Welcome to June 2010. For the last several years, June has become to the poker world the equivalent of the NBA, NFL, & NHL playoffs combined with a touch of college basketball's March Madness and baseballs pennant race and World Series championship.
In some years we even include a dash of horse racing's triple crown (i.e. Jeffery Lisandro's 3 World Series of Poker bracelets last year) and boxings title fight for heavy weight champion of the world. To put it mildly this time of year is planned for, anticipated, and drooled over by all serious poker players from the elite of the poker royalty all the way to the home game heroes. Anyone who has ever played and loved the game is either here in Vegas or wishes they were.
The month of June and July hosts several well respected and highly anticipated tournaments all over Las Vegas. Obviously the king of the tournaments is the World Series of Poker held at the RIO hotel but some of the other lesser known but still wonderful tournaments include:
- Caesars Palace Mega Stack Series
- Binion's Poker Classic
- Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza
- Golden Nugget The Grand Poker Series
- LIPS
- Bellagio Cup
- Aria Classic
- Pink Ladies Poker Tour
- Hard Rock Las Vegas Poker Series
There are a ton of places online that have all the details for all of these tournaments so if you are interested in any of them I recommend that you go to
www.lasvegaspokersource.com to find out all the details about dates, buy-ins, structure, etc.
For today I will discuss my thoughts on the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and The Grand Poker Series, the only two that I have first hand knowledge of.
For all the "Poker" people who read this please bear with me, I may explain some things a bit simplistically for your taste. The simple fact is I have to write at least this first entry for the season so that my mom and some non poker playing friends can understand what I am saying. All of my entries will not be so detailed.
WSOP
The 41st Annual WSOP started May 27th and goes full steam until about July 17th when they will take a break for several months and return in November to finish the final table of the Main Event.
If No Limit Texas Hold'em is to be considered the Cadillac of poker games then the World Series of Poker must be considered the Cadillac of poker tournaments.
The buy-in's are bigger (minimum is $1,000 and the highest is $50,000) and the biggest names in the game all come to play this the most prestigious tournament around.
Heather and I have stopped in to view the craziness a few times already and we will probably stop in to watch as many final tables as we can. I played in a $1,500 buy-in tournament in 2006 and 2007 but since I didn't do very well I have not played in the WSOP since.
For myself it is hard to find value in putting up $1000 - $1500 to try to beat out 2000 - 5000 players at this point in my career. I could play the satellites and try to get into the game cheaper and I may make a few satellite attempts this month but for now, the WSOP is just a bit above my skill level.
All that being said, the RIO has made some great improvements to the tournament this year. The Pavilion is HUGE and they have made it really friendly for people who what to come watch. The Amazon room has been reconfigured for better access, more featured tables, and while I think the main ESPN Final table section needed to be designed with a lot more spectator seats, it is a wonderful improvement over previous years.
There does still seem to be some problems. There is so much going on all the time that events don't always start when they are supposed to. There doesn't seem to be a consistent rule about electronic devices (some people have said that they are not allowed to tweet or post during a tournament while others are obviously tweeting and posting their results). The people maintaining WSOP.com and CardPlayer.com will post final table results every hand for a while and then will not post any updates for over an hour which is frustrating when you are trying to follow the action from home.
Finally my last thought about the WSOP is regarding the vendors. I know that the economy is in rough condition, and I am not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but I just don't understand how prices for everything can keep going up? $8 for a pre-made cardboard personal Pizza? $3 for bottled water? I haven't even looked at the new food court or the Bad Beat Bar prices but I am sure they are similar.
To me it would be better to lower prices and make up the difference with volume but I guess the other way of looking at it is, since it is a pretty captive audience, they can charge what ever they want and people will pay. Well I guess people other than me.
I think the WSOP poker community as a whole should boycott all the vendors for just 3 or 4 days, in protest of the ridiculously high prices the vendors are charging, to show that without us, their existence is unnecessary. 3 days of food inventory thrown out might get it into their heads that we will not just sit idly by while they siphon money out of the poker economy.
All that being said, Long Live the WSOP!!
The Grand Poker Series
The Grand is my tournament of choice for 2010. I love the Golden Nugget and The Grand is a great event. Normally the Golden Nugget poker room is an intimate, dark environment with less than 20 tables.
