Author 'Bond18' Archive
Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 73
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The Bellagio Cup IV $15,000 Main Event is about as tough as a live tournament gets. The vast majority of good players have busted the WSOP Main Event by now and almost every major online tournament player either has the backing or the roll to go ahead and take one more shot before leaving Vegas. Having talked to other online players before the event, playing on Saturday is clearly the favored day, leaving the opportunity to play online for huge prize pools on Sunday, or in my case, go play the Venetian $5,000.
Sirwatts and I are the only ones playing from the house. We catch a cab in the morning and for the seventh time straight, Sirwatts loses the flip to pay for the cab. Having run so bad this Summer, and really for the last year in live poker, I can’t get the idea out of my head that Watts is going to do something big.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Days 71-72
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Things are much quieter now. More and more people are leaving Las Vegas having busted out of the Main, and those left are just hanging around playing a few days of online tournaments then heading out shortly.
Over at the World Series, it’s the bubble day and only Sirwatts is still in from our house. Everyone else is at home hanging out and making arrangements to get out of town. At the moment, I’m the only person in the house planning on playing the Bellagio $15,000, though if Watts busts, he’ll almost certainly be playing.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Days 69-70
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As always, I spend my day off relaxing around my pool and firing up the grill, then trying my best to catch up on some writing despite all the distractions. Over two months into my trip and I can see and feel myself getting increasingly out of shape, a result of the Vegas diet of huge but occasional meals, low sleep, almost zero exercise, and doing nothing but sitting in a chair and doing math problems. When I get back to Melbourne the first thing I’ll do is hire a personal trainer and get very strict with my diet to try and repair the damage this trip has done to my health. Until then I’m just going to try and be a bit more mindful about reducing junk food and getting a little more sleep, which even living well off the strip, proves hard to do in Las Vegas. With day two starting tomorrow, I’m aiming for eight hours tonight.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 68
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Grafyx and I get to the Bellagio about 15 minutes before the start of the $5,000 preliminary event. We stroll up to the cashier and find a massive line waiting for us, insuring that we’re going to be a few minutes late for the event. Not only is there a line, but I need to take money out which I’ve put on deposit after having won the $3,000, and I know that’s going to take even longer. The biggest problem though is that the lines are full of Internet players (who show up late much, much more than recreational players) and if we register late, it’s almost guaranteed I’ll be jammed on a table with several of them.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 67
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Last year I was anything but excited for the Main Event. Having gotten slaughtered all summer and run almost as poorly as I played back then, I approached the Main with an impending sense of doom. This year, things are entirely different. I’m still playing bad now and then, but I’m running amazingly well. This summer in Vegas I’ve cashed six times, made three final tables, and actually won a live tournament. I’ve decided to play Day 1D, which falls on Sunday, figuring that many of the good online players will have played earlier days since they don’t want to skip the Sunday tournaments.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 66
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Thanks to drinking several glasses of water, I do not have the vicious hangover I should today. I do not know how much I drank last night (it wasn’t that much), but it was enough to fuck up a stomach as weak as mine.
I have today off before I play in the WSOP Main Event. Everyone in the poker world talks about the World Series Main like it’s the end all of tournaments, and I am not a member of that thought process. To me, the WSOP main is just another tournament, albeit with an incredible structure and massive field filled with god awful players. The fact that the winner of this one tournament is crowned a poker champion and made into a minor celebrity for the rest of his life is pretty absurd, especially considering nobody very good at poker has won it since poker hit the boom years (yes I know, many consider Raymer and Hachem good, but at the time they won they were fairly raw tournament players.) That two complete nobodies who are more or less useless on the marketing side of things have won in the last two years does even more to diffuse the importance of this one tournament, yet whoever wins it this year will yet again be thrown into the spotlight and expected to represent poker as a whole.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 65
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The night before my previous final table, I slept like a baby. Unfortunately, last night, I didn’t have as much luck. I woke up a couple times and, due to anticipation, had some trouble falling back asleep. Still, I feel mostly well going into today, but most of all, just don’t want to do something retarded and blow it like I usually do in these kind of spots.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 64
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I first fell in love with the Bellagio during last year’s Bellagio Cup III. Not only is the hotel such a visual pleasure to walk through, but the Fontana Lounge where they put the tournaments is roomy and comfortable, in the direct center of the hotel overlooking the fountains. Also, the Bellagio Cup was the only place where I had even the slightest taste of success, finishing eighth in a $2,000 pre-lim for something like $8,000 and change.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Day 63
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Today’s event at the WSOP is the $1,500 Shoot-Out Limit event, the only format in which Limit can be slightly interesting. For something like the fourth time this WSOP, I’m seated at a starting table with Marco Traniello and the majority of the rest are entirely unknown faces, except for fellow Full Tilt Poker blogger Michael Craig across the table. I introduce myself and tell him I work for Tilt as well, but he does not seem to know who I am. That’s OK, I don’t have the time to read anyone else’s stuff during the series either.
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Bond18 – Around the World in 90 Days: Days 60-62
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As a result of the two hour time zone jump from Vegas to Milwaukee coupled with the late arrival of our flight, I wake up around 3:30PM with the party at 4PM. I scramble to get myself and Celina together before my parents arrive. Previous to this summer I hadn’t seen my immediate family in about a year, and depending on who we’re talking about in the extended family, it’s somewhere in the area of one to two years.
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