So what ever happened to keeping up with my life events anyway? I mentioned forever ago that I was going to Vegas for the WPBT, but no trip report? I’d like to say I purposely wanted to be the last one to write about it. That way I could read everyone else’s WPBT posts, like April’s, CJ’s, Heather’s, and a bunch of people who’s blogs I lurk around but have never introduced myself to, since these people likely took some form of notes or I could use their collective memories to aide my terrible memory. But the fact is that I don’t have a terrible memory, I remember everything clearly.

The story really isn’t all that interesting. I won the WPBT in a little under three hours, destroying the field with my expert play while watching the entire “Saved by the Bell: The College Years” box set (with commentary) on my mini-DVD player (oh Screech, you’re so zany). I took my winnings straight to the Bellagio where I sat down at the highest limit table I could find and blew through the competition, searching for a higher limit after the players at my table got tired of donating their money to me. By Sunday morning, I had too much money to take home on the plane with me, so I decided to give all the poker bloggers $5000 apiece to make up some story about how someone else won the WPBT. The really expensive part was getting that ballroom back together for all the pictures of Studio Glyphic winning. But money well spent, I wouldn’t want anyone to know that I won, would I?

In real life, I don’t own a mini-DVD player. And I couldn’t ever convince myself to buy the “Saved by the Bell: The College Years”. And I (obviously) didn’t win the WPBT either. Instead, the WPBT tournament experience was awesome, but my play was terrible. Here’s how it went for me.

I showed up to the even hungover as hell, but no matter how nasty I felt, as soon as I saw the field of poker bloggers in the ballroom, my excitement took over. There were a few people that I recognized, but for the most part, I would just stand around and overheard people’s names and start to place names with faces. The whole multiple names thing makes life more difficult (login name vs. blog name, vs. real name), maybe we should have just stuck with logins. And the fact that I don’t have a PokerStars account meant that I wasn’t going to know half the people there anyway. I swear I’m getting one, for real this time (as soon as I finish out my bonus on Titan). But that’s all good. It was really cool to be around a bunch of people that are really into poker, but I spent the majority of the morning just looking through all the free stuff, picking up some PokerStars gear, FullTilt t-shirts, free dvds, etc. I’m a sucker for the free stuff. The speakers were cool too, but by the time they really started talking, the fact that I hadn’t eaten in over 16 hours was really starting to take its toll on my body. I had to get food.

Yeah, it was as tasty and disgusting as it looks

After eating some greasy bacon cheeseburgers the tournament got underway. Of course, with 100 players and four people that I knew with my luck I was undoubtedly going to be seated with someone I knew. I did get a slightly lucky turn though because I could have had Kat (that would have been the worst) or Heather (I’m a little leery of her since she destroyed me at the Poker Princess Invitational), but instead I had April. She’s kicked my ass on a number of occasions, but not as many times as Kat has and not as badly as Heather did. Either way, I was determined to stay away from her and did so successfully.

In the first couple round of the tournament I was running amazingly well. Every time I looked down at my hole cards they were awesome. And if they weren’t awesome and I was in the big blind, I’d hit two pair on the unraised flop. Unfortunately, I didn’t adjust from the maniacs on Titan and pushed everyone out of the big hands I had by betting too much. Somehow I was expecting people to come over the top of my top set, but unfortunately that never happened. By the third round, I was starting to run terrible. My decent pocket pairs ran into boards that were too ugly to keep playing. I mean, with three players and a board of A-K-Q my pocket Jacks really aren’t that good.

After a stupid call on an all-in from BadBlood (which I was sure to lose), I was severely short-stacked and threw away my last 200 chips or so with A7s, which didn’t pay off when there were three callers (200 was maybe 2xBB at that point). I busted out of the tournament somewhere in the 80s. Terrible.

But even though I played terrible, the tournament was awesome and I can’t wait for the next one. This time, I’m going to spend my time playing poker instead of craps (for real!), but that’s a story for another time.