The Shark Tank

I’m not going to talk about the Protege freeroll where I drifted down early with some speculative limps and a hand where I lost two pair over two pair from the BB.  I think I played pretty solid, but wound up pushing with AK against 88 and failed to improve.

I did get to check out the set-up at the Borgata.  They seem to be pretty well organized and I was able to buy in with no hassle.  I’m at Seat 5, which is good from the perspective of seeing the board clearly, but bad from the perspective of being able to see all the players at the table.  I like 2/3 and 8/9 the best.  The event doesn’t start until 11 (and apparently won’t go off on time at that) and I was pretty amped, so I hung out in the poker room for a while.  There were empty seats at 10/20 and a long list at 20/40, so I just sat down at 10/20.

Play was horrible.  There was one guy who appeared to be completely unable to read the board and had some odd ideas about proper strategy.  There was a little old Russian guy with an incomprehensible accent who complained about the bad beats and poor play by everyone who wasn’t him all night long.  I played a couple of hours and cashed out up $245.  I missed a bunch of draws early and wound up paying a high price on a few of them — so I was in a hole initially.  I went on a bit of a rush in the last 39 minutes, with a set, a flush and a straight in my last 20 hands.  I got paid handsomely on all three and decided I could go home content.  I was working really hard on my reads and I felt like I had a very good handle on most of the table.

There were quite a few dealer errors.  One time she tried to push the pot to two pair with a straight on board and another time she announced that a player had checked who apparently did not.  The whole table checked around and he bet after 6 people left to act behind him checked.  The floor was called and the guy was allowed to bet and the Russian was quite unhappy about this.  He assured the floor that she didn’t know anything about poker.  It was pretty funny.

I’m going to try to post updates from inside the event tomorrow.  We’ll see how that goes.

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