♠ Thursday, September 22, 2005
Tournaments
A short note, crowing a bit maybe. After less than excellent days at Soaring Eagle on Sunday and Monday, I went to Manistee Tuesday for their No-Limit Holdem tournament.
As I mentioned, I won this about a month ago, which provided the cash to head out to Vegas last week. (Gil won the next week.) This Tuesday, Gil figured that being out of the office all day might be bad, since some of his customers are still ticked that they couldn't reach him last week. So, I went up myself.
Whether it's the nice weather, or the fact that school's started, or the upcoming holiday (Columbus Day is only a couple of weeks away, and people have to plan for events like that), or whatever it is, the tournament is more sparsely attended than they've been thus far. Only 42 or 43 people are here for this tournament, which is capped at 53 entrants. Since they still pay nine places, ninth makes a profit of exactly $5 and sixth barely doubles his money. It'd have been nice if a couple of places were chopped off the payout list to fatten the payouts above them.
I wish I had a great story to tell about how I won the tournament. Mostly, though, I had decent cards that held up. I was at or near the chip lead the whole second half of the tournament, and I won. Headsup took a while, as it took a while—twenty or thirty hands—to find a hand we were both willing to end the tournament with. He even doubled through me a couple of times, so he actually had me covered on the key hand (my AT v. his A7), by maybe T$1600. The next hand ended it, as T$1600 wasn't even a small blind at that point. So I got $1200, and he got $600, and the day was at an end.
I wasn't sure whether I wanted to stick around for a cash game, but they only had one going when I was done, a $4/$8 limit game. Maybe I would have stuck around if I could sit right down, but I would have had to wait behind one or two people, so I decided I was pokered out for the day and went home.
When I got home Gil suggested that we check out the Trump's tournament on Wednesday. They've had this for a while, but we haven't made the journey. We weren't missing much. In essence, the blinds go up too fast for this expensive tourney. We started with 80 or 90 people, and the whole time from 60 left down to the end, people were going out just about every hand: The blinds forced nearly every hand to be an all-in hand. For $85+$15, and $40 rebuys, that's not enough play. Gil goes out quickly, when he couldn't get to the ATM fast enough to do a third rebuy, but I last until there are 25 left or so. JT limped, I shoved my just over four big bets in with AQs, he calls, he catches the straight, I'm done. Oh well; even on a 2:1 proposition sometimes the 1 side hits. In any case, I'm in no hurry to make it back to this tournament.
I did check into a taxi license in Nevada; there's no such thing as a CDL there but for Vegas one does need a license from the Nevada Taxi Authority (or some such). It's basically just an $85 thing, but one of the requirements is that one must be resident in Nevada for thirty days before getting the license. So, I couldn't drive a cab immediately upon getting out there, unless perhaps I had established residency last week when I was there. And what address would I put on my Nevada driver's license?
Gil found a couple of random jobs online to look at, which I will probably look into. I still want to get out there, by hook or by crook.
