Back in Sin City

I flew out to Vegas on Wednesday for the NAPT. I came a little early to hang with Mike because he was only going to be here till Saturday. It was my fastest trip with through TSA ever, I managed to get through all the hassle in under 3 minutes. Pretty impressive to me. I guess they are getting more efficient.

I'm staying at the Venetian because they decided to comp me for 4 free nights for no reason whatsoever. I played a little blackjack with them before, and I guess that was enough for them. I decided to give them some action in exchange, and apparently it was a bad idea. I'm pretty sure I'm counting cards correctly, but I'm down about 3.3k with an average bet of around 150. I suppose thats not really that much given that standard deviation of an average bet of 50 would be around $1,400. Variance is pretty insane in a game where you only have a 1-2% edge at best. Oh well the real plan was to get my run bad out before the NAPT started.

I've done really well in poker though. I won about 1k at Venetian in a 1/2 pot limit omaha mix game. It was half high low and half high only. Then I went to Bellagio and won about 5.5k at 10/20 there. I coolered someone with a set of aces against a set of fives on the A95r flop for about 2.1k. It almost makes up for my blackjack run bad.

Mike decided to go for Diamond card status with Harrah's. After running some numbers he found he can go Diamond in a single day at video poker. His expected loss is only a few hundred, something that can easily be recouped by the perks of being a Diamond card holder. He had to borrow $700 from me to do it, but he managed to pull it off with a loss of around 2k. That's probably worthwhile to him, although if I had diamond card status, I honestly don't know what I'd do with it.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the NAPT. It's a $5k buyin sponsored by Pokerstars and has a televised final table. Updates will be on twitter at http://twitter.com/SuddenlyBryce

Wish me luck. I could use it.

I'll see you across the felt.
Bryce