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June 22-28: Luxor, Rio and WSOP

Discussion in 'Vegas Trip Reports' started by jtoma, Jul 7, 2016.

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  1. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

    Joined:
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    My Trip Report

    Not a full blown trip report but mostly some opinions and some highlights/lowlights of my trip...

    Flew out of HNL to LAS. Maintenance delay due to a flat tire. I guess better safe than sorry especially with Vegas temperatures around 110 degrees. The heat generated between the tires and the hot runway when touching down must be intense. Two hours later, I'm out of there but that puts me touching down in Vegas around 1:30 am.

    Car pickup was a breeze due to being Dollar Express. I can't recommend it enough. Skip the lines and walk right out to the cars. Find the electronic board with your name and stall, and drive out of there in minutes.

    I check-in at Luxor around 2:30 am. Check-in was smooth until the very end where the desk agent tells me that the room key system is down until 5 a.m. He says he'll send up a security guard to let me into my room. I go up to my tower room and wait 10 minutes. No security guard. Call the front desk. I end up waiting a total of 30 minutes to get into my room. After a long day of travelling, I was pretty upset but too tired to do anything about it.

    I ended up with a Player Deluxe King room in the west tower. The room seemed run down and the furniture had seen better days. Also, the fact that there was no safe means that I will likely not be returning here. Room was comped but I had to pay resort fees.

    About 7 hours after checking in, I checked out of the Luxor to move to the Rio for the rest of my stay.

    At the Rio, I used the VIP registration and was given a Premium King Strip View in the Masquerade Tower. The room was large (~600 square feet) and very comfortable. While it wasn't on the same level of the high end resorts, the room was more than adequate for my needs.

    The primary reason for my trip was to play in the World Series of Poker. It's an annual thing for me, and I have been going every year since 2009. My intention was to play 1-2 bracelet events and a few daily deepstack tournaments.

    My first event would be the event 41 - Monster Stack and I choose to start on day 1B. This means I had a day to gamble and a day where I was forced to work remotely from my hotel room before my poker tournaments would begin.

    Gambling went decently well...

    Royal holding only 2:
    IMG_20160623_183956.jpg

    Wish I had stayed on DDB:
    IMG_20160624_140417.jpg

    High Limit Double Diamond Deluxe:
    IMG_20160624_143008.jpg

    On Saturday I started Day 1B of Event 41 (Monster Stack). It was a fairly large tournament with 6,927 entrants and a prize pool over 9 million. Day 1 was pretty standard. Since we start with 15k chips, that leaves a lot of room to be patient and play ABC poker. I played fairly tight/aggressive and was able to take down most of the pots I entered. We started at 10am and wrapped up for the day around 10:30 pm. I bagged 73,600 chips and would be back for day 2:

    Start of day 2:
    IMG_20160626_132612.jpg

    Day 2 started with approximately 2,000 of the initial 6,927 entrants remaining. We would hit the money at 1039 players remaining so I still had some work to do. It was an extremely up and down day. I worked my 73k chips up to 100k by the first break, then down to 50k just a few moments later when my AQ lost to AK. By the second break of day 2, I was down to just 37k chips. Shortly after the second break, the bubble broke and I had officially made the money... hooray! I then used the post bubble frenzy to disguise some big hands and was able to double up twice with AA and then with JJ. I was back up around 125k chips and sitting pretty comfortably. I started to loosen up and play more aggressively picking on the smaller stacks. By the dinner break I had accumulated about 250k chips.

    Chipping up on day 2:
    IMG_20160626_164351.jpg

    After dinner on day 2 was just as swingy. In the level following the dinner break, I proceeded to lose 4 decent pots for about half my chips. I then proceeded to run above EV and finished the night with 521k and in good position going into day 3.

    Day 3 starting stack of 521k:
    IMG_20160627_110030.jpg

    Day 3 was more of the same up (for most of the day) and down (mostly down at the end). I was down to 423k at the first break and up to 1.1m at the second break. Dinner break up to 1.7m and 1.9m at the last break. Unfortunately after that last break, I went completely card dead and didn't have enough fold equity to shove lightly. In the hand I was eliminated it, it folded around to the button and I pushed about 12bb with 34 offsuit hoping it would get thru. Big blind woke up with AQ and that was my tournament.

    I had dreams of making to my first WSOP final table but it was not to be. I won about 17x my buy-in so the ROI was definitely good. Unfortunately since I made it so deep in the tournament (3 12 hour days of poker), I missed out on a lot of gambling and food that was on my to-do list.

    My flight out was the next morning and I left the Rio at about 6:30 am to make my 9:15 flight back to paradise.

    The main thing is that I left Vegas with more money than I arrived with and memories which I'll be able to cherish until next years WSOP.

    If you made it this far I commend you. The poker section likely lost most people who aren't into poker (and probably some who are). Thank you for letting me share.
     
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  2. breanna61

    breanna61 Super Moderator

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    Congrats on making it as far as you did; no small feat!
     
  3. Big dan

    Big dan High-Roller

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    Do you know what place you were eliminated in?
     
  4. CALELLA

    CALELLA Low-Roller

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    Very well played in getting into the money, these tournaments are definitely a slog and any cash is a good return.

    I played in the Golden Nugget Seniors game and grinded for almost 11 hours with hardly any cards just to fall short of the cash(17 places off money).

    Soul destroying to play so long for zero return so again very well played Sir.
     
  5. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

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    Sorry I guess I forgot to post that. I ended up in 41st place for a $25,493 payout. Before I got eliminated, we were down to 5 tables and that was when it hit me how close I was to winning this thing (or at least making the final table). Unfortunately the cards didn't go my way and I didn't have enough chips to really do much.
     
  6. tringlomane

    tringlomane STP Addicted Beer Snob

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    Nice report and great run all around!!
     
  7. Richard Alpert

    Richard Alpert LOST

    Joined:
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    Congrats on a winning trip! Thanks for the awesome report. Well done!

    RICHARD
     
  8. djslots

    djslots Low-Roller

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    To finish in 41st place is still pretty damn good out of 6900, congratulations on your winnings. Also, thanks again for taking the time to post your trip report.
     
  9. Big dan

    Big dan High-Roller

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    Very well done! What was the buy in?
     
  10. mescalita

    mescalita old and in the way...

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    I love poker reports. Congrats on a good showing. It was nice to live vicariously through you for the Monster Stack tourney. I'm stashing away some cash to play in the WSOP Seniors event next year - would love to run deep into the money also.....
     
  11. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

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    $1500
     
  12. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

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    Best of luck to you. If you have never played in a WSOP bracelet event, I highly recommend it. The guys that run the WSOP are awesome at what they do and the value/structure can't be beat.
     
  13. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

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    Thank you so much.

    I agree. I have bubbled many times and hate the feeling of spending so many hours playing for nothing. However, it just takes one good cash to make it all worth it.

    Thank you!

    Appreciate it!

    I'll admit I got lucky a few times but almost everyone who gets deep in a tournament has to get lucky at least once or twice during the course of the tournament. Thank you for reading.
     
  14. kkinwi

    kkinwi VIP Whale

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    Congrats on a winning trip! And if you actually won on the Rio VP you did very well!
     
  15. caroleehs

    caroleehs Low-Roller

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    You should be very proud of your win!
     
  16. jtoma

    jtoma Tourist

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    Thanks! Actually my records show I was -200 on VP at Rio but I did put in about 40k coin-in between BP and DDB. I did end up on the positive side for BJ, slots (unusual) and poker.

    Thank you!
     
  17. VegasJmr

    VegasJmr Low-Roller

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    Great Report!
     
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