Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 18:42:41 -0700 From: Michael Hunter Subject: [BARGE] 2005 TR BARGE 2005 Trip Report I landed in LV on Wednesday night. I'd originally planned on not coming until Friday so I had only signed up for the BARGE NL tournament. After landing on Wednesday evening I made my way to the Plaza, registered, and checked out the poker room. I immediately ran into Fitch and Zimmers exiting the lowball tournament. We chatted a bit and then I looked around for a game. I wasn't super serious about this as I was itching to get down to the Wynn and see if the NLHE games were as juicy as the last time I'd been in LV. I played the next 23.5 hours in a 2-5 NLHE game at the Wynn. I'd checked out the 5-10 NLHE but in the couple of orbits I watched about half of the confrontations were blind vs. blind and the rest were heads up. Few made it to the river. While this could have still been a good game if I knew my opponents the massively loose passive 2-5 NLHE games I was watching at the same time were going to be far better. The 2-5 game I played in wasn't the best until in the middle of the morning the tables were combined about the same time as the 5-10 NLHE game broke. We picked up a drunk who couldn't go back to his room because he had blown off his girlfriend and two stuckees from the 5-10 game trying to get even. Sweet. The game took off. I was involved in two hands which were interesting during this time frame. In the first I was in late position with the two other relevant opponents in the small blind and under the gun. There is light action preflop and we see Qd Js 5d. I have 9To no relevant suites. Its checked to me I bet $25 (roughly pot), the small blind check-raises to $75, the big blind folds, the UTG player jams for something more then $600, another player folds, I fold, the small blind goes into the tank. The small blind player has been playing pretty tight. He is a chef from Monterey who has rented a place in LV and has been playing poker full time for the last few months. I get the feeling its just barely working out for him. The UTG player is the gambling drunk barred from his room. Fairly quickly the small blind asks the drunk if he can see one of his cards of his choosing for $50. The UTG player seems a little confused, the small blind clarifies, and the UTG player agrees. The small blind picks a card and turns over the Kd. He quickly calls with QJ. UTG doesn't show his other card yet. Diamond on the turn gets the small blind out of his seat. Queen on the river sits him back down. UTG shows KdJd. Unfortunately people rib the drunk about buying a card. Personally I thought the small blind was tight enough that the UTG player should have realized that he probably had QJo and that he would fold if no information was sold. The other hand involved another player who was there for a short time. He sat down with $200. Hit a couple of weak draws to build his stack up to just less then $1000. In this hand he is in the small blind and I am on the button. One of the 5-10 players is two to my right. I have 3k as does the 5-10 player. There are a couple of limpers, 5-10 boy makes it $40, I call on the button with 45s, small blind makes it $200, limpers fold, 5-10 guy calls fairly quickly. My thought at this point is that both of these guys are overly aggressive and will pay me off if I hit. I'm fairly sure that the small blind has some "good" hand. So far he has been fairly passive preflop and attempts to be tricky later in the hand. I suspect something like AJ/TT. I call getting fairly poor immediate odds of $160 to win ~$450. The flop comes down 678 trichromatic one of my suit. Small blind jams for the rest of his stack (~800), 5-10 boy folds, I call and snap KK. My preflop actions are a little dubious but given the deep stacks and fairly aggressive nature of my opponents I don't think they are horrible. When I get some more time I'll have to do a little more thinking about both of these situations. Comments appreciated about either. An amusing event from this evening is Huck Seed sitting in the 1-3 NLHE game after the 5-10 NLHE game broke. It took a drunk in the game about 30 minutes to figure out who Huck was but after that it was a constant stream of babling gibberish flecked with drool aimed at Huck. As I remember it Huck didn't stay too long after that. I run into other BARGERs and ultimately get a ride back to the plaza from Brian Goetz along with Oz and his brother. There was some other BARGEr who offered to share a taxi/ride with me but I don't clearly recall who that was. Thank you. I think we end up having some meal at the carson street cafe but I'm starting to fade enough at this point I'm really not sure. Session start Aug 3, 2005 22:39. Session end Aug 4, 2005 21:53. Less then 30 hours into BARGE including travel time and I've made a tidy little profit for the trip. Given a recent crushing on the net it was a nice event. I took some cards and chips to the calcutta and ended up playing freezeouts when not making a few bids. I bought Dave McVay and