BBC Z's Oct 13th - Oct 16th Las Vegas Trip Report (w/ hork42 & buddy) - Day 3
Day 3 – Stardust / Wynn / Circus Circus – Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.
I wake up off the floor around 11am. We have to check out of the Boardwalk and move our stuff up the strip to the Stardust (The only cheap weekend hotel Kevin could find + we got the poker room rate “requiring†3 hours of play). The moving process was very easy. I hadn’t taken my bags out of the rental car yet. Two days in Vegas with the same clothes etc. I can’t keep up this pace.
We head over to the Aladdin for the breakfast buffet only to find that we’re too late. We then go over to In-and-Out burger. It was a good burger but they seem a little over-hyped. Anyway, hork42 decides he wants to play in the Binions $70 + 1 $40 re-buy MTT.
I make a last-longer bet with him. $10 if he can last 2 hours into the tournament. I tell hork42 before he leaves to just give me the money now. It’s in the bank and I start thinking about all crap I can buy with the winnings.
I realize that I need a real amount of sleep or I’m going to go crazy. I want to play 4-8 at some point, but in my current sleep deprivation, it would be impossible. I stay back at the Stardust and sleep from 1pm -> 5pm. At 5, I head down to the stardust game to start working off our required hours.
I sign up for a player’s card. I get seated. I realize the floor never took my card. I ask the floor “what’s up?†since I’m on a poker room rate. He replies “Oh, I’ll just write your name down here†on the paper they use to maintain the list. I highly doubt they use the same sheet of paper all day so they don’t appear to have any real system of determining play. Feel free to take advantage.
As for the poker room, I enjoyed it. They have a BBJ at 50k for getting aces full of tens beat by quads or better. The max rake is $3 (Strip standard is $4) and they rake $1 for the jackpot. The room is heavily populated by the older crowd. I was the youngest player (at 27) by at least a good 15 years. Now, that’s not a bad thing because older LL players tend to be the most predictable. The game was 3-6 with a full kill should someone win two hands in a row. The players were KILLING themselves to win that red button. It was amazing the lengths people would go to spike a kill pot. I never got a chance to win one. Tight aggressive tend to rarely ever win back to back pots. Around 6:00pm I realize that hork42 and Kevin aren’t back from the tournament. I think my $10 is long gone.
A did make a realization of an interesting leak I would have. I have a tendency pre-flop raise and if the pot was HU, I would bet the flop and turn but never bet the river. I was shown a lot of very low pocket pairs that I don’t think would have called if I had made the bet there. I’ll have to work on that.
An interesting point about Vegas: Poker rooms are allowed to use both props and shills but the room has to point them out if asked. We had a dealer in our game that was very interesting. He was extremely aggressive pre-flop but would fold to raises on the turn. That player type is one of the rarest you’ll ever see because they lose so quickly. I figured him for a shill but didn’t really care enough to ask. The dealer was also the most popular guy in the room with all the oldies. It’s hard to tell if they are actually friends or the oldies just as friendly towards him because they know he’s dead money.
I’m up around $120 at the table just from the 3/6 pots until I take AK with on an AxT flop in a capped pre-flop (with the dealer) 6 handed flop, 2 bets on the flop (4 players) , 2 bets on the turn heads up with the dealer when the J hit the river. I bet, he raises I call and shows me KQo. Ugh. I believe this hand to be the start of a run where I was getting beat by gutshots on the river. Sucks, but don’t matter to me as long as they don’t have the odds to call. At 8pm, Hork and Kevin arrive back from Binions.
Hork tells me about his journey in the tournament. Apparently around the 1:45 mark, he got himself short stacked and sucked out twice in order to make it past the 2:00 mark and win the bet. I can’t recall the hand the busted hork42 out, but he landed up bubbling out in 12th with top 10 paying.
We go from stardust (+$74) to grab food at westward ho where I picked up a travel companion: The 99cent 3/4 pound hotdog at westward ho. I was feelin’ this hotdog for the rest of the night and I’d bet that I’m still digesting it. It seemed a little on the raw side but hey, it’s cheap. We head over to the Wynn for some 4-8. It’s about 8 or 9pm.
