With things slowing down and people on vacation I deceided to spend my time through the New Year’s in Las Vegas to help the hurting casino industry. OK so I mosty went to win some money and have fun playing poker. My buddy Fiodor flew into LA and we made quick work of day one of our poker bash.

We grabbed the 11:00am at Sahara with around 55 entries and I was off to a strong start. I ended up making it down to the final two tables with a marginal stack and got myself in an interesing position. Three people in front of me went all-in and I had to call, with over 40,000 in the pot I had around 10k which gave me a great return on my investment of 10k into the pot with a decent hand of A/10 spades. I ended up losing the hand as the turn came A/2/2 and one of the players had a A/2 starting hand. No worries and a 17th place finish was a great start.

Then we ran over to the 4:00pm at Startosphere which is a more expensive buy in but less players. Same format which is a 4,000 chip purchase and you play until the end. This tourney had around 35 with first hour re-buys I think and I was holding strong. I won a bunch of small pots, nothing pretty and let it dwindle down to 8 left. I won a huge pot and it put me second in chips behind the leader who at this time had around 68k to my 24k out of a total 119k. With ante’s and blind’s things got crazy fast and I had money coming back and forth. We got down to four after a few rounds and the pressure was on. Only top three were getting paid and finally one more went down at my table. I was in the money and the chip inbalance was amazing, the leader had around 85k out of 119k and we split the other stacks. With blinds at 2k/4k and 500 ante I pushed all in on the small blind (another 8k) and got called by the chip leader which I counted on. I had a K/8 unsuited and he flopped a J/5. He ran a Jack on me across the river which took me out and left me for third place. All and all a great tournament and I got paid so that is always a plus in poker, I double’d my money basically from the buy-in which puts me up a little for the day.

So far I have stayed calm and collected by far playing the best poker of my life keeping myself from self-destructing. No bad beats have really been taken either so I guess that is pretty easy. The six month poker hiatius seems to be paying off and we are about to eat some quick dinner and tackle the 12am at Ceaser’s Palace, hopefully see some people I know!

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