Bits and Pieces
The Main Event is underway at the Rio, the 4th opening day having just been completed. From my brief review of the action, it seems that not a lot has changed from last year.
Poor deep stacked play is the order of the day, and this is to be expected as most of the players will be unfamiliar with playing a 20k stack, and the impact that has on how to play hands preflop and postflop, particularly during the early levels. I have a feeling this will change in years to come, due to the huge popularity of the deep stack festivals provided by other casinos. The sheer volume of players playing these festivals, means that people will evolve their deep stack play in my opinion.
Some of the hand histories I could not believe (although pokernews have been known to get their facts wrong from time to time). Example below from Raymond Rahme (a final table player last year).
4 limpers at 150/300 and Rahmond Rahme is in the hijack and checks. with
Flop is 7c 2h 8h
Early limper bets 800 into the pot of 1800.
Rahme raises 8100 all in with his Queen flush draw. So…8100 into a pot pf 2600, with a frankly mediocre draw… awful if this is correctly reported. The other guy calls with pocket Kings and they hold. I’m not sure how the guy makes the call to be honest (unless he had a ton of chips) because Rahme’s play looks like two pair or a set of 2s to me, and he’s just trying to take the pot down without risking someone flushing. The mind boggles.
It seems the ESPN “star names” have largely bitten the dust early as well - I haven’t seen the full chip counts for Day 1D, but it looks like Jennifer Harman and Carlos Mortenson are the only big name players well placed at the moment.
If I were to pick a couple of players against the field at this stage, I think I’d go for Alex Kostritsyn, the consistent Russian Aussie Millions winner (95k stack near end of day1) and Mike Watts, the Canadian who is sitting on 101k. Watts runs pretty hot and cold, but he’ll either be out during Day2 or will run really deep I think.
It’s a real shame not to be there - 2009 will almost certainly see my Main Event debut, as I’m not going to bother going to Vegas during the warm up events. I’m unsure whether Sonny played in the end - if he did hopefully he’s still in there.
In other news, the WSOPE have announced their schedule for September. Whilst the Main Event is still ludicrously priced at 10k GBP entry, I see there is a £1,500 bracelet side event, which I imagine I will play on September 9th. Harrah’s are banging on in the press about how people play UKPT regularly for 1k, so they are expecting a sell out field. What they neglect to mention, of course, is that the UKPT events are 10k starting stacks, whereas WSOP will doubtless stick to their formula of a 3k chip starting stack. I guess I’ll still be seduced by the chance of winning the bracelet, and enter this expensive crapshoot, but we shall see.
Finally Shazbo finally started playing on Full Tilt with pretty spectacular results. In three $75 tournaments entered (with 250 runners or above), she cashed in all three and made two final tables winning a total of 5k. Nice.
This week sees the UKPT League again on Thursday, followed by my home game on Saturday night. If past form is anything to go by, the home game will be carnage, ending at 9am Sunday morning, and will cost me approximately £300. In addition, the Omaha planets will align once again, and Honest Dave will win circa £2k ;)