Mama said there would be days like this

Well Sutti and I decided to extend the Vegas trip for another week or so to leave us more time for vacation and hopefully for me to play the Main Event.

I really wanted to satellite in, but after two failed attempts at $1k SNGs I was getting pretty frustrated. Luckily I worked out a deal where I sold off percentages of myself and that also allowed me to split my $10k buy-in 50/50 with someone who has trust in me. It's a pretty big leap of faith by him and I plan on making it a good deal for both of us.

3 nights ago I played a 15-hour long chinese poker session with Seb "miamivice", Nico "belinho" and Nik "Ragen." We were playing for $100/point. I started off terribly, down $5k in the first 2 hours. Then I went on a slow but steady run through the morning hours and eventually finished up $7k after 15 hours of play. Woooo hoooo!

As I would discover last night, that run was just the upside of variance though. I only played a few hours last night but managed to lose $7.5k after an unbelievable amount of surrenders, scoops and royalty payoffs. I went to sleep right away afterwards to try and get it off my mind.

Today's plan is to go the Rio and buy-in for the Main Event, which I'll be playing on Day 1D. After I buy in I'm going to spend the day relaxing and getting my body and mind fit for the madness of tomorrow. I'll probably spend most of the day at the pool as well as get a massage during some point of the day, life can be nice sometimes.

Arrival in Las Vegas

After a very nice week in Kansas, we arrived in Vegas on Friday morning bright and early at 7am. Getting our rental car turned out to be more of a hassle than we expected, but we finally got on the road at around 9am and headed over to the "Luckbox Villa" to get settled in. For those who don't know them, it's basically a group of the most successful German online poker pros, most of them under 24 years old.

I wanted to play the $540 Venetian Deepstack tournament as a warmup on Friday afternoon but I made it to the casino a couple minutes too late so I would have only been an alternate. I really didn't feel like doing that so we all went over to Mandalay Bay where I picked up just under $500 playing $2/4NL for an hour.

We then came back to the house to relax a little, but relaxing quickly became gambling instead. First game was a $200 HU SNG vs. Christoph Niesert, who I know from playing in an underground game in Berlin. He lived solely from HU SNGs for a long time, but I managed to pick off a couple bluffs and win the tourney after about an hour.

After that came chinese poker. The guys around here have almost no regard for money, so the game is for $50 a point. Sebastian aka Luckbox is known for never losing at this game, but Friday night was different. We probably played for around 4 hours and I won a total of $3k.

Then came "Seri" - Poker. It's a game where each player gets 7 hole cards. With those hole cards, each player needs to create 3 different hold'em hands and place them face down. Once each player has laid down his hands, a community flop/turn/river are dealt and each player compares each hand to his opponent's hands to see who wins. Playing for $100 per point can get very expensive very fast. It's a game of total adrenaline and involves <.10% skill, but it's fun regardless. -$1.2k for me after 2 hours.

Finally we played $10/10NL hold'em, 5 handed with myself, Alexander Jung, Weyoun, Sebastian and Nico Behling. The game is more aggressive than anything I've ever seen. Rarely is a pot NOT 3bet preflop, many times even 4bet or 5bet. Toss in the factor that a few players were playing very deep ($5k+) and it becomes a very interesting game. I bought in for the standard $1k and made a couple hundred dollars after a couple hours of play. I was dog tired after all this and finally made it to bed around 5am.