Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop

Just finished up the daily noon tournament at the Venetian, and ended up chopping it equally 5 ways for $800 each. It was kind of odd when we got down to five players, as the leader had about 25K but the short stack had 12 or 13K, and everyone esle was bunched up pretty closely. It only paid out the top 3 spots so it wasn't too hard to get the chip lead to agree to an equal chop five ways. I was in 3rd with 17K but blinds were 600/1200 so it was starting to get pretty crapshootastic and I was happy to chop it up.

All in all pretty decent tournament, as far as the amount of play you get for your money. You get $1500 in chips for the initial buy-in, plus 1000 more in chips for the $5 staff bonus. You also can take one rebuy (but only one) rebuy, which is 1500 chips for $50. The only downside is that apparently the fields are typically 30-40 people, paying 3-4 spots, so it's a fairly small field. 30 minute levels, too, instead of 15 minutes, so it's not a total crapshoot a few levels in like some tourneys.

The general level of play was a bit spotty, but not terrible, as apparently a goodly number of locals play in the tournament, who were for the most part a little weak passive but not godawful. There were a handful of WPT fanboi types who were, on the other hand, pretty godawful, but not that many, and overall it wasn't a supersoft field. Not really tough, but not tons of complete dead money, either.

I felt pretty good about my play, although I did suckout with AJ versus AK at one point with all my chips out there, with an A flop and an opponent who was all over the place as far as his general play, who happened to finally have a real hand for once with AK. A J on the river saved my arse and I was never in danger from there on out. Won a nice hand at the final table when I flopped quad 8s and was able to go into steal mode as no one wanted to make a stand on the bubble.