Poker Words - A Poker Blog: WSPL Goes To Vegas Game 1

After much debate about rules and formatting and costs and profit distribution, and who the hell is going to be our ninth player we actually managed to get this thing started.

I may have left out a few details in my last post as I was writing it while trying to get everyone signed up for the league at the very last minute. The short version is this. We have 9 players each contributing $600 to the league. Of that $3000 will go to entry fees for two people to a $1500 event at this year's WSOP. The remaining cash will be used to pay out the winner and second place finisher of each weekly tournament. We did this so that people that get eliminated will still be motivated to try in the final weeks of the league.

Game one did not exactly go smoothly. Our first problem is that Our ninth player got added at the last minute. He was getting off work as the game was starting, the email for the league sends him to the .com site, but we're in the US, so we can only use .net now, yadda yadda yadda and he isn't able to register until just after the tournament starts. Since he was so close, and a last minute addition to the league we gave him a break and decided to start the tourney over in 10 minutes.

10 minutes later and everyone is signed up. The tournament starts and instead of a nine player table we find ourselves at two tables, a four and five. WTF? Confusion reign as some people don't realize we're split. They think the tournament is messed up again and quit. Of coarse once one person is eliminated we find ourselves combined to a single table.

10 minutes later again and this time it counts no matter what goofiness ensues. Again we find ourselves at two tables. I'm at the four person table with Smack to my right. I guess its better to have him there than to my left, but it doesn't help much as he bulldozes the table. In addition to being a bully I think he was actually hitting his hands. He takes about half to the other three players chips before the first blind level ends and the nine of us are combined to one table.

Once we are combined Smack continues to dominate the table, but a disturbing trend begins. Cookie starts hitting some monster hands, and knocking people out left and right. We're all chatting on TeamSpeak and he's obviously drunk. He's also simultaneously playing the new Star Wars MMO and complaining that the poker window keeps popping up over his game.

A typical hand involves him exclaiming confusion that it is his turn followed by him trying to figure out what his hand is, followed by him making a ridiculous bet followed by him hitting a full house or a runner runner flush on the river.

It didn't matter where you were in the hand, if you went all-in against him, you better hope for a split because that is the best you could possibly do.

Shane put up a good fight once they got to heads up, but he was behind something like 10K vs 2K and he was never able to get the lead. So in the end our worst nightmare was realized and Cookie is our current points leader.

Personally I didn't do that well. I tried making a move early on four handed and got shut down. I managed to double up later on when I got all-in preflop with Aces, but that was the only significant pot that I won. there was a lot of missed flops and folding to over the top raises that lead to an eventual fifth place finish.

Here are the standings so far.

Week 1 Results