Been Too Long

Sorry.

I got to Vegas around 6:30 PM on Tuesday. I just typed "Bellagio" in my Magellan GPS and it took me right to the valet lot. Navigation rules. I went straight to the cardroom and played in 2 $335 satellites for the $3100 tourney on Wednesday. The first one was uneventful as I went out 6th but in the second one there was a fun hand. 3-handed, I'm in the SB with 12K chips, the BB has 3K chips and the Button has 15K. Blinds are 200/400 and the button raises to 900. I look down at black AA and reraise to 2200. I'd been playing pretty aggressive and I want it to look like a resteal. BB fold and the button goes into the tank. He takes his protector off his cards and looks likes he's about to fold. I take the chip off my cards and act like I'm happy to take the pot when he re-caps his cards and re-raises to 5K total. He does a good job convincing me that he's weak so I count my chips and just call. The flop comes K62 rainbow, I check, he insta-pushes and I insta-call. He flips over KK and I'm out in 3rd. 8 people put down $200 extra to increase the stakes so the pot was essentially worth the $3100 entry fee plus $1800 cash. Whoever wins that hand wins the table a huge majority of the time. Oh well. Down $870, I head to the side games and sit in a pretty good $30/60 game. I run good and cash out around 1 AM up $1120. +$250 overall but I still had to buy myself into the $3100 event.

The next day I woke up pretty early and was very excited to play in the tournament. I hadn't played in a while and I was itching to go. Long story short, I played like ass early and folded the best hand in a big pot when I could have almost tripled up. Once the blinds went up to 200/400 I never had more than 15 blinds and played pretty good situational short-stacked poker. I worked my way up to 10K chips at the 300/600 50 ante level when my bustout hand happened. The floor comes over to break our table so everyone is packing up their chips during the hand. I'm in the CO-1 with Tc3c and raise to 1600. The BB calls and we see a flop of 8h6h2s. The BB checks but I smell a check-raise so I check behind. With a bigger stack I may bet but it's so easy for him to check-raise me with crap on that flop and I don't want to bet another 2K chips and have to fold. The turn is the Th and my opponent quickly bets 2200. I have about 8300 left and push pretty quickly. I put him on an 8 because everything so far feels like a missed check-raise. He starts muttering to himself, "you must have flopped a set, I can't believe you slowplayed your set, I don't see how I can fold". Now I'm a little worried because he's putting me on a big hand but feels committed to the pot. He's getting 2.36-1 which isn't a great price if he puts me on a big hand and he only has me covered by about 4K. Eventually he talks himself into calling with AhJs. In the actual hand he was getting the correct pot odds but if he puts me on a range of hands and is THAT positive that I have a monster, it's a bad call. He's absolutely shocked that I only have one pair and tap dances on my nuts when he hits his flush on the river. I'd rather have him fold and have 14K chips without risking a draw-out but I don't really mind the call as I had a good chance to get up to 20K in chips with 30 minutes left in the 300/600 level. I end up finishing about 72nd out of 250. I felt like I played really poorly all day and drive back to Christy's mom's house to marinate for a while. After about 30 minutes I want to play again so I head back to the Bellagio and enter a $540 satellite to the $5K tourney the next day. I play arguably the worst poker of my life and finish the tourney in 8th place. I'm disgusted so I go to sit with my friends John and Mike in a 4/8 game and raise every hand while drinking double Jack and Gingers. I like doing this while running/playing bad because it seems to shake up my game a bit. I refuse to do it while running good for the same reason. We finished around 2 AM, headed to the Bellagio Cafe and ate a late dinner. I had a great roasted turkey with cranberry sauce, mashed potaoes and green beans and sobered up. I decided not to play poker at all today and just clear my mind. I brought money to buy directly into todays $5K event but I really didn't fell like I was playing my best poker so figured it would be best to chill for a minute. Tomorrow is another off day so I'll probably play online a bit and hit up the $30/60 a bit.

I mentioned that I'm staying at Christy's mom's house. She has a 3-bedroom townhouse a few miles off the strip and it's really nice to be able to come here and relax instead of being relegated to a hotel room. She doesn't have much food here because she works 80 hours a week and always eats at work so I had to go to the grocery store for Boca chicken pattys and Boca smoked sausages. It's always fun standing in line at the grocery store with 2 strippers. It's pretty easy to pick them out, bleached blond hair pulled back in a pony tail, gigantic fake breasts, and a ton of make-up. Someday I'll get tired of seeing strippers in the wild but today is not that day. Today I went to Best Buy and bought Cinderella Man, Dazed and Confused, Euro Trip and The Usher Truth Tour live in Atlanta. I went with John to get Cinderella Man because he had never seen it and I wanted to buy it. I ended up seeing Dazed and Confused in the bargain bin and couldn't pass that up. Then we saw Euro Trip and John claimed it was the funniest movie ever so I bought it even though I've never seen it. Then I picked up the Usher DVD and John made fun of me and said, "let's just go, you aren't going to buy that". Huh? "How do you know? I love Usher!". He replied with, "Stop screwing around, i know you're not going to buy that crap". Oh man, he definitely got my blood boiling so furiously that I almost bought 5 copies. Never tell a Schaefer that he won't/can't do something. Say I won't....SAY I WON'T!

The more I think about it, the more I think I'm going to skip the EPT in Copenhagen. The plan was to check out all the Northern European countries that I've never been to but January/February isn't the best time to go there and I think I'll take a rain check, no pun intended. I think the schedule looks something like this:

December 17 - January 3: Seattle for Holidays
January 3 - January 11: Bahamas for poker
January 11 - February 7: San Diego. A whole month at home!
February 8 - February 11: Deauville to defend my title. I thnk I have to go to this one, no?

After that, I'm not sure. I have almost 2 months in there before the baseball roadtrip so I'll have to think of something cool to fill it with. There's a tournament on a cruise ship in mid-March that I'd really like to qualify for.

It's a good day to be Kal mother-effing Penn. Harold and Kumar will obviously be amazing but I don't know if the Taj Mahal story will work without Van. Only time will tell but one thing is certain: I will see both of these in the theater.

I guess that's it in the Life of me. Sorry it isn't more interesting. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to see more strippers in the wild and get some action photos. At the very least I'll have a good story of how a stripper slapped me at Rite-Aid.