by the people who seem to have all their shit together during this time, who probably wake up every day and exercise, post daily blogs on their progress at the WSOP, and who seem to find that perfect balance between grinding poker, resting and indulging.

One of the paradoxical aspects of the WSOP, I have come to accept, is that you are surrounded by countless friends and acquaintances, many of whom you don’t see often throughout the year, yet it is often logistically impossible to actually find time to gather with all the people who have said, “let’s do dinner” or “don’t be a stranger.”

For the most part, people are very busy and focused on whatever poker agenda they have outlined for themselves and coordinating free time is a true task: You bust out of an event early in the day, and your natural instinct is to look for someone to hang out with. But many of your friends are still in the event you just busted, while most of the rest are planning on playing that day’s 5PM event, are still in the previous day’s event, or they are sleeping off a long night of poker or partying.

It somehow feels like bad form to text someone and say, “If you bust out, call me” and the few people with whom I am comfortable enough to send such messages wind up being the same few people I socialize with.

As a quasi-loner (and someone who doesn’t really like large social groups, either), I don’t particularly mind the need for solitary activity, but the distance between people in the poker world despite our geographical proximity during this time winds up being another slightly frustrating facet of the WSOP.

For my part, I am mostly just disappointed in myself for not slipping into a well-balanced routine this summer despite being well aware of the need for it during the WSOP, and it feels like the sand in the WSOP hourglass is rapidly sliding. I haven’t been overtaken by any overriding negative impulses, but I also haven’t been living a particularly healthful existence–my diet is poor, I have been smoking again and too much, and I have hardly exercised, except for a couple of weak tennis sessions and the one day on Lake Mead.

For the first two-plus weeks here, the June Vegas weather was unseasonably mild, so I have no one but myself to blame for my level of sloth, whereas usually the oppressive heat is a major barrier in establishing a normal daily balance. Mostly, I am just disappointed in myself when I consider how much more vibrant I felt during the time period in February and March, when I was focused on improving my physical and mental health. I know that I’d be better poised to deal with the harsher aspects of the Series, would be better organized and happier, if I had stuck with it. Of course I should just get up tomorrow and do 30 minutes on the treadmill before going down to the Rio, but it never seems that simple in practice when I am in a dyspeptic mood.

Now the Vegas weather has finally broken, and it is 90+ degrees here every day and will probably get steadily hotter through the main event, which begins July 3rd. It’s been a disappointing, hapless WSOP so far, but my only option remains to find a way to deal with it and try to emerge successful.

After busting out of the $2,500 NL event on Friday June 5th, I played my first single-table of the trip in the Brasilia Room, a $1,030-buyin that paid out 10K in chips to one winner. We were 4- or 5-handed (and I had recouped $600 of the $1,030 from last longer bets) when I got a call from my brother in New York, who told me that our father was undergoing “emergency open heart surgery” to treat what we later found out was an aortic dissection.

The old man was visiting his cardiologist, socially, at the doctor’s house near Poughkeepsie, NY and had started to feel chest pain. He resisted going to the hospital for an hour or two before finally acceding to the doctor’s suggestion, and they drove to the Vassar Brothers Medical Center.

Despite the news, I believe I kept my focus fairly well, but I wound up taking third in the satellite after some unfortunate hands. A little while later, I met my friend Cory during his dinner break from the $2,500 (we made it to and from Fix, across the highway at the Bellagio, in perfect time), and during the meal I booked an 11:45PM Jet Blue flight to JFK.

When I got to New York City around 8AM on Saturday, I stopped at what was easily the shittiest Hertz outlet I’ve ever been to. The first car they tried to give me appeared to be stained with blood on the upholstery of the left door and the brakes made weird loud noises. The word I got was that my father had made it through surgery but it was still unknown whether or not he had a stroke during the procedure. I picked up my brother in Manhattan and we made the two-hour drive to Poughkeepsie, exhausted and uncertain.

