Ooh, I’m so close to being ready to party!
Andrew’s coming off a discouraging min-cash in a Venetian Deep Stack event, Dave just can’t seem to win no matter what he plays, and Dan’s the one noting an impressive Vegas grinder hourly? In this episode, we discuss table buzz about the major New York sports betting busts, Ivey and Negreanu’s Australian bracelet wins (is it the death of poker’s middle class?) and introduce our growing international listenership to Awesome Andrew’s Vegas Social Calendar — just in time for the opening of Hakkasan! But then we really do have to drill down on Dave’s recent woes at the table … to help you find your best way out of your poker holes before an extended downswing becomes a downward spiral of total life despair. And our HOTW … pocket 9s under the gun! Do you know a better way to address the pressing societal issue of open-raising vs. limping in early position with small-to-medium pairs? That’s what we thought. (Enjoy the extra links while listening …)
Vegas Grinders 1.10
[audio: https://pokerati.com/podcast/VegasGrinders/VG1.10.mp3]
Episode Resources:
Dan Bilzerian tweeted this picture of $9.4 million in chips with the caption: “Our poker game is officially fucking huge.”
Flags were flying around Las Vegas — and it had more to do with the WSOP than the 4th of July.
Sure, you can always expect to see more $5,000 chips in play on Vegas felts during the WSOP, but the super-high-stakes action that requires them really picked up this summer — more so than usual, it seems, particularly in the days leading up to Big One for One Drop, the biggest buy-in tournament in history.
Pots in the hundreds of thousands of dollars practically became the norm in The Ivey Room at Aria, where a bunch of billionaires and Hollywood socialites were playing $2k/$4k NL for more than a week. At the same time, a $1k/$2k PLO game was going on in the Pavillion Room at the WSOP, and Doyle Brunson was logging super-long sessions at his home room in Bellagio.
Poker room supervisors say Vegas hasn’t seen this level of action since billionaire banker Andy Beal took on “the Corporation” at the Wynn in 2004. ($15k/$30k and $30k/$60k heads-up limit hold’em was their game.) There’s some chatter among Vegas regs about how different poker rooms go about bringing in certain players while keeping others out — lest the biggest casino whales get devoured too quickly by certain poker sharks.
Here is a 2012 guide to the who/what/when/where/why of the really big games around Las Vegas:
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