Day One Continued

I walk into the room and I see 4 poker tables all set up with the chips and cards ready to go. I am ready to play at that point. Now we are all waiting for the pros to come in and start the teaching. The four pros are Mark Seif, Mark Kroon, Shawn Rice and Jim Shipley. They sit up at the front of the class and they are introduced by the WSOP staff.

Mark Seif then gets up and welcomes us to the class and lets us know that we are part of a group of 5% that will get education on playing poker. He informs us that we are learning everything that they know about how to play poker. They will not hold anything back from us. This is the theory part of poker playing and going through the book lasted about the whole day. A lot of information was passed on to us. I was writing in the book as well as the pad I brought with me. I wasn't going to miss a thing.

The book we received has the following information inside:
Introduction
Pre-Flop Strategy
Post-Flop Strategy
Stage Strategy
Sit-n-Gos
Satellites

This book contains quite a bit of stuff in it but the knowledge really will come from sitting at the tables and playing the hands in front of these pros. You just know that the information you will receive will be something good. Greg Raymer, 2004 WSOP Main Event winner came in and talked with us.

We had class till about 6pm and then went on a dinner break and we are then to meet up in the Pavilion and we were to play tournament poker with the pros. I arrived at the pavilion room and located my seat at table 147 seat 7. The pro at our table was Mark Kroon, a very good online player. He showed us his skill level during the game. It was hard to play against him. I needed the next two days to finally understand what he was up to and how to play against him. He explained to us the next day what he was waiting for from us and of course we didn't know that.

We started at 7pm and we had 4 tables going. I was able to get down to the final two tables before I was short enough that I needed to start shoving. I did and ended up going out in 20th place for the tournament. My first goal was not to go out first. My second goal was to make the final table and then win the tournament. Well, at least I didn't go out first.

The person next to me when we started the tournament was the person who won the tournament and was given a $6,000 to 7,000 prize. The chance to play for a seat in the main event and take another main event class before playing again. Second and third place received about $2000 for another class with the academy.

After I was done with the tournament I then focused my attention on the other tournaments going on in the Pavilion and Amazon rooms. I walked around and found and watched Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, Freddy Deeb, Phil Helmuth, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Todd Brunson, Jen Harman.

After watching all of these players and being pretty tired from the busy day I finally headed off to my room on the 17th floor and the great view and was ready to go to bed and get some sleep and get ready for the next day.