When we got there, the nurse told us that our father seemed to be fine, was vaguely cognizant of our presence and could verbally identify the name of his cardiologist friend. I spent the night at the Holiday Inn Express while my brother visited an ex-girlfriend who lived nearby. By the next day, the anesthesia had worn off to the point where my father could converse with us, and he seemed in good enough shape that I felt comfortable leaving him to recover and my brother to be the man on the scene. I was back in Vegas by 10PM on Sunday.

***

Picking up where I left off in the last blog, the $2K NL tournament on June 4th was the only event where I built a stack and sustained it for a while. I took an early hit with AK vs KK and was down to less than half my starting stack after getting moved to a new table early in the second level.  I doubled up on the last hand before the first break to 6K and pumped up to about 15K when it was time for dinner break. We ate at Pasta Mia, a serviceable, but far from great, Italian spot located in a strip mall a few blocks west on Flamingo.

I won a coinflip after dinner to get my stack somewhere in the 22-25K range and busted my stack shortly after with KQ vs AQ on a Q-high board in a 50K+ pot. I may have overplayed it.

On Monday, just after returning from the NYC hospital visit, I played the $2,500 6-handed event, which was basically the coolest tournament I had played yet. I nearly doubled my first stack during the first two levels, then lost it all back and more in level three after a series of coolers and lame spots. Shortly after the second break and getting moved to a new table, I busted my short stack to Andy Black.

I phoned it in for Tuesday’ $1,500 pot-limit hold ‘em event. Not sure why, I like PLHE tournaments. After having my stack crippled at the 25/50 level to 150 chips (getting it in with QT on an KQT board in a spot where bottom-two is almost never good), I tripled-up with A7s to get me to around 550 chips. Then, five people limped when it was my big blind, and I looked down at A6 and decided to “pot it” to 350.

While two of the limpers were making their decision, a middle-aged man in the three-seat with a heavy southern accent said, “You’re fi’in to get picked off” in a strangely menacing way. Slightly taken aback, I just kind of smiled and asked, “Is that a threat?” The British guy on my let out a laugh. The man with the drawl responded without seeming to miss a beat, “It’s an agreement.” He was one of the two limpers who called my allin, and he busted me with KJ on a K77-xx board.

I was looking forward to today’s event, the $1,500 shootout that was capped at a 1,000 players. In order to make the final table, you have to win two consecutive STTs on consecutive days (and the final table on the third). But before the first orbit was complete, I was making the long walk back to the parking lot. My table was great, very soft in my relatively limited observation with the exception of a couple of tough players and a “maybe” or two. The button started in the 10-seat and it was in the 7- or 8-seat when my bustout hand took place:

I was in the 1-seat and my neighbor in the 10-seat, a young-looking Asian guy who was mostly out of my line of site and whom I didn’t have a read on, opened at 25/50 to 225. Some random guy two to my left (we’ll call him “Randy”), who seemed like one of the softest spots at the table, had 225 in his hand, telegraphing his decision to call. I made it 725 with kings and when the man in between us, a CPA who has lived in Vegas for 30+ years, folded, Randy briefly rethought his decision but eventually reached back into his stack and called the 725 cold. Then, the small blind called the 725 cold! The original raiser called the 500 and with the pot at 2950, we saw a flop of 974 with two clubs. I had the Kc.

The SB and the Asian dude checked, and I bet 1800 of my remaining 3400-chip stack (I started the hand with 4125). This was actually a pretty big mistake in bet-sizing that I only recognized after I had dropped the chips in the middle. 1200-1500 would be way better here. Randy thought for a limited amount of time and went allin. The small blind pretended to agonize for several seconds but folded. The Asian guy didn’t labor over the act for too long, but he showed his cards in frustration to Andy Black on his right before mucking. I called, and Randy revealed QcJc for an 8-out flush draw. He turned the flush.

I didn’t hit my king-high flush draw, and, after taking my first legitimately bad beat of the 2009 WSOP, I made the way back to my car. Not long after, I talked to my father, who is recovering at the same hospital, for the first time since I left the East Coast and by his own account, he is “bored and miserable but otherwise fine.”