It is a room set up for cash games and that is definitely where the Nugget puts its emphasis. The daily tournaments at the Nugget are fun to play but the structure is very fast for a $105 buy-in tournament and I have been told flat out that they have no intention of changing the structure (see my posts on methods to evaluate poker tournaments for more details)
To compare the Nuggets daily tournaments with the 57 Grand Series tournaments is to compare water with wine. Yes they are both liquid, yes they can both be enjoyable, but other than that there is no comparison.
The Grand Structure is so much better than the dailies that it is hard to express to non poker players an equivalent comparison. Here are just some points that I think make The Grand an exceptional value.
#1 - The Buy-in and Structure.
With the daily tournaments the buy-in after the one time add-on is $105. For that you get $8,000 in tournament chips and you play 20 minute levels. The blind structure increases so rapidly however that within 3 hours you are searching for any suited Ace to get your money all-in just be be able to cover the blinds for one more round.
With the Grand the $135 buy-in gets you $12,000 in tournament chips, 40 minute levels, and the blinds go up slowly enough that after 5 hours of play you could still have a very playable chip stack.
#2 - The Room.
With the daily tournament you play in the corner of the main poker room. While the seats are comfortable, the lighting is terrible. The room has recently gone through a major expansion and renovation but it is still cramped and the smokers stand right at the edge of the room and blow their smoke right into the room. There are no tournament clocks, and it is often hard to see who is playing the tournament and who is playing cash.
With the Grand, the Grand ballroom is immense! There chairs are not nearly as comfortable but there is great lighting, plenty of space between tables to walk and even though the smokers still line up right at the door, the tables are a good 40 feet from the door so the smoke doesn't get anywhere near the tables.
That being said after playing event number 1 The Grand does have some problems. John (Tournament director at the Golden Nugget) if you have time to read this after the Grand is over I would love to get your comments.
1) The Vig. 20% Vig? Seriously? I was told that for the $125 buy-in event ($135 with the bonus chips) $10 goes to the dealers (a pre-tip) and $25 was withheld for the house. This is so exceptionally high that once people really understand they may not play.
Binion's across the street has similar tournaments but their vig is only 3%. To make the comparison sink in the $125 buy-in at the Grand puts only $100 into the prize pool. A similar event at Binion's would put $121.50 in the prize pool. With the 372 participants that event number 1 got that is a difference of $7,905 which is almost the amount that was paid to the first place finisher.
In other words, the Golden Nugget charged the players $9,300 to put on event #1. That same tournament at Binion's would have only cost $1,395. Now, I am not suggesting that the Nugget drop the vig to 3%, but even the regular dailies with the add-on is only 15.2% vig. If you just matched the dailies you would still make $7,068 and while still a high cost, not quite as hard to swallow.
2) The Dealers. First off all the dealers in the gold jackets are top notch. They are the Nugget's regular dealers and obviously the Nugget searches for good talent with good game knowledge, chip counting skills, and good table management skills. It is too bad that in order to staff up for an event of this size the same care and due diligence could not go into the selection of dealers.
Yes they are competing for dealers that staff all the other tournaments but seriously this is a huge fault in the event. I am sure that as more events are run some of the white shirt dealers (part timers) will get better but in event #1 the $125 NL tournament, it couldn't get much worse.
My first dealer was a gold jacket dealer at table 60. He controlled the game, kept things going, and couldn't have been more professional. He signed the card twice before getting rotated and lets just say he obviously set the bar way to high.
The next dealer to come in couldn't do a proper shuffle, caused a mis-deal on one hand 4 times (she couldn't seem to remember to deal to the stacks even when someone wasn't there), didn't keep track of the action and had to be prompted with whose turn it was to act, and what legal bets where. Sorry Karen but you need a lot more practice and you need to learn how to keep track of the action and count chips.
The next two white shirt dealers where no better. Several mis-deals, counting chips on an all in, one chip at a time instead of by stacks, and in several cases starting to push pots to the loser rather than the winner. The table was able to correct the errors but we shouldn't have to.
I was then moved to table 28 and while I will get to the details of my hands at this table later, many of the same problems where happening here as well. In one all-in pot the player asked for a count. The dealer took the $100 chips and put them in the oddest stacking configuration I have ever seen. He made two stacks of two then put 1 chip on top of that. He then proceeded to make 7 such piles and then announced that the bet was $3,000. He totally missed the 7 - $1,000 chips and the 2 - $5000 chips and miscounted 7- $500 stacks as $3,000 and not the $3,500 that it actually is. The table obviously corrected his error before any damage was done but how can a dealer announce an all in bet as $3,000 when in reality it was $20,500?
