Tuesday $225 Shoot Out

Wasn't a shoot out at all. It was a 15 minute blinds, 1500 chip starting stack with 25/50 blinds to start, winner take all single table tournament satellite into another tournament, a straightforward mtt held the next day. Some tables weren't even taking an hour to complete. This wasn't the structure I was looking for at all but the idea of satelliting into a 100 player field tourney with a huge prize pool still sounded sweet. Also, I've played a ton of super turbos and whatnot so I'm used to fast structures and I think they are actually really fun. No sweat, no worries, All IN!! Good times.

However, 225$ winner take all turbo satellites can make a low dough kid like me broke in fat ladies heartbeat since the variance is so high. I feel like I could win in this structure much more than %10 of the time, but how much more? Are my odds twice as good as the average guy? I highly doubt it actually since the structure of the game meant that my cards were face up on the table and I was completely at the mercy of chance the whole time. My aggressive blind stealing kept me in the hunt down to 4th place but I lost all 4 of my all in confrontations in that time. BvB I lost with K4o against A6o, Q6s shoved from the CO ran into A7o in the sb, and lastly my KTo went down against 89o. There was another hand in there as well, but you can see the structure virtually forces people to shove wide and call wide and you're going to be at the mercy of the cards quite a bit.

That being said, if I could play 9 of them at once I'd be in heavan since I think there was a lot of value there.

Shortly after I played my first cash game, buying into the 2/5 at The Venetian for $350 as I had decided earlier. Over all the table was a bit better than I was hoping for but I still didn't feel threatened. Most of the local "pros" I've played against in Vegas seem to have a strategy designed to fleece tourists as safely as possible and you generally don't have to worry about getting 3 bet bluffed and outplayed for the most part. This table was no exception- not especially tough, not especially soft, and after a couple hours of play I was up $130 when Carrie arrived with her friend and we all decided to get a change of scenery and check out the pool at the Rio. Which was closed. Can anyone tell me why these beautiful Vegas pools close at 6pm while the sun is still shining?

We did get a chance to stargaze at the WSOP and it was hilarious to see Carrie calling out players names before I could. She didn't know a lick of poker before she met me but of course she's seen every episode of High Stakes Poker, most of the WPT productions, and a slew of other random shows now, so she was able to name maybe twenty different players yesterday.

I'm having my usual problem of making myself actually play serious poker. I'm not sure if I'm just trying to avoid failure or I'm being prudent since I'm operating on a short bank roll and I really don't want to play in anything less than totally ideal circumstances. For instance what I really want to do right now is go to the pool while it's still open and get myself a gooey blended drink, but that's kind of a horrible way to prepare for a poker game you want to take really seriously, so. . . we'll see.