his partner and Lee Jones and Wil. I chopped Lee's action with another BARGEr (sorry, I'm bad with names) but sadly both Lee and Wil didn't cash. Happily Dave finished in 3rd so I scored a nice little profit. That night I played a little HORSE and then we started a 1-2 often straddled to $5 PL mixed game. The games we played this year were Miss. Stud 8 or better, Omaha (high), and 2-7 triple draw. Paul Philips joined us together with quite a few of the expected characters. Unfortunately the casino was a little loud to be able to have a good conversation with the whole table. I ended up sitting away from the very interesting paul-jerrod-mauer corner who seemed to be having a good chat. All in all we had a fun evening and ultimately the game died around 2:00 in the morning. Just about the right time to get to bed before the tournament. I had a nice chat with Fich about his conversation with Wil about BARGE and hit the sack. The tournament. Ah, the tournament. I was a card rack before antes and built a 10k stack. I sucked after antes and went out 40th. I only really felt like I badly misplayed one hand when I tried a steal against a short big blind. oops. The banquet was a blast. I can't say much for the food. My cow was too fatty for me and the surf was over breaded and pretty gross. But a few cocktails and some excellent company made it all go down. About this time I discovered that Dave had scored for me and was reminded that I had (in a tired and slightly intoxicated moment the night before) bought a piece of Oz who had also cashed. Ding! I bought some tickets for a bottle of Lagavulin that Un was raffeling off for a MS charity feeling like it was going to be pretty hard to miss given my luck so far. Of course buying 10 of the 52 tickets might have helped also. I ended up winning the bottle and hopefully anybody who wanted some found me. Unfortunately only about 1/2 the bottle was consumed so I have my doubts. W1l r00lz! Hopefully we see him at future BARGEs. His talk was great for an after dinner speech. I just wish I had found time to play in some game wtih him. He should spend some time in the Stars NLHE HU SNGs :) The after banquet stuff was fun. Enough Lagavulin and other alcohol consumed so that I still feel shitty. Also enough consumed so that I was pretty passive during the 1-2 Binglaha game at the Shoe. Ah well, sorry Nolan. I did find the young hotties who dropped by to chat with Raymer pretty amusing. I was also slightly jealous. Thank you to MGC and Deadhead for being worried when I disappeared before the game broke and didn't come back for a while. Given my drunkedness and the money in my pocket it was probably foolish to go wondering around downtown. But I did. Later that evening I made it down to the Wynn with another BARGEr (sorry, another name I can't remember). This time I ended up in a 5 handed 5-10 NLHE game with a couple of losers and Huck Seed. I wasn't too pleased to have Huck in the game but the others more then made up for it. As it turned out Huck was mostly pinning down the losers so all was well until we got moved to the main game. I was so focused on getting good position relative to Huck I didn't recognize the old man I was putting to my left until Huck asked Oneal how he was doing. Doh! Putting an aggressive WCP to your left definitely tightens you up just a bit. After doubling through one of the weaker players and picking up a few other pots I was getting tired and demoted myself to the 2-5 game. After a few hours of grinding out the money I picked up a taxi back to the Plaza. I went to sleep sometime afternoon on Sunday so that I would feel at least vaguely reasonable for dinner on Sunday evening. I had a nice meal at 808 in Caesars with a group of people some of whome I hadn't talked to much in the past. As is normal with any subset of BARGErs everybody had something to say. I'm happy to have spent some more time with yet another group of very interesting people. Later Sunday evening Michael Chow and I spent some time playing 2-4 NLHE at the Mandalay Bay poker room. It seemed like a nice room and the games were good. Unfortunately I busted Michael. Hopefully he will forgive me. As normal I missed hanging out with some people and met some new ones. Somewhere above I hand lunch with Andrew Prock and Terrance both of whome I had met before but neither of which I get to talk to often. I missed Jaegar. I think he was around but somehow we didn't intersect. Jaegar started coming to BARGE a bit before I did and has always been a fun person to hang out with. Hopefully next year. I thought I saw Bruce Hyack but have been told that wasn't real. What else should I expect from a BARGE weekend? Andy Bloch wasn't around for very long. Saddenz. Unfortunately I couldn't get Brian to trade his bust out give to me ;) So thats it. I'm sure I've missed some stuff and probably misremembered other stuff. It was all a blast. Hopefully I'll see ya'all and more next year! Michael Hunter stateline, NV 8/8/05 ________ BARGE 2005 is being supported by PokerStars.com and ParadisePoker.com.