Borgata Winter Open-aments
After Biloxi I went back to Vegas for a few days, and then got on a flight to play 3 events at the Borgata Winter Open. I arrived Wednesday night and the next morning was the 2k NLH. Not much really got going for me in this tournament. I missed a hand where I had a straight flush draw and completely bricked on the river and tried to run a bluff, but the Action Bob had a full house, so pretty sure that wasn’t going to work. I was short on chips lost with QQ against J9 off. Sweet. The next event was the 2k HOSE. YES. For some reason I just run so ungodly horrid in these live mixed events. I’m not quite sure what it is, I take a little bit of blame for sometimes getting impatient, but the play was so bad in this event, there is no way I shouldn’t have had every beautiful chip on the table. I hung in there, bricking off some huge draws in Razz and SHL and that will do it.
I got a day off before the main event. So I chose to play online of course, because it was Sunday. There was a great group of people at Borgata including my girlfriends Lacey, Maria and Tiff. So we had some really good social time, meeting and getting to know a lot of the east coast players that we were unfamiliar with. It’s interesting, it’s definitely different out there. But we had a great time, and the B Bar became our stomping grounds. J
Monday kicked off the main event. Wow, what an amazing structure this was. 50k starting chips meant you started with 1000 BB’s. LOL. I had a pretty tough table draw. My girl Lacey and I registered together so this meant we were at the same table, along with Shaun Deeb, Hasan Habib and Ted Forrest. I told myself that I wouldn’t play too crazy, because I could see myself getting carried away starting with so many chips. Well that plan didn’t work out too well, I found myself going to a lot flops. I was down to 30k pretty quickly and finally our table broke and I got moved to a much better table. The only player I recognized was Rick Fuller, a good friend of mine. I decided to tighten it up a bit, and found myself to end day 1 with 75k in chips. Not horrible, a little under average.
Day 2 I had a new table again. Pretty decent table. I was in seat 1 and seat 2-5 were most definitely softer spots then seats 6-9, which was really good for me. I was really happy with my play on day 2, never really getting out of line and just playing small – medium sized pots. I ended day 2 with about 330k which was a little bit above average. Even after day 2 we had not made the money yet, as the field started with over 1000 players, with about 150 going into day 3 and 99 would get paid.
Day 3 comes along with yet another new table. Again a pretty good table. No maniacs really. I played a huge pot where I flatters an under the gun raise, guy to my left 3 bets it big, Tony Cavezza smoothies from the small and the original raiser folds. I then think for a bit a shove my whole stack in. There was about 300k in the pot and I shoved in 240k more. They both went into the tank for quite some time through the break and both eventually folded. That was a nice pot for me to take down without having to see a floppers. That put me up to about 550k. After that I couldn’t seem to win a hand. I went super card dead and all the sudden I was on the short stack with about 80 players to go. I hung in there for quite some time, until I open stuffed it in the hijack with 55 and ran into AK and JJ, and AK won it all. I took 44th place which was good for around $9500. Meh. You’re never gonna be satisfied in this spot, but I was pleased with my play looking back.
After this we spent another day at the Borgata, sweating a few people who were still left in the tournament. Then I went to NYC to spend some quality girl time with Maria and Lace. Definitely a needed and well deserved break before heading back West to gear up for the LAPC.
