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Trip Report

by Paul McMullin

As you've read elsewhere, AtLarge was a blast... Thanks Goldie and the Taj. Here are a few observations:

Taj accommodations I:

My wife (Edith) can walk a bit, but is very uncomfortable walking very far, so we travel with a wheelchair. She also sleeps sitting up most of the time because of her hip and back; when I made the hotel reservations with Marsha(?), I was assured that the Taj had been renovating the rooms, and that each room had a comfortable chair that should be acceptable for her use. However, at checkin, and again at "guest services", I was told that the desk-style chairs that were in the room were all that was available. Edith spent an uncomfortable Thursday night in one of them, and had pretty much decided to drive herself home on Friday... but I cornered Goldie in the poker room Friday morning before the start of the HOE event, and he allowed me to swipe one of the SIGNIFICANTLY more comfortable chairs from the hospitality suite (Thanks Dave F. for assisting me with the furniture arranging!). Edith was assuaged, and I returned the chair Sunday morning. [I don't know if they have security cameras in the elevators or not, but I'm thankful that I didn't have to explain WHY I was moving furniture between rooms when I couldn't get any of The Donald's Staff to do it for me.]

Worst overall(?):

As Goldie was saying his goodbyes on the way out of the card room on Sunday, someone asked about the "best overall" award, but when Goldie denied any knowledge of the tradition, there were three people within earshot claiming to have "AtLarge Best Overall" jackets to verify that it HAD been awarded in the past. Perhaps it was a computation that Crunch had been managing. In any case, I've GOT to be in the running for either the "best" or "worst" overall performance of the weekend: I finished on the bubble in Friday's HOE tournament (10th/96?), and made it to the bubble table in both Saturday's NLH (28th/200) and Sunday's Stud event (17th/67). Lots of play for no prize money. IGHN.

Is this a great seat, or what?

In the stud event at my starting table, Michelle was on my left. I'm pretty sure I had both her and Russ Fox on my right last summer in Barge's Stud shootout event, and turned to Edith before the dealing started and told her that I expected Michelle to be the most aggressive player at the table. That didn't stop me from shoving in a raise on about 1/3 of the hands that came to me unraised, and she never really seemed to get a chance to push back much - Edith seemed to think that I had been mistaken, but I think that the "human card rack" trick that I had going for the first two hours put Michelle a bit off her normal game - you just don't really want to mix it up with someone that is going to show you a flush or boat every time you get to the river with him. I'm certain that I would have had much more trouble had she been on my right again. (First raise wins; what a great seat!)

Event structure error(?):

When we sat down for the NLH event on Saturday, there were T3000 in chips at each place at the table, with the smallest chip being T25, but the tournament clocks were showing that the first round would have 5-10 blinds (or did we start at 10-20?). In any case, the directors scrambled around selling two stacks of red chips to each table, and then came back and sold a third stack. It turns out that someone had agreed to add a couple of blind levels at the beginning of the tournament as of last Wednesday - which turned out to be something of a disaster for the Taj because it extended the tournament into an 11 hour affair! At the end of the first hour only 10 or 12 people had busted out; we weren't down to 1/2 the field until about the third or fourth hour. While this was great for the participants, it was lousy for the Taj - we were NOT busting out and then playing in their ring games, and they had so many tables in use for the tournament, for a short time they were running ring games outside in their "auxiliary tournament area" because they didn't have free tables in the main playing space.

Consider that there were nearly 600k tournament chips in play with four players at the final table, and the blinds were 10k and 20k without antes. Great for the players - with 100k you could wait for an orbit or two before you were in real pressure, but it meant that the final table lasted quite a while.

I am mildly concerned that the fact that the tournament ran so much longer than was expected may mean that the tip pool may not have been as generous as had been planned. I KNOW that the floorman 'Brian' was annoyed about the change in the structure and how long our tournament lasted.

[GOLDIE: please let us know if an after-the-fact-collection is in order to make up a shortfall to the tournament dealers.]

Taj accommodations II:

The tournament directors that were handling seat assignments were very accommodating, allowing me to "randomly" get a table assignment before each of the three events that was accessible enough that Edith could sit behind me (in her wheelchair) and watch me play... she spent about 15 hours between the three tournaments watching me avoid busting out, and was present at my two-hand-collapse in the stud event after watching me dominate the table for the first three-and-one-half-hours.

She used to direct bridge tournaments for a living, and was quite the bridge player herself before she became so active in directing, and had a few comments about my play and "table presence" that may help improve my play in the future. In any case, thanks again to the Taj staff for making it easy for me to arrange for her to watch.

The ringing in my ears has stopped now:

After I busted out of the NLH tournament and visited with Edith for a bit, I managed to snag a seat at one of the TWO tables of the "pink game". Sitting between LenG and Dilligaf was a riot, but it wasn't until just this morning that my ears stopped ringing. One "local" sat down and played four hands before he got up and went over to the podium... we watched him "conversing" with the person managing the board (this conversation included several 'thumb pointing over the shoulder back at our table' motions) followed by a shrug by the staff member; the local came back to the table and stacked up his pink chips to leave without sitting back down. After he left, LenG declared it a new 3'42" record for hyper-tilting a local out of the game. Too bad he only donated a stack or so before he left.

Welcome to California-in-NJ:

I bought in to the pink game for 10 stacks at about 8:00PM. At 10:30PM I was down to about 3 1/2 stacks, having played several hands that I've given up playing in the online ring games, and feeling mildly annoyed at myself for having done so. No problem, this is the pink game! When I reached my pre-determined go-to-bed 11:30 cutoff time, I was selling 10 1/2 stacks back to the table and the dealer [keep the pink chips on the table if you can, to avoid 'fill' problems for the house]. Reminded me of the California games I'd visited a few times [you're not stuck if you're within 2 pots of your buy-in!].

Taj tournaments:

I played in the Taj's $100+20 tournament Thursday night and their $200+25 tournament on Friday night. They start you off with T5000, which seems pretty generous, but the blinds bump every 20 minutes or so at the start: 25-50, 50-100, 100-200 + 25 ante, 200-400 + 50 ante, ... the jump from 150/orbit to 550/orbit was a bit of a shock, and then to 1050/orbit again means that the field is down to about 1/3 or 1/4 within about two hours [thanks for coming, now go gamble!].

I suspect that the "locals" have a HUGE advantage here over the "tourists" because of the adjustments that you need to make for this sort of structure [lull you the first 40 minutes, then sock you the next 40], but I *hope* that I could make the appropriate adjustments if I got to play that structure a few times myself.

Final remarks:

All of the AtLarge tournaments were great fun, with LOTS of play.

Got a "8-2 poker club" chip as a bustout prize. Nice touch guys!

It was great seeing Rev. Holtman outlast Eric in the NLH event.

Also great seeing all the west coasters that traveled - I'll have to figure out how to get out to Escargo(?) next spring.

Thanks again Goldie! See everyone at Barge!

-prm