Unfortunately the WSOP didn’t start very well for us. The first person to get a bad beat was my mum, who was not allowed to board the plane to the US because she has an older passport. (WTF?) As it turns out although Hungarians don’t need a visa to visit the US, if they happen to have a passport that was issued before the current, new EU-type passport was introduced, they do need to get a visa. What sense does this make?

So for the first week my mother-in-law came with me to take care of my one-year-old daughter. Luckily she is a super nice person, and they get along very well with my daughter. I hoped my mum would arrive (after changing her passport) by the end of the week when my mother-in-law had to go home.

My fist tournament was the 2-7 triple draw. I fought like a hero for six hours against the will of poker gods. At first it went very well, I felt like I was playing my A-game and only made one or two smaller mistakes. There were two weaker players at the table but they got knocked out rather quickly. In one of those seats arrived one of the best online high-stakes mixed game and triple draw specialists, Poker Stars online pro, Seb86. The other seat was taken by a guy who also looked very competent. This made our table deadly given that we already had 3 high-stakes players from the very start. This still wouldn’t have been a problem, especially because I felt that I played clearly better than at least two of those guys.

The problem was that while at the beginning I had good starting hands and made most of my hands after the draws – and went to 11,5k from the starting stack of 7,5k – when the blinds went up and every hand made a huge shift in the chip stacks I was unable to win a hand. This was not because I made mistakes, or because the others outplayed me. I remember playing a very good game at this point and I don’t actually remember making one single mistake at this stage of the tournament. I just simply couldn’t make a hand or even bluff at a pot. The biggest hit was when at 250/500 blinds I made a No2 vs a nut hand. This is the biggest cooler in this game. There was 8-10k in the pot. I actually only lost 4 bets after the third draw which I felt proud about (5 is the maximum number of bets at the WSOP). I was left with 1500 in chips while the 10k stack would have been a very healthy one at this stage of the tournament. At the end I stood pat with T high against my opponent who was still drawing and made a better T high on the last draw. I felt like the last hand was typical of my whole tournament.

As I was leaving the table and wished good luck to everyone, three of the guys congratulated me on my game including the two that I considered to be better players. I was disappointed that I only got so far, but I was proud of myself because I felt like I played a great game.

I had four more tournaments to play and hoped that they would go better.

I was close to cashing at the 1k NLHE event, I got knocked out around 500th and 465 places payed. Then I cashed in the 1,5k NLHE, but only for $3200 – 263rd out of appr. 3400. Unfortunately this was the only result I had out of the five tournaments I played – at the same time you are only expected to cash every 10th tournament, so it is still better than average.

I got knocked out of the Main Event on the 2nd day after not having any reasonable hands (better than 33) for the last 4 hours of the first day nor the first 4 hours of the second day. It is hard to play poker up the stream...

I felt bad about not playing better poker at the Main Event. The first six hours went very well and I felt I was playing my A-game. Later unfortunately when I was card-dead I just couldn’t sit tight and I got into three situations which I shouldn’t have. When they catch your first big bluff you should sit back and relax, wait and not run another one (or two) for quite a while until you build your image back up. I didn’t have any hands to build my image back up and although I swore to myself not to try to go after pots with my distroyed image, I just felt like the situations were too perfect to miss. Well, I didn’t succeed...

So what now? I think I will turn back to online poker in which I am quite successful and I will try to build my bankroll back up after spending it all on buying a house. I would like to try some new poker rooms where I hope to find soft competition: PKR, Cake Poker, GR88 Poker, Unibet Poker and Bodog Poker .

Seb told me that the 2-7 competition is quite tough now that no Americans can play and I guess there are not many games to begin with which is a shame because I love that game. I just started to play it online again on Poker Stars and it seems that the competition is soft at the lower stakes (up to $5/$10). I guess I will only run into the problem of tougher games on higher stakes (I used to play up to $50/$100).

As far as live tournaments go I enjoyed the WSOP a lot and I am thinking that it is not really worth it to go to live tournaments just to play a Main Event and maybe 1-2 side events. During the WSOP I can play 20-30 tournaments one after the other. If you get knocked out, another one is starting the next day. So I am thinking that this is definitely the best tournament series to play.

I am not saying that I would refuse a backing or sponsorship deal or that I will not try for satellites, especially to events that have multiple side events maybe even in mixed games. However I don’t think I would put too much effort in satellites for now. I’d rather just perfect my game for the WSOP next year and then win a bracelet (or two ;) )