Dead Money Diaries

Slow and steady is the way to go …

A common question I\’m getting these days: \”So are you playing much? How\’s it going?\”

In a nutshell, at the tables, not particularly well. (Especially compared to last year, whence I shocked myself by making more money playing during the WSOP than actually working during the WSOP.) I\’ll see if we can\’t whip up a visually compelling WSOP bankroll chart/graph … but in the meantime, it\’s not like you have to be able to read music to get a sense of what the following — which is all the poker I have played over the past two weeks — would look like:

Day 2, 2/5 NL, Rio, 3 hours:
-$300

Day 6, 2/5 NL, Rio, 2 hours:
-$300

Day 12, 1/3 NL, Rio, 3.5 hours:
-$187


And then this weekend, I played at the Mirage … was stumbling out of the Thrillist Las Vegas JetVegas Launch Party Afterparty at JET (beer + scotch + vodka + random mystery shot)*dancing on table = not pretty) … was about to hop in a cab back to the Rio but decided I needed to sober up even to let someone else drive. So when a random Friday night reveler near the Mirage Poker Room came up to me and said, \”Hey, you wanna play a $115 sit-n-go?!?\” it sounded like a perfect idea. Upon taking my seat and sizing up the competition, I also paid into a $20 lasts-longer …

My strategy was to pretend I was the drunk guy at the table. I obviously smelled the part, and would pull a Shane with messed up chipstacks to appear really clueless. Ha-ha, they would have no idea what I was up to! It all was working perfectly until the third hand, when I forgot the part about playing differently than the image I was trying to project, and the pair I moved all-in with didn\’t catch up against the re-raiser\’s flopped straight.

Day 14, 115 SNG, Mirage, 5 minutes:
-$135

While the above may be a once twice-a-Series anomaly, all my Rio play is not. Those cash games are the start of what was supposed to be an easy part-time path to poker glory: Play some cash games and use those winnings to buy into satellites; chop often until earning my way into at least one bracelet tourney; get chips early and go deep; text with Tom for advice on getting to the final table/winning … smile for Flipchip as he chronicles WSOP winners; just don\’t get ahead of yourself and even start thinking about Player of the Year …

So clearly I have run into some obstacles, but I still think it\’s a workable plan until I run out of money/Harrah\’s food coupons.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *