......the first day of our trip where we have literally no plans.
8:30 AM - I'm normally up around 6 AM every day. It seems like 8:30 is becoming my new time on this trip. I am fine with this.
9:00 AM - Out onto the patio to enjoy the peaceful serenity of the pool below us before anyone gets in it. Since I am always up hours before Discombobulated Bear makes an appearance, this has become one of my favorite rituals on vacation......just sitting on the patio, drinking an ice-cold Diet Coke, doing something on my computer or Ipad. It's a great way to start the day.
I am pretty sure we will be IN that pool in the not-too-distant future.
10:45 AM - My prognosticative abilities can no longer be questioned. We are in the pool.
At this point, there is no sign of shrinkage.
12:30 PM - That's about as much pool time as I can handle, especially in this heat, so I head back up to the room to have some lunch. I bring Pool Bear a turkey sandwich as was ordered, er, requested of me. She will be there for hours.
2:05 PM - What's this? I feel a nap coming on. I wonder if I should let it get me or if I should fighttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
4:00 PM - Just as I am stirring awake Tracey returns from the pool. She tells me a story of the redneck who joined them down there after I left and spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone that his pro-gun stance doesn't make him a mass murderer just as if he had pulled the trigger himself. It's probably a very good thing that I was gone by the time he started in on his position, as there would have been a confrontation.
Apparently everyone involved in this conversation hates Hillary Clinton, but they don't like Trump either. Too damn bad, people, it's YOUR system that has put those two on the ballot. You can hold your nose while doing it if you must, but if you don't vote for Hillary, you are responsible for every problem that Drumpf causes while in office.
That was a pretty unsatisfying nap. It just didn't take :(
4:30 PM - I hop in the car and head to Panda Express to grab some take-out for dinner. For $45 we get enough food for both of us to enjoy a full dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow. Pretty reasonable. We are planning a late dinner at Mon Ami Gabi tomorrow, outside on their terrace once the sun has gone down and the heat subsides a tad, so having a large meal around lunchtime is the perfect tonic to get us through until our table is ready. We don't generally eat dinner that late.
After dinner we relax a little bit and watch some TV. I am playing in a poker tournament at 9PM at Caesar's Palace. It is a $150 buy in tournament so not huge but if I am successful at least I will win enough to make it worth my while.
8:30 PM - I get to Caesar's and register for the tourney. While waiting for it to start I notice a game called "Free Bet Blackjack". What is that, you ask? Well it's regular blackjack except that when you double or split, the HOUSE pays those bets for you. So if you bet $30 and let's say you get 11, and double down, you don't have to put up the other $30, the house does it for you.....so you are effectively wagering $30 to win $60.
Why would the house DO that, you ask? Well, for one, blackjack at these tables only pays 6-5, so they recoup some of their edge there. Secondly, it makes people play worse. I saw a guy split 4's against a face card, and then a guy doubled down on 9 against a face card as well. I guess the chance to win twice the money without putting up twice the money was too enticing for them to notice that they actually decreased their odds of winning the hand significantly.
Anyway, I sit down and play for a bit, and get only one hand worth doubling on (an 11), and I end up pushing the dealer so nothing exciting. I made $40 in the 10 minutes I played so that's pretty good.
(if you have no interest in poker stories, stop reading now, that's about all there will be for the rest of this blog entry).
9 PM - Tourney starts. My first table is odd, lots of raising and re-raising and huge raises, more than you would normally see at a tourney like this...especially so early when the blinds are so low. We started with 15K in chips, and the blinds are at 25/50 so everyone has 300 big blinds...no need to get nuts. But there is one guy at the table who continuously over-raises and the following interesting hand comes up:
I am in middle position with pocket fours. There is a raise in front of me and I call and so do about 6 other people. The pot has around 1K in it pre-flop. The flop is Q94 rainbow, quite a nice flop for me obviously. The pre-flop raiser bets 800, and Mr. Crazy Raiser raises it to 7500! At this point, I could smooth call but that would be suspicious and pointless, so I shove my stack in, he calls instantly and tables Q9. He doesn't improve and I more than double up my stack really early.
For the next little while I play well and get some decent hands and, most importantly, don't get unlucky. I dominate the table I am at for the first 5-6 rounds and I am almost certainly tournament chip leader at the first break, which is 2 hours into the tourney.
I get moved to another table and continue to play well and get a few hands, and I'm the chip leader at that table too for most of the night.
