Quick Stud Tourney Report - U.S. Poker Championship (LC)

[PoorLawyer]

So I played in the $500+50 preliminary stud tourney on Friday at the Taj. I think there are still some lower limit stud and stud8 tourneys before a big 5K stud event in a couple weeks, so if anyone is interested these were my thoughts on the whole thing:

1. It took a LOT longer than I thought it would. Starting with 5,000 chips gave a lot of play. After the 3rd level (45 minutes each) there was only 1 or 2 people knocked out. I went out in level 10 at 800/1600 bets with 100 ante and 200 BI...this was 9 hours into the tourney and there were still about 35 people left (top 16 get ITM)

2. The play was mediocre at best. There seemed to be a lot of either stud regulars or taj tourney regulars there. Everyone seemend to know each other. Would have been helpful to have Jeff there for some notes on this motley crew [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]. Nobody seemed all that special though in my time playing. I didn't really see anything fancy going on at all...there were a lot of pretty loose players early just getting their stacks chewed up by everyone else. It was not very aggressive though until the later stages where people started stealing. This is not to say there were no good players there of course (there was some guy who everyone knew who must have been fairly decent as he got a call from ESPN to check up and see how he was doing [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]).

3. The payout structure seemed silly. There were about 115 people in it I think (there were 200 people in the 300+30 stud on wednesday) and they paid a whole second table, but basically 13-16 get their money back plus 60 bucks and 9-12 get money back plus 150 or so. I think the general consensus was to go ahead and give a refund for the second table but bump up the final table money more instead of those dinky consolation prizes. There was no real good money payout until 3rd (which got about 5000 i think; First was 22K)

4. As for me personally, I think I played really well, having never done a live stud tourney before. I certainly was not intimidated or anything. My stack was up and down, basically holding on with a little below average stack until about the 8th level when i made a move and got up to about 12K in chips (there were only 4 big stacks at the time I went out and they were only around 25K, so it was very evenly distributed with some people barely hanging in and a ton of people in the 5-15K chip range). At the time I went out I just lost a nasty hand where my 999 got outdrawn by 6s up that filled on the river...down to about 3000. I had stolen a couple hands to get my stack back to about 6500. I get a real hand right after a steal, KQK, and raise in mid-position and the BI, who is the only big stack at my table, must have decided I was stealing again as he reraises me to 1600...I make it 2400 which commits the rest of my chips. Young sunglassed, hatted, jerseyed, 120 lbs soaking wet kid started with 228 and makes running 8s....I should have had the floor check his ID before I picked up and left, but I was too ill from having sat there for 9 hours to go out against that cheese. I really think I would have cruised into the money if I double up there as the level was about to go up again and there were a lot of short stacks.

Anyway, overall it was a good time and I will take another shot when they come around again, but I really don't see how people play in those things every day. The final table must have lasted until well after midnight and a lot of the people who had played the day before were going to play in the hold em event the next day at 11 too.