I’ve been a busy boy lately. Since I last blogged, I played the NAPT in Vegas at the Venetian and the LAPC in Los Angeles. On top of these tourneys and my hectic past few months, I’ll be going to San Jose for the Bay 101 Shooting Star tournament. While the LAPC is the biggest WPT, I’d say Bay 101 is the most unique. There are 50 Shooting Stars with a $5,000 bounty on their heads. Furthermore, once you reach the money it goes from 9 handed to 6 handed for the duration of the tournament. That’s a pretty cool idea and I’d love it if more tournaments did things like this.

For the NAPT I drove the 4 hours from LA to Vegas with my brother for the weekend. It was the first NAPT and the field was massive. The Venetian could barely handle it but overall it was a well-run tourney. Day 1 my table was pretty favorable although I had the one good player on my direct left so that caused me a few issues early on. We started with 30k and within two levels I was up to 45k after winning a big pot with KK against Raymond Davis. Around the 4th level I then lost all those chips back to Raymond when he turned the nut straight against my aces. After treading water for two more levels, I had my big double up with KK yet again against top pair. The very next hand I picked up kings again and busted Poker Ho’s queens to get to 80k. By the way, sorry about that Ho. Flop came Q, river K. Sick. I ended the day with 65k, a solid day 1.

Day 2 was not nearly as entertaining although for yet another time I had my roommate, Amit Makija at my table and on his direct left. Honestly, it’s just plain weird now that this keeps happening. My table was wild with Dwyght Pilgrim and Soheil Shamseddin raising a ton of pots. I had position on them but was never able to get into any good spots with them. After 3 levels of nothingness, our table broke. I found myself with 50k at 1k/2k and at a completely new table with no reads. After 5 orbits, I raise/called A7cc on the button to a small blind shove of 10 bigs and he had AQo. I ended up having him drawing dead on the turn. Woops. After that, our table broke yet again and I was moved to a far tougher table with two very good players, James Mackey and Steve Billirakis. I played really tight and even had to fold AKo to a single 3bet by someone who was a clear satellite winner, really tight, and made an extremely small reraise. It seemed too alarming to shove AKo there. I ended up shoving QQ a few hands later into AKo and lost the flip to bust with 40 minutes left in the day, 80 from the money.

Overall, I grinded my heart out for 2 days and played very well. And that’s all I can do. Next week I’ll be talking about the LAPC main event and how I decided to put it all in for heaps of chips with 810hh preflop. That’s a big woops. Until then wish me luck at Bay 101! Peace, I’m out.