Making a trip to Vegas!

Looks like I will be going down to Vegas for a bit after all. Right now, all of the World Series of Poker events are running so this is really the best time of year to go down there and play poker. Also, a lot of my poker friends that I met online are down there now, so I should get to meet them in person.

I'll be in Vegas for about 10 days, as I leave this Friday and come back on Monday, June 30th. I'm not staying quite as long as I did in March, (stayed 20 days that time) but it will still be plenty of time to hang out with my friends, party a bit, and play some live poker.

I probably won't play any of the WSOP tournaments this year, mainly because that is not my specialty. I have had some decent success in online Multi-table tournaments, but I don't really feel like playing a live tournament for a significant sum of money... mainly because MTTs have a huge luck factor in them. You have to get extremely lucky even to make the money and win a lot of coin flips.

So I'll be playing cash games down there, mostly $2/5 NL. All of the games are nine handed live, unless you play during the early morning hours (the tables get short around 4AM-10AM). Towards the end of my first trip to Vegas in March, I really started to get the hang of live poker so hopefully this time I can crush it.

I played for about four hours on Absolute Poker today and finished + $560

None of my winning hands were all that interesting, as most of them were me just hitting a pretty big hand and getting value from solid betting.

My biggest losing hand of the day was pretty interesting, however.

Here it is: http://www.pokerhand.org/?2773299

While I was playing the hand I was just thinking to myself that I would check-raise the flop this time with TPTK because before, in a similar situation against the same opponent about 30 minutes ago, I just check/called three streets with TPTK. I figured this would mix up my play. Once I turned top two pair I felt I needed to go with the hand, because QJ was still a likely holding for him (also maybe even a stubborn AK on the flop). I never see anyone check-raise twice in a hand like this... and I think most people assume that if you check raise the flop and don't lead the turn then you were probably just making a move on the flop... this, in my opinion, allows me to pick off some of his bluffs on the turn as well. Just so happened the turn card gave him the straight. I don't mind the way I played this hand... although it definitely wasn't normally how I would play it. Any comments would be appreciated.

I plan on continuing to update my blog, if I have time, when I'm in Vegas. I'll be bringing my laptop computer with and probably play a bit online while I'm down there as well.