Finally the day arrived, I’ve just turned 21! At four minutes past midnight I registered for my WSOP Players card at the Rio, while being registered I got a good chat with the girl behind the counter, she laughed a bit when she saw my ‘I support single moms’ t-shirt - she said she liked it.

I also got an application made for my ITIN number, just in case I make a major cash in one of the tournaments, it would be a serious bad beat if I were forced to leave behind 30% of my winnings due to US tax laws.

I arrive at a semi-good table. There’s about four players that I quickly recognize as being good players, whereof one of them has a highly tuned luckbox. The luckbox quickly becomes the chipleader at the table, bullying others around. There’s no doubt that he was a good player, but seriously, he just hit his hands. There was also a noshow at my table that had yet to show up when I busted after about three and a half hours, he had around t300 left (starting stack = 1500). I guess he was a better player than me, he must’ve read Harrington, he played kinda tight.

The first guy went out after about 10 minutes in a sick sick hand. Two limpers (the luckbox in the BB) see a flop of 779r, they both get all in. The first limper shows 99 for the flopped full house, too bad that our luckbox just flopped quads with his 77! That is without doubt the sickest beat i’ve seen live, mind you that I haven’t played much live though.

The luckbox quick get’s irritated with me as i’m sitting a couple of spots before him, continuously stealing his blinds. It ends up in the inevitable blind battle where I raise with 44 (no spades). He calls. The flop comes QsJs8s. I try to make a CR/bluff, but unfortunately he pushes and I’m forced to fold, having about t1000 left.

After this battle I suddenly stop getting hands, i get absolutely nothing. And before i know it, blinds are at 100/200 and i’m sitting with like t600 left. It’s foleded to me in LMP. I look down and see a nice couple of ladies and i push it in. It’s folded around to the luckbox who again goes into the tank while giving me the smirky look. He calls about 400 chips more into the pot of about 900 and shows 75o. Great, I’m a good favorite with about 82%. Unfortunately the flop comes 725r, he flopped two pair. The turn brings another 5 which brings me down to a total of two outs, the last two queens. Unfortunately the river is a blank jack, and i’m eliminated from the tournament at around midways into the 100/200 level.

Also I just received a second confirmation email from Harrah’s for my main event entry, they’ve suddenly moved my starting day from 1B to 1A. It doesn’t matter much to me as i’m already in Vegas, but seriously, how can Harrah’s change ones starting day three days before the tournament starts? What if I’d already made plans? This is no $1000 event we’re talking about, this is the $10.000 WSOP Main Event. Once again Harrah’s shows it’s incompetence.

So I finally arrived at Vegas!

Lack of space

After a grueling trip of about 24 hours I finally arrived at our house in Vegas. As expected the overseas flight was a living hell due to my size and the lack of space in tourist class. To make it even worse, since I last flew with SAS, all passenger seats in tourist class now has their own little TFT monitor. Why is that bad? That is bad because these monitors run off a computer placed below one of the seats in the foot area. Naturally i got the seat which had the computer, so while I was already struggling with the lack of space, I now only had half the foot space that everyone else did.

On the plus side, all overseas SAS flights now have onboard internet via WIFI. How cool is that, surfing on the internet at an altitude of 30k feet?

Immigration troubles

At Chicago I almost didn’t make it through immigration.

I had my Pokernet t-shirt on with a little Pokernet logo and some cards. Besides my t-shirt, the immigration officer could naturally also see that my destination was Vegas, so by putting 2 and 2 together, he figured i was headed there to gamble (duh). He politely asked me, ‘Are you a professional gambler?’. I smiled and answered him honestly, ‘No I am not’.

• Officer: ‘Are you here to play the WSOP?’
• Me: ‘Yes I am’
• Officer: ‘Did you put down the money yourself?’
• Me: ‘Yes i did’
• Officer: ‘So nobody is sponsoring your entry? You have paid everything yourself?’
• Me: ‘I won my entry in an online satellite tournament, so no, i didn’t put down the 10 grand myself’
• Officer: ‘What site was that?’
• Me: ‘Party Poker’

And then he gave me the whole long speech. “You should now, you’re really out on a line here”. He warned me that they did not look kindly upon foreign poker players entering the US and playing their tournaments while bringing back home the money they won. He did let me go though. I have no idea where that speech came from. I guess it might be due to the Goodlatte bill that is currently a very hot topic in the House/Senate.

Pokernet camp

I am staying in the house that Pokernet has set up. We’re probably around 10-11 guys staying there at the moment, and how can you expect anything but a mess when 10 poker playing guys are living together?

The house is great. Everybody’s beating me in pool, but whatever, it’s great fun trying anyways :D We’ve got In’n’Out burgers nearby, a 7-Eleven, taco thingy, Burgerking and so forth.

So I finally got into my first ever real poker cash game at a casino. My main game is without doubt tournaments, I rarely play cash games as I don’t think they’re nearly as interesting, also I’m far worse at cash games than at tournaments. When I do get into cash games online, I usually play the NL25 games at Party, I’ve had lots of problems beating even NL50/100.

I was planning for playing the NL1/2 games in Vegas, but the Rio has 2/5 as it’s lowest, and i didn’t really want to travel further into the strip as I were going to the Rio anyways. So here I was, signing up with the brush for the first Vegas cash game, a $2/5 NL game with a max buyin of $500.

