Pot Limit Omaha events tend to be some of my favorite events at the WSOP. I’m only moderately experienced in the game, but it’s a fun game and a nice change of pace from the NL Hold’em events I’m constantly playing at the series. As a result, I was definitely looking forward to WSOP Event 22 ($1500 PLO).

I got off to a good start in this event with AAxx holding a couple times against draws and getting paid off with a flopped boat against trips. I lost a few standard pots where I was slightly ahead after that though, and busted with  AcQc9x7x all in on a Qs9s8c flop against Sam Stein’s AxAsJs6x when he rivered a flush.

For some strange reason I was actually a little bit tilted on my drive home, which is really odd for me since I don’t often get very emotional about tournaments…especially when I bust early. I think it was just because I had a really tough table draw of players who actually knew PLO well, and had been crushing it anyway despite not being nearly as confident in my PLO game as my NL game.

I was on my way home when I got a text message from one of my best friends Joe Cappuccio (was Joey Capp/Cappuccio816 online) saying that he was going to Burger Bar at Mandalay Bay with another one of my best freinds, Matt Iles (was papamat25/I Pay Ur Rent), and his awesome new girlfriend, Amanda. I wasn’t in the most sociable mood, but they live in Jersey for now and I don’t get too many opportunities to go out with them.

I met Matt and Joey when I first started playing it Atlantic City…in fact, Joey was at my $1/2 NL table at Tropicana on my 21st birthday while I was going back and forth from college to AC in the middle of finals week. I met Iles through him, and we all started hanging out together between grind sessions. We’ve talked through countless hands, told each other bad beat stories, helped each other out when shit gets rough, and generally been through enough together through they years that these guys are like brothers to me. I’d give them the shirt of my back in a heartbeat and know they’d do the same for me.

So, needless to say, I wasn’t going to turn down this invite despite a slightly sour mood. And boy, am I glad I didn’t! We had a pretty good meal (B+) at Burger Bar, which is a bar/restaurant that serves some interesting varieties of burgers. We all went with the American Kobe burgers…mmmmmmmmmmmm. They also had some awesome alcoholic milkshakes, but we are a tad suspicious that those rat bastards didn’t even put alcohol in the shakes.

After that we came back to my house (video blog house tour coming soon) for some herbal refreshments and remedies and so that Matt and Amanda could get the tour. We decided to go out to Fremont Street after that for some frozen beverages in OLDDDDD Vegas. Aside from Fremont just being an awesome place in general, it gave us an opportunity to drop Binion’s Horseshoe Casino…the original home of the World Series of Poker.

After that we dropped Matt and Amanda off and were SUPPOSED to go to the Rio so that I could buy in for the $5k shootout and go home to get some sleep. That’s what was SUPPOSED to happen. But, alas, things don’t always go as planned. I bought in for the tournament, then saw my buddy Jason Young in the hallway at the Rio shortly after he went from a huge stack to near-bubbling the $10k Stud event.

As a compassionate (and already heavily inebriated) friend, I decide to join him at the bar so that he can try to get off tilt. I call Cappuccio (my DD, weeee!) and have him come inside so that we can hang out with Jason for a bit. I grabbed my true love in the beer world, a Blue Moon, but Jason Young decided that this wasn’t enough. No, no, no…we should be doing shots of Jameson at 1am when I’m already hammered!

Somehow I wasn’t quite sober enough to process just how bad of an idea this was, and obliged him. Now, I somehow managed to go through the first 26.5 years of my life without EVER getting to the point of being blackout drunk. However, there’s very little else I recall that evening, so I’m going to go ahead and call that streak broken.

To quote a couple of Joey’s tweets from that night:

“poochpoker: while looking for his 5k shootout receipt @MattStoutPoker just pulled a jalapeño popper out of his pocket. I can’t make this up.”

Not only was that true, but they didn’t seem to want to accept said jalapeño popper as proof of payment at the tournament the next day. So uptight! So I had to have the floor person look up my table number and seat me. Oopsies!

I was honestly, surprisingly, and very fortunately feeling better by the time WSOP Event 24 5k shootout started, and drew a pretty tough table. I ended up getting down to four-handed and losing a 40k pot (150k in play) with JTh<77 when I shoved 19bb from the BB against a button raise. As I write this I’m still sitting here trying to figure out how 77 could possibly beat my JTh in a race, but I swear it really happened! Oh well, on to the next one!

Stout