Lost Time

It would seem odd that a purported poker blogger would hype up a trip to Vegas and then fall completely silent once that trip has come and gone. Well, I can only explain it like this - it went pretty badly, I was fully burnt out by the end of the trip and ready to take a month+ break from poker. But I wiped that silliness out of my head pretty quickly.

I'm pretty sure it goes like this for all poker enthusiasts... When you're winning, the appetite is pretty much insatiable, and you play as much as you can, in which case your level of degeneracy is determined by how many other important facets of your life you put aside to make poker the #1 priority. When you're losing, you burn out quickly and promise to take a break or quit completely, in which case your level of degeneracy is determined by how quickly you forget about the whole thing and return to the felt.

The Vegas trip thrust me into the latter scenario, and it basically took me about 10 days to get over it. Not sure where that puts me on the degeneracy scale, but either way, I feel alright about it.

Basically, I started out my Vegas trip on a losing streak and never fully recovered. In literally my first orbit playing 1-2 at Imperial Palace, I got all-in PF with AA vs. KK vs. KT, and saw 9-J-Q hit the flop. Fortunately, the KT was a $60 short-stack, but it still turned a coulda-been $230 win into a $110 one. The pain of that loss was doubled when the KT guy, a loose-passive redhead (we'll call him Red), who was ready to leave on the all-in hand, later hero-called my river bet to take down a $170 pot.

In that hand, I raised J9s from MP to $10, got called by the tight old cowboy to my right and by Red in the BB. The flop came 2-4-5 rainbow, and I C-bet $20, which both players called. The turn was an 8 and it checked through. The river was a K, I fired $40 into $90, cowboy folded, and after tanking, Red called with AQo and scooped it. I guess he figures I'm 2-barrelling the turn with pocket pair better than 8's, which polarizes me on the river to AK/KQ or air. It was a good call, but I would later find out that Red was a total spewmonster, and I would eventually get a piece of it too.

So I ended the first night down $165, but felt good heading into Thursday, where I planned to play the Caesar's $330 megastack event. I enjoyed that event, which has a great structure, but I was completely card-dead, catching nothing better than TT over 5 hours of play, before finally shipping it in from UTG with 44 and an M of 6. Got called by KK and that was that.

Over the remaining course of the weekend, I rarely got much going at the NLHE tables, although I did end up back at a table with Red from the first night. We were at the Rio playing 1-3NL. We played 3 big hands...basically, this dude was calling any raise with any 2, so these are really just all of the hands that I raised. In the first one, Red, sitting 3 to my right, limped for $3, and I raised to $17 from the button. I ended up isolated against him, and we saw an 8x-8c-5c flop. I led for $28, he shoved for $85, and I called. He had been playing any 2, but had generally been a calling station and not an aggressive raiser, so perhaps that should have been a sign. However, given his short stack and the number of draws out, there was no way I was folding. He turned up 82o, I missed my 2-outer, and he scooped it. I was fairly well steamed and the entire table was shocked (and also drooling over the fact that he now held a $200 stack).

I would get a small piece back later when I flopped my first cash-game set of the trip (3 days in!) with 99, extracting 2 streets before he folded the river. It was a limped pot, so I only got about $25 off him in that hand. But I would get the rest from him shortly thereafter, when he decided to slowplay a turned 2-pair, checking a turn that eventually got checked around and allowed me to river an OESD. He shipped it in and I snapped him off for a ~$150 pot.

Those were the NLHE cash game highlights as I remember them. There were some more interesting spots that I remembered for a while, but have slipped my mind now that we're 2 weeks past the trip.

I only played one tourney after the $330 one, when we returned to Caesar's for their $160 7pm megastack tourney. This tourney was also a good value, with a decent amount of play for the buy-in. 218 players entered, and I ran really well in this one, making it down to the final 2 tables (18 paid). I was thriving on a short stack until, with 12 players left, I called an EP shove with KK. Opponent turned up A9, and A hit the flop, and I was done. Had I won that I probably would have cruised to the final table and pulled down at least $1K. Sigh. I still won $225 for my efforts.

Despite feeling crappy about my poker play, when all was said and done I was only down about $250 for the trip in poker tourneys and cash (I forgot to mention that PLO treated me quite well...I won some $300+ in PLO cash games). The kicker was the money I blew at table games. I didn't walk away a winner from a single one of the table games I played over the course of my 5-day trip. I lost at Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, and Pai-Gow, to the tune of $730. The next poker trip is going to be poker-only. All it takes is one trip like that to lose your taste for games that are stacked against you.

Okay, that's enough about the trip. I'm trying to get back into the online swing. And I'll have a post coming soon with my overdue June results.