Is it just me? Every time I walk past this in the hall on the way to the WSOP, I don’t see a patio chair turned into wall art as much as I see an old man’s walker, crushed under an SUV on Valley View trying to get across to one of the Subways in the Gold Coast, covered in colored crepe paper and stuck up to hide the evidence in plain sight.
I took another shot at the 9am mega-satellite on Friday, ending up firing two bullets because the field got to 38 (three full $1500 payouts and one $1200), but didn’t manage to ever get anything going (hence the second bullet).
I debated playing some single-table-satellites, but since I hadn’t been able to connect up with the person I probably would have sold the lammers to (I cannot imagine myself trying to hustle lammers to people in line, even in a full WSOP; I just don’t have the ‘strike-up-a-conversation-with-strangers’ gene) I decided to wait until the $250 Deepstack at 1pm, which has been getting a couple hundred entries the past week.
I made some call in the late morning, then headed down to the All-American Bar & Grill for a salad before I headed in to Pavilion. It was a little after the 1pm start time by then, but I wasn’t too worried, since the levels were 30 minutes. But even though the line didn’t even extend from the satellite cages all the way to the central aisle, it wasn’t moving at all, at first. There were maybe 20 people in front of me and three windows open, but I stood in the same place for a long time. It was nearly. Half hour before I was seated at the table. And I only lasted about 25 minutes, loving a couple chunky hands, then raising [kc js] in middle position, getting a couple calls, then seeing a [9x 8x 7x] flop and [qx] turn and getting my stack all in and called by [9x 9x]. Then, of course, [qx] on the river.
That was the last tournament poker for me for this trip. I figured that I would go pick up my media credentials, mostly to add them to the collection, and went back to the room to rest up from the excitement of my HORSE min-cash. I saw that I now had a WSOP.com player page and my Hendon Mob profile has the update already, Sadly, it’s not enough to get my on the next installment of the PNW Poker Leaderboard.
I wandered back down to the Amazon room and ran into Kevmath (again, because he’d been one of just five people—including myself—in the drastically-reduced media room earlier) and we firmed up our connections for getting together later. The final two tables of the HORSE tournament were running, and I very much wanted to rail PNW player Kao “Flexx” Saechao, who was second in chips at the time to eventual champ Anthony Zinno (who I’d won a pot from earlier in the tournament, I will remind everyone from now on), but I contented myself with harassing PokerNews because they had Oregon’s Kao Saechao linked in their player profile.
No thanks for that, but they did fix it not long afterward. They might just have noticed that the guy in the player profile looked nothing like the guy at the table. Flexx made 4th place, so great congratulations to him, and he will appear in the Leaderboard. Now wee just need Portland Meadows—named after a horse-racing track—to put on some HORSE tournaments to make Portland the home of Big O and HORSE!
Picked up some beer for Kevmath, went back to the room for a while, then he DMed me to let me know it would be a bit later than he’d expected because of a big news thing, which turned out to be he last-minute announcement of two more day 1s for the Main Event and a reshuffling of the rest of the schedule, to accommodate the relaxation of COVID travel restrictions to the US. He made it about two hours later than he’d originally expected (and I left him waiting outside he door for five minutes because I didn’t see his first couple of DMs, my apologies, Kevin), and we watched some of the endgame of the $5K NLHE 6-Max, from 3-handed until just about the time it ended in real life (though not on the 60-minute PokerGO delay feed) while I got to hear some details of how he came to play next week’s Turbo Bounty bracelet event, and other insights into the weird niche he’s carved out for himself as poker’s social media ganglion.
Time to finish packing up and head out in a few hours. Have a great WSOP, everyone!