After my name was called for I was assigned a seat at table 199, we were playing 9-handed. I sat down, pulled up five benjamins (benjamins were live at the table, no other notes were allowed as table money) and put them on the table. Within five minutes the chip runner came and took three of my benjamins and turned them into chips. After tipping off the chip runner, I was ready to gamble.

Playing live cash was a lot different than playing online. Within five minutes I’d already categorized most of the players at my table. There were a single female at the end of the table who clearly only played the nuts, she must’ve had a VPIP of like 5-10%. Then there were like 3-4 people who limped anything. And had they thrown their first nickel into the pot, they were calling most raises behind. Lucrative LPP’s, they were.

Also there were three guys who had clearly played some time together as the chatter was going on lively, just as they also ordered drinks én masse.

I had full control over the table, I really felt comfortable playing even though the stakes were much higher than my ‘usual’ game. I worked my stack up to about $1k when I ran into a very nasty hand. At this point in the game, one of the LPP’s had left the game, and instead another serious very tight rock had taken his seat. Like the nut peddling woman, this guy also only played prima hands. So i pick up QsQc in the CO. A couple of limps to villain1 (the rocky man, stack ~ $600) who also limps. Another limp before the rocky woman (villain2, stack ~ $110) who also limps. I raise it up to $35 to get the worst limpers out. I get two callers, both rocks, great. The flop comes 5d2cTd, and the rocky man bets $80 rather quickly. The woman calls all in and the action’s on to me. Now, I didn’t fear the woman as she was already all in and she was shortstacked, I was more careful with the guy as he had a healthy stack himself, and i knew he had to have something to bet out there. I called to keep the pot size under control. The turn brought the money card: the Qd! The guy checked it over to me, i bet $200. He thought for a couple of seconds before he called. The river brought the case Ad. The guy instantly pushed his last chips, around $300. FUCK. I went into the tank. Again, this had no influence on the woman at all, I was only thinking about the man, what did he have? He limped preflop, that could’ve been AK/AQ maybe, definitely nothing worse than that. The way he played it, it would’ve had to be suited, and since the Ad was on the board, it couldn’t have been in diamonds, so no flush. I gave him respect and gave up my hand. He flipped over KdKc for the rivered nut flush. The woman then flipped over AsAh for a rivered set of aces. Wow, talk about a rigged fucked up game. AA vs KK vs QQ, and both AA and KK smooth limped / called preflop, crazy stuff!

This terrible hand brought me down to around $500 again, my starting stack. To avoid tilt and too much thought in general, I left my chips at the table and went to get something to eat. Clever decision.

Later on I had another interesting hand. I get Qs9s on the button. Everybody limps before me, literally, everybody, so i limp with the hopes of flopping a flush, straight or something good. The SB raises it up to $20, and again everbody limps, as do I. The flop comes QhAh9h which gave me bottom two pair, though it was a monotone board. It’s checked around to a semi-aggresive player that had a serious tendency to overplay his hands, he bets around $200 into the middle. The pot is like $160 before this. Now what would he bet so hard here? He certainly wouldn’t do it with the made flush, most likely it’s a hand that’s scared of the flush, it could easily be AK. To shorten it up, i go into the tank and conclude that the risk of him having AQ / the made flush is simply too great, so i fold. The rocky guy from earlier instapushes his stack of like $1k, and the action’s back to the semi-aggresive player. He thinks for a long timem and finally mucks his hand, he shows it to the table… AdQd. The rocky guy won’t tell what he had. It is however later on suggested that it was a bad laydown, I’m very satisfied with my laydown though.

As the night progressed we got increasingly shorthanded, much to my joy. We played 5-handed for a long time, and I loved it since clearly nobody else knew how to adapt. In this period of time i brought my stack up to around 950ish again. The chat was getting really friendly since we’d all been playing together for like 5-6 hours, only one of the guys were talking in toungs sine he’d been drinking all night.

It was clear that the people respected me and my game very much, and they could see that I was an above average player. At one time one of the guys (Kyle) asked me where i was from. I gave him a taunting smile instead of answering (he could see the joke), so he started guessing: “Sweden? Norway? Finland?” I told him to try the last scandinavian country. A couple of seconds passed before he finally guess, “Holland?”.

I ended the session at around 4:45 AM when our table broke up due to it being only 4-handed.

Result for this session: $422
Overall cash game result: $422

So today we decided to take a trip to the Grand Canyon just outside Las Vegas. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon once before on an earlier trip when I was seven, but honestly I couldn’t remember it that well besides it being hot as hell and, well, grand.

We took the large package consisting of a 40 minute flight in a small plane that took us over the Grand Canyon to a small indian run airfield on top of the Grand Canyon edge, a busride along the edge of the Grand Canyon, a helicopter trip into the Canyon and finally a boatride on the actual Colorado River.

After we landed we got on a bus that drove us along the edge of the Grand Canyon into a supposedly native indian village. Like all american things, this was as fake as the average breast on a Las Vegas woman. I didn’t even wanna go see it, I mean, the indian building was the most modern building we’d seen all day, far surpassing the airport buildings.

After taking the bus back to the indian airfield, we got into the helicopter that was awaiting us. This was my first time riding a helicopter, and all I can say is that my boyhood dream of becoming a helicopter pilot was enforced… Seriously, when (not if) I get rich, I’m gonna take that license, no matter what.

At the bottom of the canyon we got onto a pontoon boat that took us about a mile upriver. At that point the boat turned around and drifted slowly towards the camp again, while the guide told us about the history of the Grand Canyon.