My first FT sweat

What a surprise, Alex made another final table. The guy is just sick at tournament poker. He came into the FT of Event #3 with a sizeable chiplead and held it until they got down to about 5-handed play. He ran into some unfortunate situations, then lost a few hands, and found himself with about 2.6m chips when 3-handed play started. The hand he busted on was pretty sick; check CardPlayer for the details here ("Alex Jacob Eliminated in 3rd Place") if you don't already know them. Still, $282k is a nice payday for 3rd in a $1500 buyin event.

After that, Nate, Ben, Strasser, his friend Mike and I went to Fix at the Bellagio for dinner. Alex and his girlfriend met us there; he and Jason insisted on whoring the appetizers, which resulted in 7 total appetizer orders. Between those and the main course, everyone stuffed themselves. Al thanked us for sweating his FT by picking up the tab -- what a great guy.

Jason headed to the Bellagio poker room to play some 50/100NL, but since the list for 2/5 was over an hour's wait long, Nate, Ben and I headed to Caesar's. As previously mentioned, I'm pretty cash-broke right now, so I sat at 2/5 (uncapped buyin at CP) with my last ~$1100. There was another typical loud, super friendly drunk guy playing every hand with a nice stack, and I couldn't win against this guy. For example, 3 limps to me on the button, I overlimp QJo, BB makes it $30, maniac and one other guy call, and I call. Flop 9sTsKh (awesome). Checks to me, which I felt was very odd, so I put in $85; only the drunk guy calls. Turn 6d, checks to me, I'm positive he's on a spade draw and bet $225, he quickly calls. River is the 4s (sigh), he checks, and I check behind to lose to his AJs. Whatever.

So, after running bad some more, I found myself sitting with under $400. Very frustrating. However, I hit a few hands and made some nice plays against the two plain-vanilla LAG asians sitting to my right to build my stack over $1400 by the end of the session. I felt I was by far the best player at the table, and it really really sucks playing 2/5 because it's such a boring game. Even 5/10 live is just "meh" since you can't make any cool/interesting plays (because your opponents wouldn't understand them and react accordingly). Oh well...suffice it to say that I badly need an online --> cash transfer soon. I'm losing so much money in opportunity costs by not playing at least 5/10 live, and hopefully this problem will be resolved very soon.

Ground training for skydiving is tomorrow, but I forgot to call Kevin to find out what time to be there. Looks like I'm gonna have to wake up at 6:30am (aka 2 hours from now) to call and see if it's a morning or afternoon class. Ugh, time for sleep.