The Summer Wind - A WSOP Trip Report …… and beyond!
Don’t ask me why I chose the title of an old Sinatra song to be the title for this year’s trip report, i have no idea, i
WSOP-C Planet Hollywood
Day Three - Friday January 2nd
Thanks for all the good luck messages.
With the re-start not until 1pm I was thinking of the best way to spend the morning and came up with the idea to do some last minute prep work by watching a PokerGo PLO final table stream. I found one with Jesse Lonis, Alex Foxen and Josh Arieh as the final 3 and watched the last 3 hours of it.
What sort of hands are they opening with, calling with, folding? What bet sizes are they using? Would I play it the same way or different? How are they playing post flop? How are they accounting for ICM?
I found it a useful exercise and it took me up until it was time to get dressed and walk down to PH. Wardrobe choice today? All black, à la Gary Player, or Lee Van Cleef in the old westerns maybe. The man in black.
I stopped at Chick-Fil-A for lunch.
Mike Patrick from poker.org sets the scene for today.
The headline would be Ari winning a record equalling 21st ring. Not if we have anything to do with it!
The final table is in the poker room, not out on the mezzanine. We resume on Level 18: 6,000 / 12,000 / 12,000
Jack wins the first hand which was a 4-way limped pot.
On the 2nd hand Ari raises on the button to 30k and we defend with KK42. (I don’t want to 3-bet here and bloat the pot out of position)
Flop: K-4-2
Well it’s going to be hard for it to pair up lol.
We check. Ari bets 25k. I’m happy to take it here and raise to 80k.
Ari to my surprise 3-bets to 160k.
I contemplate just flatting. What can he have?
Maybe AA with a 3 or a 5 and backdoor flushes?
In the end I decide to pot it and he folds.
The next hand is a limped pot.
We have AQ6x
Flop: Q-6-2 with two clubs. (We don’t have clubs)
We lead out for 25k and Jack calls
Turn: 6
We lead out again for 75k and Jack calls again.
River: A clubs, completing the flush.
I elect to check it, hoping he made his flush and will hang himself.
He did make his flush but makes a good check behind.
I guess I’ll never know if he would have called another bet but happy with the play. Have to mix it up.
Konstantinos (who has two rings like me) says he likes my check and it would have worked with him.
Level 19: 10,000 / 15,000 / 15,000
Jack is now in 2nd place and Ari the short stack, although there’s not that much between the three of them which means I can apply maximum ICM pressure, which I’m doing. No mercy.
Jack eliminates Ari in 3rd. Now he’s closer to me in chips and Konstantinos is the clear short stack so I can’t really force the ICM pressure anymore.
I open the button for 30k with 4678
Konstantinos 3-bet pots it from the SB for 105k
I call.
Flop: 7-J-5
Konstantinos bets 100k which is about half of his remaining chips.
We raise and set him in.
He calls.
His par of Jacks is ahead but we’re the clear favorite with a full wrap:
Turn: 2
That’s no help. Konstantinos is still ahead.
Come on!
River:
The river is a 3 completing our straight! LFG!
We’ll start the heads-up battle against Jack with a 1.3 million to 600,000 advantage
Level 20: 10,000 / 20,000 / 20,000
We’ve been playing heads-up for about 20 minutes and I’ve increased our lead to about 1.5 million to 400k when we play the following hand:
We call on the button with AQQ6 and Jack checks his option in the BB
Flop: 8-6-Q with two clubs
Jack bets 40k. We call.
Slowly does it.
Turn: 9
Jack bets 75k. We call.
Slowly does it.
River: 9
Jack bets 100k and has 160k left behind.
We raise to set him in.
He thinks for a while and reluctantly calls it off.
We’re good of course for ring #3
Oh, think twice, ‘cause it’s another trip for you and me to Paradise
It was an interesting hand. Can’t really fault Jack who had a straight and a flush draw and ended up with trip nines.
Every chip in the room. Best feeling in poker.
The man in black.
