WSOP 2015 – Day 1

Arrived in Las Vegas yesterday. Delta Airlines seemed to be having some problems yesterday so my flight was an hour late. Caught a taxi to the Rio and checked in. As I was walking down to the Amazon Room to scope out the situation, I got a message from Dan Spear about dinner so we met at the Rio Buffet and had a good meal and caught up on what’s been happening in the last 15 years or so. It’s funny since we used to play a weekly poker game when we both worked at Quarterdeck some twenty years ago and we both are still playing albeit more seriously.

I wanted to try out some new tournament plays so I entered the 10pm DeepStack tournament. I generally don’t like this tournament since the starting stacks are only 5K and the blinds are a half an hour and as such is probably the worst structure I play at the Rio when I’m out for the Series. I did manage to take a couple people out fairly early and made some well executed 3 bets and bluffs. I lost a hand for about a third of my stack with a classic AK vs QQ coin flip and then made a read that the LAG player on my right was contemplating a fold and then put in a raise to 750 when blinds were 50/150/300. I three bet 2K with KQo expecting a fold most of the time and position otherwise with a fairly strong hand on the button. He shoved for another 2K and I figured I needed to call getting 3.5 to 1. I flopped open ended with two overlords but he had 2 of my outs with A9 and I bricked the turn and river. This crippled me and I was out in a couple more orbits.

This morning I took care of some phone calls and then headed down to registration to buy into the Friday morning flight for the Monster Stack. Last year we didn’t arrive until two hours after the tournament started and then after checking in we were pretty far back in the alternate list. I think it was after 11pm before we got seated and instead of having a monster stack, we were short stacked for the blind level. When I got down to registration, there were two people ahead of me in line. This was a much better plan than last year. I did buy into the 3pm DeepStack for this afternoon. This is a much better structured tournament and one of my favorite non-bracelet tournaments at the Rio.