Please work on getting better training for these part timers or spend some of that crazy vig you charge for some dealers that are already trained.
3) The Temperature. Holly Crap that room was FREEZING!!! I know that poker rooms tend to keep the temperature low but my gosh. Next event I will be wearing Levis and bringing a sweatshirt. Kind of crazy when it is 105 degrees outside to be complaining that it is cold. On this point however I am sure you will never make everyone happy. I am concerned however on how cold it gets later at night.
4) The Tournament Clocks. Don't get me wrong, the fact that there are even any tournament clocks is better than having none. But what I don't understand is why, in event #1 with 372+ entrants, the main clock was not for that event but as for the #2 stud event with probably less than 100 entrants. The clock for the most people was tucked in the front corner, invisible to a majority of the players.
I am sure that the Stud players where happy but they were definitely in the minority. If 3/4th the room is going to be filled up with players from one tournament regardless of the game, shouldn't the biggest clock be for that tournament?
5) The Public Address System. Something should be able to be done with it. With the overhead music and the ambient noise in the room very little could ever be heard. When the room went relatively quiet when Phil Hellmuth entered the room and made his little speech it was a bit better but most of the announcements were impossible to hear.
There needs to be either more or better speakers in the room. Speakers from the 30 foot ceilings with music coming from them even when you are talking just don't cut it with a room of over 600 people watching, playing, dealing, and managing the games.
6) The Rules. While most people know most of the rules there where obviously some people who either didn't know any of the rules, or were intentionally breaking the rules to see if they would be enforced. Now I am not suggesting that every rule needs to be announced before every tournament but there needs to be some announcement of some of the most serious rules before the cards are in the air.
Here are three examples that I think need to be announced before every tournament and need to be enforced if they are broken.
- Taking chips off the table during breaks. This is never allowed in any tournament that I have ever seen and yet it happened in event #1 on the very first break. However, instead of the rule being enforced disqualifying him from the tournament and his chips being taken out of play, he was given "a stern warning" and paid a penalty of the two ante's that he missed, his missed big blind was given to the winner of the pot he missed (although that didn't seem right either because the winner of that pot did receive the big blind that he should have won from a different player), then there were two small blinds in the second hand and he was dealt out of the second hand.
Needless to say it was a cluster that took over 5 minutes to resolve. This should have been resolved in 1 minute by referring to rule 38 of the Tournament Directors Association's official rules (if TDA rules are being used for The Grand).
Anyone coming to a seat with chips in their hand had better have a seat card in their hand as well or their chips should be forfeit. How else can you prevent chip passing? Please don't say you are going to go to the Eye in the Sky. Seriously, how many times have they actually gone to the eye in the sky and prevented chip passing?
- Use of Electronics\Messaging. Is it OK or not to use your phone at the table? I know that it is impossible for the dealers to know if a text message being sent is to a buddy at the table or someone's mom in another state. For the simple fact that it is possible that the message could be going to the person at the other end of the table that alone should make any use of phones illegal in a tournament, period. If you need to make a call or send a message you should have to get up and leave the tournament area or your hand is immediately killed.
What if their phone is also their music device? If you want to listen to music (another bad idea that I think should be against the rules) then your music device can't have the capability of sending messages to others. Simple rule. Implement it and enforce it. 1st offense you get a warning, 2nd a penalty, 3rd expulsion from the tournament.
- Betting with many chips in your hand. Many players will grab 1000 worth of 100 chips, reach out and then drop 300 or 400 worth of chips and pull back the 600 or 700. This is (or should be) an illegal bet. Every chip that crosses the line (even if the line doesn't physically exist) must go into the pot.
There are a lot of young angle shooters looking for reactions and dropping more or less chips to suit their fancy and it is just another form or string betting. Obviously if the bet amount is announced before any chips are pushed in the verbal amount is binding and if someone goes to make a call and they have 5 chips when they only needed 4 they can pull the one chip back.
This type of betting is getting worse all the time because the rule either doesn't apply at some locations or is not enforced. Can we have a ruling from the floor?
Take 5 minutes at the start of the tournament, in the form of making everyone shut up and listen so that everyone can hear these important announcements. If you have been told the rule up front, you can't claim ignorance later. 5 minutes that would make things a lot better for everyone.
