WSOP Dec 2

Day 2 was better than day 1 for me in terms of the tourney. Same tournament details.... $500/$60 and the details were traveling around the group. There were 299 entries making a total payout of $149,500 and that they would be paying 28 positions. Unfortunately for me, prone wasn't one of them. LOL.

I had AA get cracked after 2 hours and I did get down to 1 individual chip two different times. At the dinner break, I had about $3,100 in chips and was one of the shorter stacks remaining but at that point there were only about 60 people left I knew it was going to be tough for me to survive through 30 people with the blindsand the antes going up rapidly.

There were a couple of very interesting hands that happened during Day 2. I had the same cards in the same position two different times with almost identical board cards, but with different outcomes. At one point, I had rebuilt my chip stack to about $2,100 and had 86os in the big blind. Everyone folds and small blind limps in. I check and the flop is 8, 6, 6. The small blind checks and I bet $500. He calls and the turn is Q. He checks and I check. The river is a 9 and he goes all in having hit his open ended draw. I took that pot with my boat. The second happened a little later when again, I had 86os. I'm the big blind and everyone folds to the little blind who limps in. The flop is 6, 4, 4. I bet $500 and he calls. The turn is Q and we both check. The river is an 8 and the small blind bets $1,000. I knew he had me beat, but I called and he had hit his open ended with the 5, 7 as well. I knew that I should have bet the turn, but just checked because of the over card. Dang, I hate poor play on my part and that was one of the weakest hands of my week.

The hand that crippled me Day 2 was another giant suck out. I had A-10 on the button and bet $500 with $100/$200 blinds. I get one out of position caller. The flop is Ah, 10d, 5s. I bet $1,000 and he moves all in. I call and he turns over A, 5. He rivers a 5.

The hand that busted me out was of course, AA. I pushed all in with only about $1,500 left in chips and had two callers, KJ and KQ. I like it! But unfortunately for me, the flop hit everybody but me with JQ7 and the turn was another J. So there you go.

Back to the cash game! I did meet a great guy there. His name is Mike Hefner and he was actually seated with Jeff B in the first $500 tourney and Jeff pointed me out to him and he introduced himself to me. He is a purple heart recipient withthe military in Special Forces out of Fayetteville. He is recovering from a gunshot wound that he received in July in Iraq. He's still in physical therapy now and will be for a while. He was on a rush and I when I sat down at his table, he had about $3,000 in front of him from a $400 buy-in. I am now including him on our weekly poker game at ITX. I played for about 7 hours only to break even at the table. And some of that was my fault from playing 2 particular hands very soft. I hate it when I do that.

All in all though, I really enjoyed the trip and I did learn a lot. The primary thing that I learned is that I don't believe that I'll play in the $300 or the $500 buy-in tourneys again. I believe that my money would be better invested in the $1000 or even the $10,000 buy-in events in order to weed out some of the poorer quality players. I'll be back!