Break 1 Update

Busted

I had a couple more really productive meetings in the last few days and got a lot of work done, so, regardless of what happens tomorrow and afterwards, the series has not been wasted. That's not going to matter, though, because I think I'll just win the ME, instead. My table is Tropical 2 (in the satellite room) - that's an open invitation to stop by and say hello if you feel like it.

Meanwhile, a huge shoutout to Bond, who won a 3K Bellagioment last night (!) and got out of makeup (!!!) in addition to an awesome (not actually awesome) 14K gold bracelet. Combined with his WSOP FT and the other Bellagio chop he's had, he's now up about 300K on the series (of which he keeps, like, 20% - thx makeup) and might be enough to get him signed by FTP or Stars. I really hope so, because the guy deserves it.

That now makes 6 final tables for the house (4 WSOP, 2 Bellagio) and - my best guess - around 400K in profit (of course, 3/4 of that going to various people's makeup.) Sirwatts and I are the exception to the rungood, but Watts has 100K after day 1, so I'm gonna go ahead and assume we'll both FT it.

Here's to tomorrow being awesome!

My final 2 prelims turned out to be a standard 0 for 2 - I won 1 hand in one of them and 0 for'd the other. (When you 3 bet ~5 times in limit and wind up flopping/turning 2 pairs (1 top, 1 middle), neither of which are good at showdown, you're not gonna get anywhere in a donkament.)

On the other hand, in the last 2 days, I *did* meet about a thousand people I badly needed to meet, and a couple of those are going to result in what I feel is a solid opportunity down the road. Poker is such a small world that almost everybody who's anybody is in the middle of the Strip right now, so there are a lot of different parties, constant networking, and everyone's collaborating on something or other. With the amount of money behind the scenes of this game, it shouldn't be a surprise, but I do feel extremely lucky to be in the position I am right now.

With that said, it's not all a total loss poker-wise, either. As I said earlier, I'm switching games to PLO/razz as a way of temporarily unstressing from donkaments (where, frankly, running bad is getting old). All of my PLO games so far have been on Cake so I don't have graphs, but in the last 2 weeks, I'm up 2K at midstakes PLO and 3K in midstakes/HU razz in less than 3 thousand hands (and about 25 HU SNG's), mostly due to good game selection but definitely having improved in both. At this point, all signs point to me playing them full time - especially since, due to being at the Rio constantly, I'm only playing for an hour or two a night right now and on only a couple of tables at a time. Once I'm back home, I can do way better than that.

Or, I could just FT the ME and spend the next four months getting coached by CTS or something.