What's Two Broken Toes?

June 6, 2011

I came here in 2009, that was my first World Series of Poker, and I played about 15 events. Last year I played about 20 events. I went deep in the 25k six max, deep in the 2500 six max, and I chopped a Venetian tournament heads up, so it was a decent summer I guess.

This year I was playing football the day before I flew out here and I broke two toes. I'm not sure when I broke them, it might have been a tackle or something like that, but I broke two toes and then I didn't get them checked out or anything. I just taped them together and now they're infected. It's not pretty. It gets worse every day, like swelling up and I haven't been to the doctor yet. I haven't really got time with all this going on. I'll see how I do in this tournament and go from there.

I'm actually chip leader at the moment here in the 10k Pot Limit Hold'em. I've got over 200k and blinds are just going up to 800-1600, so I've got over 100 bigs. Yesterday my table was really tough, but I managed to chip up to 125,000 by the end of the day by bluffing and picking off bluffs. I didn't really have any big hands. Yesterday at the very start of the day, Jason Mercier moved into the seat two to my right. Shannon Shorr was to my left, Lex Veldhuis to his left, then Mike Matusow, Alan Cunningham, and Davidi Kitai. This is one of the toughest fields that you can find in any sort of poker tournament. Very early on I tried to bluff Jason Mercier off aces, which didn't work out too well. So I was down to 16k within the first two levels, but I managed to get it back up.

I doubled from fifty to one hundred thousand yesterday by playing a hand in an interesting way against Shannon Shorr. I was opening a lot and he three bet me a lot all day long. In the first level Shannon three bet me one of the first few hands, and I flopped top pair and called him down. From that point on he just decided he was going to three bet me every single time I tried to open. I let him get away with quite a bit. Sometimes I'd peel off a flop and then just fold, and other times I'd just fold to the three bet. I wasn't really looking to get involved out of position against Shannon because he's pretty good in position and he'd put me in a lot of tough spots that I don't really need to be involved in. So just back from the dinner break the blinds were 300-600. I open for 1300, Shannon three bets to 3500, and I call. At this point I've got 50k and he's got 100k. The flop comes A-A-3. I've got A-Q, by the way. I check, Shannon bets 3k, and I call pretty quickly. The turn is a jack, an off suit jack. I dwell check this time. Shannon bets 8000 and this time I dwell call. The river is an off suit five. I was trying to make it look like I had a middling sort of pair the whole way through the hand, so I thought I'd continue that story. I led out 4k on the river into about 35 thousand and he just shipped it on me. He stuck it in and I snapped him off pretty quick and he just mucked. I never really found out what he had, but that pot put me up to 100k, and it was quite easy from there because I had a lot of room to maneuver. Shannon gave me a lot more respect after that.