So today on Bovada is the first of their WSOP Main Event qualifiers. These qualifiers will run every Monday until the WSOP ME and will provide a $12,000 package for the 2012 WSOP ME in July. $10,000 for the buyin and $2,000 for expenses. The buyin is $500 (470+30) with at least two seats guaranteed tonight. I will try to satellite into the $500 tonight but will pay the full entry if I have to. It has been a dream of mine to play in the WSOP ME and I expect this first week to be a pretty good opportunity.

My thought is that it being the first week of qualifying will mean that mostly satellite winners will participate. I expect the field to be pretty small and I also expect the level of play to be lower than in the coming weeks of these satellites.

I will post updates if I can make a run in the satellite. Wish me luck!

So after a long Sunday of running into AA over and over in the big Bovadas I decided to run one of the 50+5 satellites into the Black Diamond Poker Open Main Event. For those that don't know, the Black Diamond Poker Open is Bovada's big poker series they are running in March. The first half of the events are tailored for the smaller bankroll players and the second half of the series has larger buyins. You can find information about this series at the following website http://poker.bovada.lv/poker-promotions/black-diamond-poker-open . So the main event runs April 1 at 5pm with a guaranteed $250,000 prize pool and a buy-in of $450.

Anyways, there were 21 players and the top 3 got paid (tickets for 1st and 2nd and $150 in cash for 3rd). Long story short, I run pretty well and easily make the top three with the chip lead. I have 12k, second place has 11k and third has 2.5k.

THEN THE STORY STARTS....2nd place guy with 11k starts talking in all caps in the chat log saying he will give away all his chips because the wants the $150 in cash instead of the $450 tourney buy-in. I immediately call him an idiot for openly colluding in the chat log. He calls me stupid and I decide to stay out of it. He tells the third place stack (2.5k) that he will raise most of the third place stacks chips and then will fold to a minor re-raise. I fold every hand while the short stack quickly re-raises the big stack over and over until he is out. Another weird part is that the small stack really did have good hands (AA, AQ, KQ) all in the 6 hands it took for the small stack to knock out the big stack.

So it made no difference for me because I still got my $450 tourney ticket for the BDPO Main Event but I have never seen someone turn down $450 in a tourney ticket for only $100 profit (the buy-in was $55).
Thoughts?

So there are 56 people left (started with 835) and im sitting in 45th. Already secured a $200 profit but I would love to make the 23K for first. Only 10BB though as the blinds are huge. Hope to catch a couple cards and put something together. I am player 782 if anyone is on Bovada.

Hey guys, day 1.5 of the AC trip is in the books so I figured I would write a quick update. I Just got here yesterday evening and played some 1/2 with no success. I was up a bit then I played the midnight $70 tourney which ended up being annoying so I went to the cash table and spewed off 200. Oh well.

I decided to play day 1A of the WSOP-C event #2 which started today (Thursday) at noon. The tourney has two starting days and allows you to buy in on day 2 if you bust on day 1. The buyin was $345 and you start with 10,000 in chips with the blinds being 25/25 to start. Event #1 started yesterday and they got around 715 people (345 buyin)with first taking about 41K. I thought that we would have a pretty big field on day 1a since people could run the tournament twice but only 347 players signed up. It was originally scheduled to last 21 levels but due to the low number of runners they chose to go to EITHER 21 levels or 42 players left, whichever came first. It became clear pretty early that we would reach 42 players before 21 levels ended.

I played pretty snug and got up to 25k without much risk. A guy with about 35k had just moved to our table and we were 1 and 2 in chips (another guy had about what I had). Then a nice hand happened where I picked up AKo in the hijack and decided to just limp behind one other limper. Blinds are 150-300 and the big stack has the button and raises to 800. The blinds and the limper fold and I decide to raise to 1,900. He thinks for a second and then pops it to 5,100. At this point I was feeling very torn about my decision. I come up with having to call and re-evaluate on the flop. I did this for two reasons… 1. I can win a BIG pot if the flop comes down correctly. 2. I can still fold and have 20k and plenty of time. Well the flop comes down GIN with AcKc7d but the big stack decides to insta-bet 7,600. At first glance this is a great spot but I couldn’t stop thinking about him having a monster, AA or KK seem pretty possible. I tank for a couple minutes then decide that I have to take the only line I can think of and shove my 20k stack. I think there were enough other hands in his range that it was profitable. Thankfully he didn’t inst-call so I knew I was good. He ended up folding after tanking for a couple minutes but flashed the 4 which means he must have had A4. Anyways, that guy was a donk and went from table leader with 35K to out in about an hour.

The only other memorable hand was me sitting on 45k with about 70 left and the average at about 35k. I just got moved to table 1 and this girl is on my left with about 35k. I found out after a few minutes that she took 62nd this year at the WSOP Main Events for like 130k-ish. Blinds were 600/1,200 at this point and the table feel was pretty friendly and talkative. I’m in the sb and it folds around to me and I look down at AA and decide to awkwardly min-raise to 2,400. She thinks for about 10 seconds and shoves and shows 55 against my AA. I flop the A and all of a sudden I’m sitting on about 85K. Nothing else of interest happened for the rest of the day and I bagged 85,400 with 42 left at about midnight. The average is 82K-ish but there are definitely some small stacks while the big stack at my table had 225,000. Play resumes on Sunday at 3pm EST after day 1b plays the exact amount of time that we played, which was 6 mins remaining in the 18th
level.

