Big, Big Score in the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza

Boom chacka lacka!!!! Last night I chopped the prize pool with the final four finishers in the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza $560 buyin nlh tournament for a cool 51k and change in Cold Hard Cash!!!

This is easily my biggest ever poker score, and I can honestly say that so much went on in this tournament that I have never, even been a part of before. I can't wait to post all about the experience, and really the crazy weekend I had here in Las Vegas overall this time around. I hung with some old blogger friends, met a few new ones as well, and had yet another amazing meal in one of my favorite restaurants in the world. But most of all, I played poker. Like a motherfucker. Nine or ten fruitless and frustrating hours of cash on Friday night / Saturday morning, and then what proved to be about 15 straight hours on Friday on Day One at the Venetian, followed by another 12 hours or so straight through on Sunday to get to the chop. In the end, after several frustrated and frustrating attempts, we finally got unanimous agreement on a chop -- something I was pushing hard for, mind you -- when down to four players remaining, and the four of us divided up the remaining $231,000 and change in the prize pool almost exactly according to chip stacks, leaving both me and the guy who had just a few hundred chips more than me each nabbing more than second place money, while the chip leader who had close to twice as many chips as 2nd and 3rd place took home 70 grand, and the fourth place guy agreed to 37k for his take in our four-way domination of the event.

I have so much to write about this, but right now is not that time as I have a million things to do today and still haven't slept or even come down to earth at all yet. This whole week I will probably spend reviewing the whole crazy trip to Vegas, from The Venetian tournament in separate posts for separate days, to some of the awesome perks we got this time as a result of my brother's -- shall we say "reputation" among the MGM/Mirage/Bellagio crowd based on his past experiences in their casinos, and of course, by popular demand, some discussion on my amazing meal at Prime in Bellagio, for the second year in a row. I want to cry that place is so great. But more on that later in the week. I promise I will be working on these posts all week and that I'll get each one up as soon as they are good and ready. I will try to target a post every day of the week like usual, but being that I will be on vacation with my family this week I don't want to make any guarantees.

51 grand, all to sit and play poker for 27 hours over two days. Whoever thought of this was a frigging genius.