I had a go at qualifying for the World Series main event this past weekend at Full Tilt and PokerStars. Both rooms had massive guaranteed satellite tournaments, giving away at least 100 & 150 WSOP packages respectively.
At Full Tilt I qualifed pretty easily. Played a 4 person heads up sit and go for about 130 bucks and won it, saving me a packet on the $500+35 entry to the big one.
So then I ventured over to PokerStars to try and qualify. It was madness, with satellites going off every few minutes. Surely I can jag a cheap seat here too! The buyin to the Stars mega satellite was $350+20 and I was resigned to playing this one no matter what. I knew the number of seats on offer would probably go way higher than the 150 guaranteed and hoped I would be able to last my way to the top 200 of the field.
So first up I played a 10 person sit & go for $50+5. It gave away one entry to the winner and $75 and $55 to 2nd & 3rd. After a couple of close calls and putting up with a crazed loon who I managed to bust 5th. (Hi Baht1!) it got down to heads up. I’d at least made $20 and hopefully was going to get my seat first try here too! Everything was looking rosy.
Then the dreaded JJ landed in my lap on the first hand of heads up play. Goold old jacks - can’t win with ‘em, can’t fold ‘em. Perhaps the hand I hate playing the most, but heads up it’s a monster. So despite the twinge of trepidation I was feeling confident and raise. Opponent re-raises… Interesting…
So I’m thinking… I have jacks heads up. I’m already in front in this tourney. My opponent has a bit of a chip lead and of course is going to try and bully me a little if they know what they are doing. So I re-raise it up again. They go all-in. Surely they don’t have QQ, KK or AA on this first hand…. F#*k it, I’m all in too.
I’m kind of happy to see them turn over AK off suit and we’re off to the races. Unfortunately it was a short race with a king on the flop destroying my dream of doubling up and bullying my way to the cheap mega satellite entry. I wish them luck in the big one and go back to the satellite list with an extra $20 to qualfy with.
I tried a $16 double shoot out next. I won my first table, then lost with KK v QJ to finish 4th. Gotta hate those quad queens…
Aftr that it was a sequence of bad beats the like of which I’ve never had the dipleasure of experiencing before. Every donk and his fishy friends were trying to qualify for this thing and time was running out whil the suckouts kept coming. Every qualifier was a turbo too, meaning that you had to move early or get blindsided. (my little term for ending up at the side of the table with no chips after the blinds are so big they make you do something stupid)
So via a variety of satellite options I burned through about $200 tryng to qualify for a $370 tourney. Not the best bankroll management there….
I ended up just buying in and getting great cards early - when the level is 10/20 and nobody will play a pot for for more than $60… Once the levels got to the stage that anyone would actually play a pot, I was so card dead that 89 off suit looked like aces to me. Over 220 people qualified for the WSOP that day at Stars, but this clown was not one of them.
Tilt’s tournament started and hour and a half later and I was so worn out that I never really had a shot in that one. I’d been playing for over 5 hours straight and pehaps due to the higher buyin and less seats on offer (think it got up to 139) the play seemed a lot better. I busted out without much fuss, calling an Ace high flush draw with AK of clubs.
So I am not going to the WSOP this year. I justified it to myself, by thinking about the extra thousands of dollars I would have to spend. You get $2000 spending money, but if you don’t live in North America it is nowhere near enough to cover a flight let alone hotels, food, strippers, tips, and everything else Vegas has to offer. Unless of course the Blackjack and Craps gods are smiling…
So good luck to whoever made it. You’re going to need it!
Phil Ivey hasn’t had a good week.
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