I am interested to find out how many people show up to play tomorrow, but I expect it will be a lot larger than today. Late registration is allowed for the first 2.5 hours so I will check around 3pm to figure out the total prize pool and how many people get paid. I expect Sunday will start around 50 people out of the money with my stack being pretty middle-of-the-road.

It’s now 2:40 am and Iam going to bed. I will try to play the winter league event tomorrow if I can. Hope everyone is doing well.

Quick update on my MTTs on Bodog since last Sunday. Admittedly, I ran really well last Sunday to scoop the two tourneys. In stark contrast, I have run REALLY bad since then. I have dropped close to $1,500 of my profits in the last week just running into monster hands and having all my decent hands busted (at least it felt that way).

Thankfully I was able to right my ship today by taking down a 3k guarantted ($33) for $1,200 profit. Didn't get me all the way back but definitely helped ease the strain a bit.

I'm heading out to AC next Thursday (12/1) to try and make a run at the WSOP-C events at Harrah's. I will write some blogs from AC keeping you all up to speed on how it's going. As always, GL all.

So I figure a blog is a better way to get some of my results out there than the forum. So the past couple weeks I have been focusing on trying to make a deep run in some of the bigger tournaments on Bodog that run on Sundays. There's the 100k ($162) that normally pays out around 25K for first. Then there are a couple other $109 tourneys and some bigger $33 and $55 that I have been running.

Well this weekend I was an idiot and missed the league events because I thought I had already registered for them. I clearly did not register for them and was forced to rail my team instead of trying to help them. So my Saturday was uneventful in the poker arena but there was one piece of good news....UVA won our 7th football game of the season. It's been a few years since we were bowl eligible (6 wins) and getting the 7th with two games to go is a great step in the right direction for us. Next week is a tough away game against Florida State and then the following week is the much-anticipated UVA-Virginia Tech game at home. All we have to do to head to the ACC Championship game is win them both although I'm definitely not holding my breath as they are both top 25 teams (Tech is currently 8th I think).

Anyways, Sunday rolls around and I am ready to hit the tables and try to make some money. Bodog sucks in the mornings and doesn't really start any good tourneys until 2-3pm EST even on Sundays. So I just relax and rail team, ROLLBUSTERS, in the league. They do a GREAT job and end up all making the final 10 players, with 3 making the FT. Congrats to all of them and especially to Sneid for taking 2nd place.

After seeing their great results and being a bit steamed that I wasn't able to participate I register for a couple events that start between 2:30 and 4 EST. I lost one of them early so I won't even talk about it but the three that I was focusing on were the $33 with 5K guaranteed, the $109 with 10K guaranteed and the $162 with 100K guaranteed (I actually won a satellite into the 100k for only $33). I played pretty snug early in the tourneys and just picked some good spots to take risk-free chips. I think there were about 700 in the 100k and I was basically just never able to get anything going. I managed to double up with about 400 left with flush over set and then donked it all away like 3 hands later when my JJ ran into 99 and I paid him off on a Q93 board.

So after the loss in the 100k I was just running the other two tourneys. I had managed to get a pretty good stack in the 5k but was just coasting in the 10k unable to make too much happen but still picking spots and staying pretty comfortable. I end up making the money in both without much risk and thankfully the ROLLBUSTERS luck starts to kick in and I begin to be un-stoppable. I chose to use a min-raise strategy for ALL of my opens once we got into the money. I was comfortable playing post-flop with any of my opponents and the min-raises allowed me to effectively mask the strength of my hands. Long story short.....not only do I FT both of the tourneys (the 109 and the 33) but I actually ended up scooping both of them in about a 45 minute span. Running well and opening a TON of pots for min-raises allowed me to run over my opponents at the FTs and I think I will keep using this strategy in the future (although you need a decent stack to do it).

Anyways, the $33 paid out like $1,880 and the $109 paid out about $4,250. All-in-all a pretty good Sunday! The only sad part is that my Redskins lost to the freaking Dolphins....but....the skins are horrible and there is definitely no denying it.

Hope everyone else had good weekends and that you are all running good on the virtual felts!
Scott

I requested a check cash-out from Bodog yesterday evening and got my approval today. They say it could take up to 7 business days for me to get the check in the mail. I will let you know when I receive it.

**NOTE** the first time I requested a check from Bodog they made me verify my account by sending a couple scans (my ID, card I used to deposit, little request form) and then every other time has been quick and easy.

Won a $22 (10 + 10 bounty + 2 fee). Knocked out 8 people (for $10 each) and took first for $162. winning is a lot better than getting second! only 54 runners so pretty weak field. Good to hold up though.

Sorry for signing up for the league game today and then not playing. Something came up last minute and I was unable to make it home and unregister. Can't wait for the next league!

I took two weeks off poker because I'm in a new relationship (and she takes a lot of time, =) haha) and also my computer is messed up. Well I finally got back to the virtual felt last night and played two tourneys, a $10 turbo and then a $5 rebuy. I made a decent run in the turbo but busted out about 20 people shy of the money.

In the rebuy I bought in twice originally and then double rebought once so I had 20 (plus fee) invested. Well I went on to scoop the whole tourney for a nice profit of about $555.

Maybe I should take a couple weeks off more often. I think it helped me enjoy playing more and pay more attention. Hope everyone else is scooping some tourneys and making some money!

GL ALL ON THE FELT!