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.

Rushing, Vienna, Vegas

My upswing just doesn't seem to want to stop, not that I'm complaining. This is without a doubt the longest (and simultaneously the largest) upswing I've experienced in my 3 years of playing poker. As of right now I'm up just over $22.7k for the month alone and we're just 9 days into June. It's time like this when you feel invincible and I'll be the first to admit that I feel pretty damn good right now. I've played around 9k hands this month so I'm definitely on target to get in at least the 20k hands that I wanted to before flying to Kansas.

It looks like I won't be making it to the Austrian Masters at CCC next week. This will be the first week of tournaments that I'll be missing in Vienna (made it to the last 3 or 4 I believe). I was really hoping to make it down there again but it's not looking like it's gonna happen this time, oh well.

As each days goes by I'm getting more and more excited for Las Vegas. In my mind I'm kinda disappointed with myself for only booking one week to be out there, I feel like the time is going to absolutely fly by when I'm out there and I won't realize what hit me until it's time to go again. Who knows, if things go well for me as well as Olli and Sutti we can think about extending the stay a little bit. I'd also like to hop over to California for a day or two if possible. So many things to do, so little time to do them in...