Taking a Trip to Valuetown
This hand is from the $10,000 buy-in Bellagio cup event that takes place near the end of the WSOP. The field is usually quite soft because many pros are still in the WSOP main event, or so worn out from the series that they skip this tournament. This event is effectively acts a “last chance” high roller tournament. Day 1 did not start off too well for me. After grinding up my 40,000 starting stack to 60,000 by winning lots of small pots, I lost a big hand with A-A versus J-J in a 4-bet pot when my opponent rivered trips. This left me with 30,000. …
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This summer at the WSOP, I decided to spend a bit of time away from the tournaments playing $10/$20 no-limit at Bellagio. After a few hands at the table, a Spanish kid to my left commented about how he didn’t like that I was writing down my hands in my notebook. It clearly had him rattled. He proceeded to play in a maniacal manner and bluffed off over $5,000 to me over the next hour. He was tilted. To be fair, I showed down decently strong hands, so he probably didn’t think I was outplaying him, but instead was lucky to make some strong hands. (I was actually lucky that he kept trying to bluff me!) …