Coming in with the chip lead I guess has its own sort of pressure as I’m expected to finish it off, so I was very happy to get the job done in clinical fashion. And I wrapped it up in about 90 minutes so was able to have a little break before today’s TORSE tournament started at 3pm
It’s very hard to go back-to-back and I didn’t get anywhere near today. I grinded it out but eventually succumbed to Christian Roberts in level 11. First time playing with him and he’s a super nice guy as well as a great player.
He got me on my exit hand.
Playing 2-7 he raises from the SB and I 3-bet from the BB. He calls.
First change: 3 for him. We draw 1 to 2578
He bets. We raise all-in. He calls.
He stands pat. We drew a 9. What to do?
I go into the tank.
He drew 3 and now he’s pat?
It’s not a snow he says jokingly.
I think he could have a 9 and if so our 987 can’t be good.
I throw the 9 and draw 1.
2nd change: pat and one.
We pair the five. No good.
3rd change pat and one.
Showdown
He has a Ten!
Aaaarrrrgggggghhhh
We squeeze but it’s paint.
GG
Frustrating to break the winner but he says if I would have patted he would have broken the Ten on the last draw in which case he would have got the 5 that I drew and improved to an 8 to win anyway. So maybe it was a Kobayashi Maru scenario anyway.
I walk back to Excalibur stopping in at Craftsteak at MGM grand for a late celebration dinner.
8oz filet and a glass of Malbec. Really good.
On Deck Tomorrow: $1,125 PLO
very very well done David. Brilliant stuff. Seems like you ran well but also maximised both your chip advantages as well as your hands. Great work closing it out so efficiently
Very nice finish for the ring.
Thinking of coming out next week for an event or two.
Thrilled for you! What a phenomenal post ... you win your third Circuit ring and you get in a Kobayashi Maru reference. Well done on both counts.
Based upon your momentum and your poker acumen, I sense a bracelet in your future.
Boom. The year of Tony is over. The new year of Tony begins.
No sweat on the Paradise trip. Took a whopping two days. EZ game.
Ship it! Catching up to Ari Engel soon 😀
Congrats! Saw it on the app last night.
Man, it took you forever to get that ticket to Atlantis. Way to go! Thanks for writing it up.
You probably should have thrown it to Ari so he can surpass con artist Hawkins.
Nice work, Tony! Congratulations!
As much as your family enjoyed Atlantis this year, that's also a big win for them. Awesomeness!
Nice work, Tony! Congratulations!
As much as your family enjoyed Atlantis this year, that's also a big win for them. Awesomeness!
Yea first thing I did was to video call the kids to tell them.
This year you can actually choose between Prague for WSOP Europe or the Bahamas for the package. It's no choice for me, I wanted the family vacation again so that's taken care of, but now the goal is to win another one before April so I can go to Prague as well!
Congratulations!
I think Kirk’s solution to the Kobayashi Maru triple draw situation would be to go through the deck and look for a 3.
WSOP-C Planet Hollywood
Day Four - Saturday January 3rd
The first order of business today was to change hotels, so I walked down to the Flamingo where we’ll be for the next 3 nights fully comped.
Not sure what sort of room this is as I booked ‘assigned on arrival’ but it’s one of the nicer rooms I’ve had here. Not new, but very spacious.
PLO again today. This time with a bigger buy-in of $1,125 but a smaller field.
We don’t last long unfortunately. Got it all-in on the turn with 89TJ on a J-T-7-3 with two hearts board. Villain also had 89 for the straight and a re-draw to the flush. So our two pair re-draw against his flush re-draw. A chop would have been fair, but poker isn’t fair. The flush comes on the river. GG
I elected not to fire again. I don’t really have any set ground rules on when to fire another bullet and when not to. It all depends how I’m feeling. Maybe I should take a more scientific approach here?
Anyway, I headed over to the B as there were two seats open in the $80 Mix game.
