Safdar Summer Tournament Poker Camp
A couple of years ago, right before Moishe was born, I made a long desired trip to play in one of the baby events at the World Series of Poker. I did terribly and got put out after an hour and twenty minutes, but it was fun nevertheless. The rest of that trip was mostly spent at the Paris casino with my tripmates Chris and Katie. (Chris, where are you? You haven’t returned anyone’s calls for almost 3 months now…)
Why the Paris? Because they were having $60 buyin tournaments every two hours from 9:30am throughout the day. This was amazingly good practice. All three of our tournament games got a lot better with the significant practice, and I believe we all cashed at some point, some of us more than once. When one tournament would end, we’d sign up for the next one. If one of us were final tabling one tourney while the other was starting, we’d register for each other.
The opposition was soft quite often, which meant we got practice playing hyper-aggressive. There’s nothing better than getting to practice and making money at the same time.
And so in about a week and a half I’ll repeat this experiment, minus the $1,000 World Series of Poker buyin. Tim, Katie, and I are going to the Vegas to overlap with the wireless show (though I would have happily gone anyway) and I’m planning on running my own version of tournament summer camp. I’m staying at the Paris and plan to be present at their three times a day tournaments. We’re going to use one of these poker tournament schedules, either from All Vegas Poker, Las Vegas Vegas, or VegasTexasHoldem.
This last schedule is my favorite, and I have it bookmarked on my iphone for the trip. It’s pretty simple, just an hour by hour list of all the tournaments in Vegas. Combined with a casino map so I can tell which ones are close, I’m going to just tournament hop for 3 solid days.
I arrive about 10:30pm on a Sunday night. I’m still toying with the idea of playing in one of the tournaments that starts at midnight the night I arrive.
Though I will play some cash games on this trip, I’m really focusing on practice, with no clear need to return with profit this trip. My tournament game is definately a money loser, so I’m just kissing goodbye to my tourney fees and focusing on playing my best game.