I get Ad9d on the button and raise a standard amount and get re-raised by the big blind, but he doesn't raise nearly enough to make me fold (mistake number one by him in this hand). He checks the flop of TT2 with one diamond. I bet about 3/4 of the pot, and he calls (mistake number two). The turn card is an Ace. We both check. The river card is a 4, which changes nothing, and he bets about half of the pot (mistake number three). I call immediately and he turns over pocket Jacks! He played every single street in the worst possible way he could have, and he paid for it. He knew it too, and later in the night he told me how he thought he had misplayed that hand. I told him I agreed with him :)
Eventually I make what is, looking back, probably a bad call when a nice Australian girl (who is 3 hours from having to drive to the airport to catch a flight) shoves her stack in after I had open-raised with AJ. She didn't have a ton of chips, but I probably should have folded as she had just enough that I should have known I was not ahead. She had AK and I did not improve, knocking my stack in half. I was able to recover, though, and build my stack up to a top 5 amount again. This tournament had 20 minute levels, meaning that the blinds and antes would go up fast, and nobody else seemed to be noticing that even though I had a huge stack compared to everyone else at this table, I only had about 14 big blinds! Everyone else was playing as if they had tons of chips, but they did not.
Eventually we get down to 10 players (there were 49 entries, the top 5 get paid) and I am second in chips with about 102K.....sounds pretty good, but the blinds were already at 4K/8K....with a 1K ante! As the second chip leader, I only had 13 big blinds!! The chip leader had around 20. Everyone else was in total desperation mode, but they didn't seem to know it.
That nice Aussie girl ended up folding all the way down to about $21K when she finally went all in. She had waited for a hand and she got it, with pocket Aces! The problem is the big blind, who was the chip leader, couldn't possibly fold for another 13K (with 31K already in the pot) and he made the correct call and tabled Q7. Queen on the flop, Queen on the river, and the Aussie was headed to the airport. That's why you just can't sit and wait for big hands when the blinds are so big.
The chips continued to just move around the table for a while. Every time I picked up anything resembling a hand I went all-in and won the blinds and antes. A couple more players hit the rail and we were down to the bubble. Someone suggested we all put in $40 for the next player eliminated so that he/she would end up making $50 for their trouble; normally I turn down any deals at the table, but considering how high the blinds were, it was more than possible the bubble would be ME and I didn't want to go home empty handed, so I agreed, as did everyone else. The bubble burst shortly thereafter when we lost our last female player, a sweet young girl from Denver wearing a Raiders hat! We teased her all night that she would have to cheer for the Las Vegas Raiders pretty soon.
So the blinds and antes went up AGAIN and now nobody had any wiggle room. Then five hands in a row came up that decided my tournament.
Blinds were 8K/16K with a 1K ante, so even five-handed there was going to be 29K in the middle before the cards were dealt. I am in the big blind with about 55K left, and everyone folds to the small blind who shoves his stack (he had eliminated the last couple players and had about 145K). I look down at my cards and see an Ace and call. Doesn't even matter what the second one is (it was a 6). My opponent had 98 and failed to improve, so I doubled up and he was down to around 90K. The very next hand, it's folded around to him (he is now the button) and he shoves. I look down and see another Ace (this time with an 8) so I shove as well and the big blind folds. He has pocket Tens this time though, and I do not hit an Ace, so all his chips go right back to him leaving me with only 14K (less than the big blind).
Since everyone at the table knows I am going in on the next hand, I don't even look at my cards. Then something really bizarre happens: The same player raises to 32K. Think about it.....one player has less than the big blind...the proper thing to do would be for all of the other players at the table to just call the big blind, and check it down to increase the odds that someone would beat me and knock me out. But this guy raises, shutting out two of the other players (the big blind called), very much improving my chances to stick around. A terrible play.
The board came like this:
88477, with three hearts. They checked all the way and turned over not much (the guy who raised to 32K had KJ offsuit), and I looked down to find KhQh for a flush and I more than tripled up! Still alive.
NEXT hand, I look down to find AK! Wow, I toss my chips into the middle and say something like "let's do that again!!!", trying to give them the impression that I am still shoving with any two cards, praying to get a call. I don't get one, however, but I'm now up to about 50K again.
NEXT hand, I am under the gun and look down to find a gorgeous pair of Kings!!! I again toss my chips into the middle, this time proclaiming "Third time's the charm", once again PRAYING to get called...and I do!! Yay for me! Notsofast....
He has Aces!!! LOL. I do not improve and that's it, I'm out in 5th place, with pays $566. Taking into account the $40 I tipped the crew and the $40 we gave to the bubble, I end up with a $336 profit (plus the $40 from blackjack).
Fun tourney, and it's always nice to cash.
And at least I can stop saying that I haven't wagered a dime this trip!!
2:30 AM - The tourney seemed to go quite quickly but it was 5.5 hours I played for. I didn't stick around to see the finale, but the blinds were about to go up again so it couldn't have possibly lasted much longer. I generally prefer tournaments with longer levels so that there is more skill involved at the end, but of course the downside to those types of tournaments is that they go on for much longer.
Tomorrow, another relaxing day, with a dinner at one of our favorite restaurants to cap it off! And with tonight's winnings, I see a nice bottle of wine in our near future.
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