P.S. Is there anyway to get the overhead music turned off in the Grand Ball Room?
My Results at The Grand
No poker player wants to hear another poker players bad beat stories so if you don't care about how I busted from event #1 of The Grand you can skip this section. Some people, especially in my family who are not poker players may hopefully understand after I explain just how unlucky my last hand was.
My tournament was fairly slow. My starting stack was dwindling because some of the plays I tried didn't work out, and I was beat a couple of times. At 30 minutes into the 6th level (3 hours and 10 minutes into the tournament) I had $4500 chips left. This is not a good place to be.
To discuss the last hand you need to understand two previous hands. I had just been moved to table 28 where all three hands took place. I was a super short stack at the table and I was told when I arrived that 4 people had previously sat in my seat and had busted. The chip leader at the table had approximately $120,000 in chips.
Hand #1: This was about the 12 hand I was dealt at this table. I was in the Big Blind ($200/$400 with $50 ante) and the button raised to $1200. I look down at A Q hearts and decided to just call. The flop came 7 Q Q. I checked and the button bet $4000. This was more than I had and I obviously called. He had A K and didn't improve so I more that doubled up to $11,900.
Hand #2: Two hands later I was on the button (same blind levels) it was folded to me and I looked down at J J. I really am not a fan of Jacks as I have been booted from more tournaments with Jacks than any other hand. However, I have position (I get to act last) and I still have a short chip stack so I can't afford to play passively. I raise to $1000. The small blind thinks for almost a minute before he re-raises to $6,000. This represented more than 1/2 my remaining stack and I really felt like he was an overly aggressive player who thought he could push me off of my hand with a very wide range of hands. I moved all-in and he called very quickly. I immediately turned over my J J and he turned over 7 7. Actually a much stronger hand than I thought he would have. There was no help for him on the board and I more than doubled up again to $24,300.
Hand #3: Exactly 10 hands later and 3 hands after returning from the break that occurs between level 6 and 7. I was on the button again. Blinds had gone up to $300/$600 with a $50 ante. A very aggressive player in early position raised to $1800. It was folded to me and I looked down at Ad Qh. Trying to play more after the flop, more of a small ball strategy and with only the blinds left to act after me I decided to just call. The small blind called and the big blind folded. There was $6,500 in the pot when we saw a flop of 4 7 A. The small blind checked and the initial raiser bet out $3000. Again, trying to control the size of the pot and thinking that the better had a hand like JJ or QQ and was trying define where I was at. I wanted to continue to keep the pot small in case he did have AA or AK so again I just called. The small blind folded. With the pot now at $12,500 the turn was another Ace. This is an incredibly good card for me as it means my opponent is even more less likely to have an A and makes almost every other hand I thought he might have more likely. My opponent bet another $3000 and I felt very good that my opponent did not have A K. I thought his most likely cards where pocket pairs over 9, or he was on a complete bluff. There were two cards now with the same suit on the board so I thought that it was best to announce my hand and take down the $15,500 so I went all-in for my remaining $17600.
I was a little bit worried when my opponent called fairly quickly and for a brief moment I feared that I was up against pocket 4's or 7's (giving my opponent a full house) or A K (giving my opponent trip Aces with a better kicker). I was very relived to see however that my opponent had only A J. A hand that I had not even once considered. So with $47,700 in the pot and with my hand crushing my opponents, he had 6 outs (3 4's and 3 7's) for a tie (14%) and 3 outs (3 Jacks) for a win (8%) I was a 92% chance of not loosing this hand and 78% chance of winning. As I am sure you can guess by now the river was a Jack and I was eliminated from the tournament.
I have analyzed this hand over and over in my mind. I could have pressed harder before the flop. But based on the betting I don't think the early aggressive raiser is going to fold before the flop to anything less than an all-in bet and maybe not even then. Do I really want to play for all my chips before the flop with A Q off suit? I don't think so. Once the flop comes I think that he will go all the way with his A J and by the turn there was no bet on earth that was going to make him fold.
I got my money into the pot with the best hand with an over 78% chance of winning and I think even the best pro's in the world would loose their chips the exact same way I did. Still very frustrating way to get knocked out.
This week I am going to play in three practice tournaments at the M (lower buy-in and less time commitment) and then I will be back at the Golden Nugget to play in event #28 and #31. I am also planning on playing in event # 41. #44 and either #54 (if I can satellite in) or #55.
Comments and Questions always welcomed.
C
