Trip Report 1 : The Overview

Thank God people pay me to write about poker, because I obviously can't win any money playing it. This weekend was long, at times phenomenal in ways both good and bad, and made me realize things about myself that I'm still processing. It also made me broke. Again.

Not quite broke, for those of you with me as a horse in the blogger Dead Pool, my bankroll now sits flush around the $500 mark. That's right, all American triple digits, baby! That of course means that the other $2,000 of it was redistributed back into the poker economy this weekend, with no one to blame but myself. I need to retool my swing, and maybe get a coach, because my game is in the absolute shitter. I played well in the two tournaments I played, but no cashy-cashy, and the blogger mixed game at the MGM was the only winning session I booked over the five days I was in Vegas. That's bad, even for me, and we all know how quickly I can lose.

Looking back on it, I got tilty the very first afternoon I got there when the 70-year-old Chinese rock in the 10s slowplayed his KK to perfection to get all my money in with Jacks on a 10-high board. His check-push on the turn looked enough like a move that it got all my money in, but I should have been paying better attention to realize that the old leather-asses at the Orleans cash tables are not shoving more than $25 into a pot without the nuts. But I got outplayed and that set the stage for me to outplay myself for the next several days, spiraling further and further into bankroll depletion as I chased losses with poor play right up until I left for the airport, finally pressing my bets too hard at pai gow to leave Vegas with only one little Benjy and a few twenties in my pocket.

There will be more to come, but here's the quick note to start - NO BLOGGER TOURNEY I HAVE ANYTHING TO WITH WILL EVER BE HELD AT THE ORLEANS OR ANY OTHER CASINO EMPLOYING THAT TOURNAMENT DIRECTOR. I have never been party to any group that was treated so poorly by a tournament director at a casino. From the moment I walked into the poker room at 11AM to confirm that everything was good, we were treated as a nuisance and second-class citizens by the TD of the Orleans poker room. We were rushed, our blinds were changed from the agreed-upon structure, and we were generally sneered at by the TD. I'll better describe the bait-and-switch later, but I need to spread my vitriol out over several posts so that the Orleans poker room is mentioned frequently on this blog, so my slamming of the staff at the Orleans poker room Las Vegas moves up on the search engine rankings. Notthat I'm bitter about the terrible treatment we received at the hands of the Orleans poker tournament staff or anything.