Off to the Venetian

Heading off to the Venetian in about an hour to hit the daily $340 there. From what I gather the field and structure is superior to that of caesers where I played yesterday, normally with about 600 runners making a $35k first place. Now that would be nice!

I thought the Caesers tournament yesterday was really good though. For $340 you get given 20,000 chips on a 45 minute clock starting at 25/50. It was so juicy. The amount of people stacking off 400 big blinds deep with top pair and stuff was just a joke.

I doubled up to 40,000 within the first level after 3x'ing KK from EP. Getting two callers then some guy 400 big blind reshoving AKo lol. I was seriously like 'FML he's woke up with aces and is tooling out, meh I'm a tourney donk, I can't fold KK'. Pretty glad I called it too as that set me up quite nicely.

I had a really good table and to be honest given the quality of play I expect I'll be coming back many times to Caesers over the summer. Over the next few hours I ran my stack up to around 85,000 when my bust out hand occurred. I thought it was a pretty interesting hand worth posting anyway:

It folded around to quite possibly the chip leader in the tournament, some wild bluffy Italian guy raising and 3betting almost every hand and imo stacking off way too light and trying too hard to bluff the wrong people. He 3x'd it and I elected to flat on the button with my AQo. I'm sure his range is very wide here, and kind of wanted to 3bet, but 80BB deep I felt I would have a greater success rate playing in position post-flop rather than raise/calling all in this deep at a very soft table.

So I flatted and we both went to a flop of AK9 rainbow. He checked to me and I cbet 2/3 pot. I think his range here is mainly weighted towards hands with showdown that don't want to cbet and not know where they stand. Hands such as Kx, maybe q9 or something. His cbet range would normally be his entire range on this board based on past hands, yet he has also been leading out with top set etc. so I was sure he had a marginal 1 pair holding. Inevitably he check-called.

The turn came the 10s putting a second spade on the board. Again he checked to me and I elected to value bet 2/3 pot again. Here he check-raised to 25k from my 9k bet (25k was about chip average in the tournament - we were both pretty stacked). This was kind of weird as I had about 35k behind. I was almost sure that he didn't have QJ for the straight but something like one pair that picked up a flush draw or a gutshot. To be honest with this guy I really think he could even have 67s or something trying to bluff me. The only value hand in his range that I could see doing this would be K10 hitting two pair on the turn but even then he may elect to check/call it rather than check/raise.

I elected to flat which I'm really debating now. Although if I shove, I get no value from anything that calls, I think he is bluffing/semi-bluffing such a large % of the time that I would get more value just calling and calling about 85-90% of rivers (non king and non spade). So that's what I did, which I'm not too sure about but it's certainly close. What really made me call though is that as I bought out the 25k in chips to call I saw him slightly gulp out of the corner of my eye and look straight ahead. I thought this was pretty weak and went for it.

The river was an offsuit Q. The board then was AK9TQ. With me having AQ. He instantly jammed and I called after a few seconds. The story he was telling was really polarised to QJ given my flop read, how he reacted on the turn when I pulled the 25k chips forward and given there are only 2 combinations of QJ available (I have 1 Q and 1 is on the board), the chance of him having QJ is drastically reduced. So I called and he flipped over KJ. I'm kind of happy with my read as I feel online I would normally fold the turn here, but still the added information for paying so much attention and live reads really does help to make better decisions. I'm still not sure about shoving turn or just calling but whatever, onto the next tournament!


So afterwards, I was a little annoyed given how I had about 2.5x average stack and punted it. Regardless, I headed over to meet up with house mates at the Mirage to play some cash. Won $300 at $2/$5 which free-rolled my tournament in a pretty soft cash-game. Had an amazing pizza for dinner using the comped vouchers then the whole flat went to this bar/pub just off the strip and spent the rest of the night drinking, chatting and playing pool/darts.

A fun day!