Trip Report: Day 4

By day 4, I don’t think I woke up too early; in fact, I think Sazzy and The Happy Pebble had left for work before I woke up.  I decided to go to the Rio and check out the action at the WSOP – which means it was after noon because I don’t think the play started until noon.  I found one room, and walked around the tables watching the action.

It was AMAZING!

You hear the chips shuffling, the table talk, the bad beat stories, and all the people!  There were so many rooms of tables that I lost track of who was playing where.  I tweeted a few of the bad beat stories I had overheard while walking around.  I remember one guy talking about why he would never play Ace-4 suited.  I stopped at the ESPN feature table, and watched some of the action there.  It was really pretty spectacular.

While watching, I had found Kathy Liebert, Tom Durr, Dennis Phillips, Jesus Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth, and a few other notable players.  Little did I know that Phil Ivey was doing REALLY well; he was tearing up the tables at the main event, and appeared to be an unstoppable force!

Later that evening I decided to stop at The Gold Coast to play poker; it’s near the Rio, and seemed convenient.  Every once in a while I tried to stop in at the Rio to play poker in their little poker room, but empty seats were an endangered species.  The waiting lists for all games were long, and I had no hope of getting a seat anytime during the WSOP.

So I headed over to the Gold Coast where I felt like a minority.  The game was great though; I played $4/$8, and ended up leaving up about 2 racks, or $200.  A guy who was sitting next to me told me the same bad beat story about 5 times; I was getting really tired of listening to him!

As an aside, let me make a statement about bad beat stories.  Everybody has them, and very few of them are truly bad beat stories.  Statistically speaking, everyone loses with great hands and sometimes we win with bad hands.  It happens all the time – it’s best to just get over it and move on.  :)

There’s only one true bad-beat story I had ever heard that was interesting, and really seemed to qualify as a bad beat.  A guy from Sequim, WA drives to Las Vegas on his Harley Davidson motorcycle to play in the main event at the WSOP.  This was in the early 2000′s, but I’m not sure which year.  He walks into the Horseshoe, and pays his entry fee on the day before the main event was to begin, and decides to leave and find something to eat/drink.  He left on his motorcycle, and found himself waking up in a hospital bed a week later.  He had been involved in a horrible traffic accident, and spent the first week of the main event in a coma.  He lost his buy-in, and the WSOP wouldn’t give him a refund.  The accident was not his fault and the other driver apparently had no insurance.  Now THAT is a bad beat!

Okay well anyway, I eventually went back to Sazzy’s to rest my head again for another night.  :)