Harrah's Rincon

I drove down to San Diego on Sunday to go to Harrah's Rincon. Nate came along for the ride, and we traversed the winding mountain to get to the casino.
Harrah's Rincon was hosting a WSOP Circuit event. The buyin was $5170, and the field was reasonably soft. There were definitely some good players in it, but over all I thought I was +EV. Unfortunately, it's really hard to prove that when you flop 4 pairs in 4 hours.
I got dealt AK 0 times, AJ and AQs once and lost with each. For pairs, I got 22x 3 times, 33, 44, 66, 88, 99x2, TT and lost with all of them. I got QQ, raised and flopped a set, but got no action. I got KK when I was down to 4k in chips and ran into Aces. I flopped a King to double up, but then I busted with 79 vs 95 on a 923 flop. 3 outer on the river. Well that's how my day went.

Bryan Devonshire won the event. He's a fairly well known pro who signed with Ultimate Bet.

Brandon Cantu was on my table also. He's also signed with UB. And we had a hand where the dealer really screwed up. Cantu got it all in against a shorter stack with AK vs TT on a AT4 flop. The dealer pushes Cantu's entire stack over, without ever counting the chip stacks. Because we were in the ballroom, all the cameras were way too far away, and then the tournament director had no clue what to do.

On the other hand, I was really impressed by the tournament structure.
We started with 15k in chips at 25/50 blinds. The 40 minute levels kinda sucked, but were made up by the fact that they had every single blind level.
50/75, 50/100, 75/150, 100/200, 100/200/25, 150/300, 200/400 and so on. They didn't skip any levels, which is very uncommon.


I won about $1,500 in cash games while I was there. However, I lost like $4,000 in blackjack. It's really hard to say that and have people still believe I can turn a profit counting cards. But variance in blackjack is far greater than that in poker.

I was getting into extremely profitable situations like getting A6 against a 5 showing, yet I would constantly lose those hands. Further it was pretty brutal losing those hands, because usually that's when I was pressing my bets. In a game where it's essentially 50/50, I was losing 70% of my hands. And I'm not referring to the hands I bust, I'm talking about hands where I would get dealt 18s, 20s, or 15s vs a 4 showing and so on. Yet the dealer constantly improved to beat me. It was pretty sick, but hey oh well. I felt like I had an edge there. Well, that's what bankroll management is for.

When I went home, I won like $2,200 online, so eh I guess it all balances out.

I'll see you across the felt.
Bryce