The Wynn was a bit surprising to me. I expected a much larger room comparable to the borgata in AC. It’s got about 30 tables or so and they are close enough that two Wisconsin sized Americans will close the walking route between tables. Heck, that happened at our table and the waitress just threw us our waters; sacrificing her tip in the process. Kevin puts his name on the list first and sites. Then after about ten more minutes, Hork42 and I are called. They are starting a new game of 4-8. I was a little slow getting my seat at the table. Hork sat in seat 7 and by the time I got there it was either seat 1,8 or 9.The tables are nine handed at the Wynn (which I didn’t even notice until about 2 hours into the session). I take seat 8 because I love have position on “Mr weak-tight†Hork. Table starts off very tight. I notice everyone at the table is wearing a watch. Some of them we’re pretty high end too. The table starts out very tight with a lot of 7 folds and 2-3 blind chops per orbit. I think every new table goes through this even with the potentially loosest players in the world. After about half an hour, we’re starting to see 5-6 to the flop. The game is a bit more aggressive pre-flop than the 2-4/3-6 I’ve been playing elsewhere. After some cautionary pre-flop play, I notice the general table is tight with few showdown aside from two or three loose players who will showdown anything.
I make my game plan to be ruthlessly aggressive against the weak tights and just value bet the loosies. Interesting hand #1: I’m up against this loose old-timer in seat 5. I raise pre-flop with AJ in EP and only the BB calls. The flop is rags. I bet he calls. Turn is a rag. I bet he calls. River is a rag. Remembering how I need to bet these rivers more often against loose players, I bet. The old-timer makes a few attempts to get the 8 chips off his stack to call. He can’t quite seem to get his hands on them. After a few more tries he folds and my bluff wins the pot.
There were interesting players in Seat 9 and Seat 6 (outside hork and myself). They were friends and they were VERY tight. Like 5% vpip tight. Anytime they played a hand, I was out like a flash. That’s not what makes them interesting. They had this bizarre ability to lay down top pair to the loosies if they got bet or raised on the turn or river. This means that their showdown percentage was also in the 5-10% range. Many a time I could see the cards they folded and I was in shock. Since most pots didn’t really go to the river that often, they never got to see that the ‘big lay down’ was a ‘big mistake’ so they got to repeat the mistake over and over. I think they lasted about 2 hours on around $500 bought in by the two of them. Needless to say, you have to be a little less transparent than these guys, even at LLHE.
My game plan works to perfection as I’m stealing pots left right and center along with some big hands. I even got Hork42 to turn to me and call me a maniac. I really appreciated that one. This was my first time at a 4-8 game, so being able to swing the money around as it should is a good step towards getting out of the low games. Kevin comes by around 11 and tells us he’s going back to the room. He didn’t like his table.
About halfway into the session, I’m sitting up $200. We get a very unique player in Seat 5: Very extraverted, very happy. He sits down at the table and begins talking about FICA credit scores. Apparently, his score is 800 and the highest score he’s even seen is 910. He has a unique mannerism in that he tends to both ask a question and then immediately answer it with a laugh. He’s always laughing: Won a pot, lost a pot doesn’t matter. He’s not all that great at cards and blows through his $100 buy-in in around 15 minutes. He rebuys, plays for another half hour or so and switches tables. Every 10-15 minutes you can hear the guy talking and laughing from the other side of the room. It was entertaining.
A few more players leave the game and Hork42 notices we’re the only players left from the original table. Not a big deal, the game is still good. Unfortunately, the cards go dead for me and I’m unable to push people around. I proceed to lose my $200 in profit and go on tilt. My version of tilt is different from the generic definition. I don’t change the way I play hands, but it’s my enthusiasm level that dips and I become more of a pessimist. As soon as I lost the last dollar of profit, I turned to hork42 to tell him that I have to leave. I don’t feel like playing poker anymore. It’s around 1am or so.
