Training at The Venetian

I have spent the past few days at The Venetian working with Jonathan Thompson who is a journalist with Men's Health Magazine. He had never played a hand of poker until Friday, and my mission was to get him tournament ready in 48 hours. He is a very interesting guy who has been traveling around the world learning all kinds of new things and generally having a great time. His previous two articles were on ski jumping in Utah and surfing in Hawaii. On his last day of ski jumping he did the big Olympic jump 3 times and on one of the falls, broke his tail bone. His next article after this, believe it or not is gladiator school in Rome. So no matter what happens with the poker the physical damages will be minimal.

In our first session we began with hand rankings and went through the mechanics of play and basic strategy . Le Ann Tinch from the Venetian set us up in the poker room with chips and a dealer as our classroom. I have to say the poker room at The Venetian is really nice. It is well designed, spacious, clean and has comfortable chairs. The floor staff and dealers are experienced and deliver a high level of customer service. They have a good high stakes cash game which runs in a private side room a few times per week and are the leader in the deep stack tournaments here in Vegas. The Director of the Poker room Kathy Raymond really does a great job.

Jonathan and I spent two morning sessions doing live instruction in the poker room and then went to my room where he sweated me playing online for a couple of hours each day. Then for the first big test we went to Treasure island to play in their 7pm nightly tournament. This was my first time in Treasure Island in years and they had a nice poker room. The evening event attracted 27 players, about half regulars. Starting chips were 5k and blinds went up every 30 min. Our planned strategy was tight aggressive, and Jonathan stuck to the game plan and really played well. Early on he raised 3 BB in early position and received 3 callers. The flop came 8 8 8 and he bet ¾ of the pot and got one caller. The next card was a queen and he made a small bet, which confused me because our plan was to bet approximately ¾ of the pot. His opponent raised him and he thought for a moment and called. On the river after a blank he opened with a bet of about 25% of the pot, which his opponent insta-called. Jonathan flipped over pocket queens and he dragged his first pot. His opponent who was the chip leader before the hand looked stunned. The tournament was a bounty event and he picked upo two bounties along the way. He went out in 6^th place after getting a little short stacked he picked up A 9 on the button, and shoved. The big blind called with A K, and Jonathan flopped a 9! Unfortunately the river brought a king and he finished in 6^th place, outlasting 21 other players.

We then went out to the new club at Treasure Island and celebrated his first tournament. We then met again this morning and discussed yesterday's play and went over some more material. He is going to play the Mirage tournament today and the Venetian tournament tomorrow. I will keep you updated.

I am playing the Sunday events on Full Tilt today and am very excited to be hosting an event today, and playing a few others. Tomorrow I'm heading back to NY to continue seeing the family.

I would like to thank those of you who took the time to email me and share your thoughts with me over the past couple of days. I do try to respond to most emails promptly, however I received over 100 in response to yesterday's blog, which were very supportive and very appreciated, so I'm a little behind.

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