O-Poker

I was meaning to put up this post on Monday, but work got in the way. (I can't complain about that.)

We had a baby sitter for the day on Saturday and my wife was heading to an ex-coworker's wedding with the girls, so it was the perfect opportunity to head over to the Hard Rock Casino in Tampa.

Live MTT

Before heading over to Tampa (about 1 1/2 hr drive), I checked the MTT schedule. The only tourney running was a 10 AM $85+$15 MTT. I started a thread on 2+2 to find out just how horrible the structure of that tourney is and how many people usually play in it. I decided to play in it, knowing that it was going to be a turbo, and then play some cash games afterwards. One of the replies to my post summed up the tourney:

"The tournament is a turbo style that has 15 minute levels. It usually gets around 250-300 players in which half of them have received a free buy in from various promotions in the room. It has a patience factor of like negative infinity and I would rather play heads up Casino War for Rollz. Other than that GL."

I was running late and pulled into the Casino parking garage at almost 10 AM on the nose. No worries. I made my through the smoke filled metal warehouse filled with tables and slots between the parking garage and the "real" building and over to the poker room. (The Seminoles only recently made a deal with the governor of FL to have LV style gaming and they had obviously added as much space as possible as quick as possible.) After waiting in line to get my Player's card and then again to register, I found table 3-2 and paid the extra $5 dealer add-on for an additional 1,000 chips. So we started with 3,500 chips and blinds at 25/50. The bad thing was the blinds went up every 15 minutes (ridiculously fast for live play).

The finally tally was 285 players, paying 24 spots, 6k+ for 1st.

To say some of the players were horrible was an understatement. There was a guy that was clearly on a flush draw. I think the pot size was around 800 when he hit his flush on the river. He was first to act and immediately over shoved his remaining 3k into the pot. The other player thought for about 3 seconds and called with 2nd pair. Amazing. The blinds were still 25/50.

I managed to gradually chip up. It really didn't matter how much I chipped up because it quickly became an all-in shove fest. I was up and down. My 99 shove was called by J7o and I lost. I called a shove with 77 and won the race against AQ. I was dealt TT and I shoved over a guy that had been raising a ton. He had a huge stack and it was an incredibly small amount to call my all-in relative to the pot and his stack. He folding and showed the other tow Tens saying that I would have to have a huge hand to make that bet - LOL.

Fast forward to bubble time. I had around 20k chips when we got down to 3 tables and wasn't getting any opportunities to shove. Once we hit 25 players they started going hand for hand (still 15 min blinds levels and we were getting about 1 hand every 4-5 minutes). The blinds went up to 3k/6k right before my BB and I have 15k chips. UTG+1, I folded 25. UTG, I folded 49.

I post 6k of my 15k in the BB. A guy from mid position, that had been pretty active during the bubble period, pushed all-in. It folded around to me. I look down at AJ. My guess is that I am ahead of most of his range, so I called. Unfortunately, he had AQ and I was the bubble boy.

To give you an idea of how much of a turbo this tourney was:

It started around 10 AM with 285 players and I bubbled in 25th at 1:30 pm. I went and grabbed a slice of pizza and checked out some of the other areas of the casino. Around 2:15ish, I went to see who was left and it was over. :)

Low Limit ($100 max buy-in $2/$5 NL) cash game post tomorrow including being slow rolled, monster draws, tilting blackjack players waiting for a SNG, spewing players, and someone mentioning that they made a call because "Hey, sometimes that works and you win a big pot."