I leave the Wynn and decide to check out Circus-Circus because I heard they have high hand jackpots along with BBJ’s. I find those interesting, we don’t have them in Toronto/Niagara and as long as the total drop remains $4, they don’t cost me anything for that extra shot of entertainment. I get to circus and I can’t find the card room. I walk the whole damn thing and don’t see it. Just as I give up and am about to walk about the door. I see it. Duh. I walked right past it. By then I there was one table going of 2/4 and I didn’t care about poker so I didn’t sit down. I check out the BBJ/HH rules anyway. Things are a little different at circus, if you get quads or better, you spin a wheel of dollar values from 10-100. The BBJ was around 20k for Aces full of tens losing to quads.
I decide that if I can’t play poker I may was well get some sleep. It’s around 3am and I head back to the room and snag a bed. I’m happy. About 10 minutes later Hork comes in. Kevin decides to spend the night playing poker since he got 4-5 hours of sleep.
End of Day 3.
Overall: I’m down like 200-250 or something like that.
Edit #1: Add link to day 4: http://www.pokerforum.ca/forum/index.php?topic=6449.0
I wake up off the floor around 11am. We have to check out of the Boardwalk and move our stuff up the strip to the Stardust (The only cheap weekend hotel Kevin could find + we got the poker room rate “requiring†3 hours of play). The moving process was very easy. I hadn’t taken my bags out of the rental car yet. Two days in Vegas with the same clothes etc. I can’t keep up this pace.
We head over to the Aladdin for the breakfast buffet only to find that we’re too late. We then go over to In-and-Out burger. It was a good burger but they seem a little over-hyped. Anyway, hork42 decides he wants to play in the Binions $70 + 1 $40 re-buy MTT.
I make a last-longer bet with him. $10 if he can last 2 hours into the tournament. I tell hork42 before he leaves to just give me the money now. It’s in the bank and I start thinking about all crap I can buy with the winnings.
I realize that I need a real amount of sleep or I’m going to go crazy. I want to play 4-8 at some point, but in my current sleep deprivation, it would be impossible. I stay back at the Stardust and sleep from 1pm -> 5pm. At 5, I head down to the stardust game to start working off our required hours.
I sign up for a player’s card. I get seated. I realize the floor never took my card. I ask the floor “what’s up?†since I’m on a poker room rate. He replies “Oh, I’ll just write your name down here†on the paper they use to maintain the list. I highly doubt they use the same sheet of paper all day so they don’t appear to have any real system of determining play. Feel free to take advantage.
As for the poker room, I enjoyed it. They have a BBJ at 50k for getting aces full of tens beat by quads or better. The max rake is $3 (Strip standard is $4) and they rake $1 for the jackpot. The room is heavily populated by the older crowd. I was the youngest player (at 27) by at least a good 15 years. Now, that’s not a bad thing because older LL players tend to be the most predictable. The game was 3-6 with a full kill should someone win two hands in a row. The players were KILLING themselves to win that red button. It was amazing the lengths people would go to spike a kill pot. I never got a chance to win one. Tight aggressive tend to rarely ever win back to back pots. Around 6:00pm I realize that hork42 and Kevin aren’t back from the tournament. I think my $10 is long gone.
A did make a realization of an interesting leak I would have. I have a tendency pre-flop raise and if the pot was HU, I would bet the flop and turn but never bet the river. I was shown a lot of very low pocket pairs that I don’t think would have called if I had made the bet there. I’ll have to work on that.
An interesting point about Vegas: Poker rooms are allowed to use both props and shills but the room has to point them out if asked. We had a dealer in our game that was very interesting. He was extremely aggressive pre-flop but would fold to raises on the turn. That player type is one of the rarest you’ll ever see because they lose so quickly. I figured him for a shill but didn’t really care enough to ask. The dealer was also the most popular guy in the room with all the oldies. It’s hard to tell if they are actually friends or the oldies just as friendly towards him because they know he’s dead money.
