39th at The Bellagio Cup

Well I made I to the money with about 38,000 in chips and was short all day. The bubble broke at 100 and then we rapidly lost players after that. My table broke and I wound up with Lee Markholt on my right and David "The Dragon" Pham on my left. Now that's a bad beat. Lee was playing moderately aggressively and almost never missed an opportunity to open a pot. On one occasion, Lee raised 21,000 with the blinds 4,000 – 8,000, in the cut-off and I looked down at 10 10 and smooth called. The Dragon then raised an additional 50,000, and Lee after a long pause re-raises 150,000. I then fold and David goes all-in. Most of the time it would be an easy fold, but it looked to me that Lee was stealing and David thought my call was weak, so David was squeezing. Lee realizing this was putting the pressure back on David and me. Lee's game is sophisticated enough that he could re-squeeze if he felt like David was making a move. So I considered all this and decided if this is what these two were up to, who was I to get in the way. So anyway, Lee snap calls and shows KK vs. David's AA. The aces hold and Lee gets eliminated. Perhaps I over thought the situation, but I did come to the right decision.

I continued short stacked and made it to 39^th place, never picking up a hand or decent situation. I started to get very short on chips and pushed on the button in an unopened pot with 22. David The Dragon in the big blind calls with AK, and a king flops, and no deuce comes. Although I was obviously disappointed, I felt like I played pretty well and ended this time in Vegas on a good note.

This morning I'm heading over to Fox 5 TV to do a WSOP update about the final table, Then it's back to CA tomorrow to catch up on things there, and then off to NY next week.

I did want to comment on Phil Hellmuth's "incident" at the main event a couple of days ago, but I will comment on that later. I will also give you some final thoughts on the WSOP.

For more information on Roy Winston, you can visit his website: www.oraclepoker.net or send him an email: [email protected]