It is nice to be home, even though I miss my에볼루션. That is one nice ride, and a cabriolet is made for the Vegas heat. When you accelerate quickly from 50 to 90 mph past a roaring truck on the freeway, you know you are alive. It cost me $500 for a day, it was worth every cent and it is not close. A+.
I played in a tournament at Bellagio early in the trip. An old rock to my right started out loudly declaring how he would never raise an ace and a face card, “never!”. Another player questioned his truthfullness, and he repeated “NEVER!”, clearly agitated. First hand I remember him playing he was betting flop and turn of a semi large pot on a QJxx board with two spades. When the river came a non spade king, instead of considering his action he just started mumbling “You motherfucking…”, and checked it down. He showed an ace high flush draw, and the other guy took it down with KT for a rivered one pair. Clearly the old guy thought the world was against him. 20 minutes later we had the most brutal of suckouts on the table as some guy was sent out of the tournament with 33 against AJ on a JT3 board. Turn, T, River: J. Just a sick beat that pretty much left the table shell shocked. The old guy commented “well, what about me with that king on the river, talk about being unlucky”. Half an hour later, he flopped a flush from the big blind against another guys set. A set against a flush is not in horrible shape with 7 outs on the turn and 10 on the river, and he hit one of those. That was too much for old guy who stood up and yelled “Did you ever see shit like that in your life?!?!?”. My answer would be, well, yeah, once or twice. He also got in a few choice words about the WSOP management who wouldn’t let him play in an event when he was only half an hour late. Some people just have no luck at all.
In the $5k event, I played at a table with both TJ Cloutier and Allen Cunningham. The only table chatter I overheard there was TJ telling how he had once seen Doyle get away from quad tens “years and years ago”. As he himself has documented in his book ‘Championship NL Hold’em’, TJ is the very definition of a solid rock, who has made his living at the poker tables folding a lot, and then soul reading people in big pots. He displayed both in a hand where he 3-bet from the button. The first raiser then said “why so little?”, and then 4 bet it. That sent TJ into the tank. After a while he said “Another raise…”. Then “…with a speech…”, and then he folded queens.