I’m up around $120 at the table just from the 3/6 pots until I take AK with on an AxT flop in a capped pre-flop (with the dealer) 6 handed flop, 2 bets on the flop (4 players) , 2 bets on the turn heads up with the dealer when the J hit the river. I bet, he raises I call and shows me KQo. Ugh. I believe this hand to be the start of a run where I was getting beat by gutshots on the river. Sucks, but don’t matter to me as long as they don’t have the odds to call. At 8pm, Hork and Kevin arrive back from Binions.
Hork tells me about his journey in the tournament. Apparently around the 1:45 mark, he got himself short stacked and sucked out twice in order to make it past the 2:00 mark and win the bet. I can’t recall the hand the busted hork42 out, but he landed up bubbling out in 12th with top 10 paying.
We go from stardust (+$74) to grab food at westward ho where I picked up a travel companion: The 99cent 3/4 pound hotdog at westward ho. I was feelin’ this hotdog for the rest of the night and I’d bet that I’m still digesting it. It seemed a little on the raw side but hey, it’s cheap. We head over to the Wynn for some 4-8. It’s about 8 or 9pm.
The Wynn was a bit surprising to me. I expected a much larger room comparable to the borgata in AC. It’s got about 30 tables or so and they are close enough that two Wisconsin sized Americans will close the walking route between tables. Heck, that happened at our table and the waitress just threw us our waters; sacrificing her tip in the process. Kevin puts his name on the list first and sites. Then after about ten more minutes, Hork42 and I are called. They are starting a new game of 4-8. I was a little slow getting my seat at the table. Hork sat in seat 7 and by the time I got there it was either seat 1,8 or 9.The tables are nine handed at the Wynn (which I didn’t even notice until about 2 hours into the session). I take seat 8 because I love have position on “Mr weak-tight†Hork. Table starts off very tight. I notice everyone at the table is wearing a watch. Some of them we’re pretty high end too. The table starts out very tight with a lot of 7 folds and 2-3 blind chops per orbit. I think every new table goes through this even with the potentially loosest players in the world. After about half an hour, we’re starting to see 5-6 to the flop. The game is a bit more aggressive pre-flop than the 2-4/3-6 I’ve been playing elsewhere. After some cautionary pre-flop play, I notice the general table is tight with few showdown aside from two or three loose players who will showdown anything.
I make my game plan to be ruthlessly aggressive against the weak tights and just value bet the loosies. Interesting hand #1: I’m up against this loose old-timer in seat 5. I raise pre-flop with AJ in EP and only the BB calls. The flop is rags. I bet he calls. Turn is a rag. I bet he calls. River is a rag. Remembering how I need to bet these rivers more often against loose players, I bet. The old-timer makes a few attempts to get the 8 chips off his stack to call. He can’t quite seem to get his hands on them. After a few more tries he folds and my bluff wins the pot.
There were interesting players in Seat 9 and Seat 6 (outside hork and myself). They were friends and they were VERY tight. Like 5% vpip tight. Anytime they played a hand, I was out like a flash. That’s not what makes them interesting. They had this bizarre ability to lay down top pair to the loosies if they got bet or raised on the turn or river. This means that their showdown percentage was also in the 5-10% range. Many a time I could see the cards they folded and I was in shock. Since most pots didn’t really go to the river that often, they never got to see that the ‘big lay down’ was a ‘big mistake’ so they got to repeat the mistake over and over. I think they lasted about 2 hours on around $500 bought in by the two of them. Needless to say, you have to be a little less transparent than these guys, even at LLHE.
My game plan works to perfection as I’m stealing pots left right and center along with some big hands. I even got Hork42 to turn to me and call me a maniac. I really appreciated that one. This was my first time at a 4-8 game, so being able to swing the money around as it should is a good step towards getting out of the low games. Kevin comes by around 11 and tells us he’s going back to the room. He didn’t like his table.
About halfway into the session, I’m sitting up $200. We get a very unique player in Seat 5: Very extraverted, very happy. He sits down at the table and begins talking about FICA credit scores. Apparently, his score is 800 and the highest score he’s even seen is 910. He has a unique mannerism in that he tends to both ask a question and then immediately answer it with a laugh. He’s always laughing: Won a pot, lost a pot doesn’t matter. He’s not all that great at cards and blows through his $100 buy-in in around 15 minutes. He rebuys, plays for another half hour or so and switches tables. Every 10-15 minutes you can hear the guy talking and laughing from the other side of the room. It was entertaining.