Dinner table-side while playing. I normally get the Filet from Prime but decided to try it from Lago this time. OMG why have I never had the Lago Filet before? It was really good. It comes served with creamy polenta, garlic butter and truffle jus. 10/10 and better than Prime.
While playing the cash game I was keeping an eye on the tournament clock from the PLO. They were down to just 10 players remaining from 40 entries and late-reg was still open.
So as the cash game was winding down anyway I decided to head back over to PH to fire another bullet.
(Made a $500 profit in the cash game after 6 hours. No real interesting spots that I remember)
Unfortunately by the time I got there they were down to only 8 players and had closed late-reg early as they were just 2 away from the money so I got shut out.
Would have been a nice +EV spot with overlay as they didn’t meet the $50k guarantee.
Oh well, never mind. Tomorrow’s another day. Back to the Flamingo.
On Deck Tomorrow: $600 Omaha 8
The first order of business today was to change hotels, so I walked down to the Flamingo where we’ll be for the next 3 nights fully comped.
Not sure what sort of room this is as I booked ‘assigned on arrival’ but it’s one of the nicer rooms I’ve had here. Not new, but very spacious.
It's a 'Go Room', which are the older ones at Flamingo. That said, it looks very spacious and even have a bath tub in addition to shower. Maybe some kind of mini suite or similar.
It's a 'Go Room', which are the older ones at Flamingo. That said, it looks very spacious and even have a bath tub in addition to shower. Maybe some kind of mini suite or similar.
Thanks, good to know for the future, although I wouldn’t stay here during pool season as I’m not a fan of the party pool vibe.
While playing the cash game I was keeping an eye on the tournament clock from the PLO. They were down to just 10 players remaining from 40 entries and late-reg was still open.So as the cash game was winding down anyway I decided to head back over to PH to fire another bullet.(Made a $500 profit in the cash game after 6 hours. No real interesting spots that I remember)Unfortunat
That's pretty bad to change the rules mid-event. One would think Circuit events are at least semi-premier, to where you can count on competency and adhering to the rules they made for themselves. Maybe the TD was a PHo employee and accustomed to running the clown show that is their poker room.
That's pretty bad to change the rules mid-event. One would think Circuit events are at least semi-premier, to where you can count on competency and adhering to the rules they made for themselves. Maybe the TD was a PHo employee and accustomed to running the clown show that is their poker room.
It’s certainly not the best run stop I’ve been to.
There’s some very bad dealers, 3pm start times suck and structures are bad. They have dinner breaks scheduled even though we start at 3pm (although everyone veto’d it In the PLO I won) and today we jumped from 4k-8k limits straight to 6k-12k, missing out the 5k-10k level making it very crap-shooty.
WSOP-C Planet Hollywood
Day Five - Sunday January 5th
The only good thing about these 3pm starts was that I could watch the NFL today before the tournament, but I didn’t have much luck. Cincy lost killing my parlay, Atlanta -3 was a loser as the Saints pulled out a back door cover and then in SNF I had Baltimore money line and they missed a field goal to win it as time expired.
I was looking for a place to have lunch and saw that Gordon Ramsey Steak at Paris was open for lunch so gave it a try.
Not a fan of the nightclub sort of vibe but the food was good.
Lunch menu:
The waiter asked me if I wanted bread and I said sure, thinking it was complementary. (It was not) My bad I guess for not asking.
I went with the Tagliatelle.
And sticky toffee pudding.
Really enjoyed both the pasta and the dessert but $15 for the bread, I felt raped.
The cards didn’t cooperate in the Omaha 8 tournament. It was lose one, win one all day until the win one part dried up and I finally busted after midnight a few spots short of the money. Frustrating to grind hard for 9 hours and be constantly fighting the cards. Seemed every time I had A-2 I got counterfeitted or the low never came.
Nice views of the casino from up on the mezzanine. I like PH. It’s a visually appealing casino.
On deck tomorrow: $600 O.E.
Yeah wow $15 for the bread would make me very sad. That whole bill looked pretty toppy to me tbh
Good luck tomorrow