A few more players leave the game and Hork42 notices we’re the only players left from the original table. Not a big deal, the game is still good. Unfortunately, the cards go dead for me and I’m unable to push people around. I proceed to lose my $200 in profit and go on tilt. My version of tilt is different from the generic definition. I don’t change the way I play hands, but it’s my enthusiasm level that dips and I become more of a pessimist. As soon as I lost the last dollar of profit, I turned to hork42 to tell him that I have to leave. I don’t feel like playing poker anymore. It’s around 1am or so.
I leave the Wynn and decide to check out Circus-Circus because I heard they have high hand jackpots along with BBJ’s. I find those interesting, we don’t have them in Toronto/Niagara and as long as the total drop remains $4, they don’t cost me anything for that extra shot of entertainment. I get to circus and I can’t find the card room. I walk the whole damn thing and don’t see it. Just as I give up and am about to walk about the door. I see it. Duh. I walked right past it. By then I there was one table going of 2/4 and I didn’t care about poker so I didn’t sit down. I check out the BBJ/HH rules anyway. Things are a little different at circus, if you get quads or better, you spin a wheel of dollar values from 10-100. The BBJ was around 20k for Aces full of tens losing to quads.
I decide that if I can’t play poker I may was well get some sleep. It’s around 3am and I head back to the room and snag a bed. I’m happy. About 10 minutes later Hork comes in. Kevin decides to spend the night playing poker since he got 4-5 hours of sleep.
End of Day 3.
Overall: I’m down like 200-250 or something like that.
Edit #1: Add link to day 4: http://www.pokerforum.ca/forum/index.php?topic=6449.0
Comments
Summary of the Binions tournament: At about 1:30 into the tournament, I note that I'm rather large-stacked... I panic or get exciited or something..., because of course, I blow it on a stupid hand that I had no business being in. This leaves me seriously short-stacked. We're at the 300/600 ante 50 level. I do some calculations and realize that if I sit out my hands, the ante would kill me and I'd lose the side-bet with BBC_Z.
1:55, I'm UTG and I push with T8o. Fear my stack of.... 700 chips?!? Well, fear they did, cause it went folded around to the BB. i guess calling 100 more was not as intimidating to him. I forget what he had, but I was behind. Flop comes with a T8x and I double up!
2:00 - Collect $10 from BBC_Z!!
Next blind level, the same situation comes up. I'm UTG with 100 more than the BB. I go all in with A4o. MP calls this time as does the same very annoyed BB.
I completely miss the flop. They check it. (great, they're just going to check down to eliminate me...) On the turn MP goes all in! BB folds. Thinking I'm so screwed, I start to gather my lucky oranges, but wait, my Ace high is good! (BB tells me after that he had me beat. Kids, this is why you don't bluff into a dry sidepot.)
From there, I managed to build a very large stack and make it 2 away from the fancy final table. Blinds are pretty high at this point. I think I have 15K, blinds are 2000/4000. So my only move is an all-in. I pick up KT UTG and raise. The table folds to the SB. (aggressive player who had been calling a lot of raises before, but respected mine.) He looks at me, saying "I *hope* I don't have a hand, cause I don't want to call that" He then looks at his cards, immediately says "I call" and flips AA.
Flop QQJ... I need a 9. 9 doesn't come. No flashy final table for me.
But I did win $10 from BBC_Z.
(he'll tell you that we went double or nothing with the same bet the next day and got it back, but there's no documented proof of that, so don't believe him.)
Gross, dude. Especially after getting stinking drunk on day one.
I'm liking the reports though, keep'em coming.
In Vegas, days and time are so subjective....
I love the idea you were willing to tank a $70 tournament to win a $10 side bet with me.
Damn, that sums up the Vegas experience so concisely...
Get it done.
D
p.s. great read so far.