As the tweet says, Day 1 was okay, but not great.

I got it up to 94k shortly before dinner, but never eclipsed that, and spun my wheels for the final 4+ hours of the day. I finished with 87,400, which should be right around average stack coming into Day 2.

We started at 100/200 blinds with a 200 BB ante, and finished with 300/600 blinds with a 600 BB ante. We go to 400/800/800 on Day 2, which begins Tuesday.

My chip stack isn't bad considering:

- I did not win any big pots

- I was never dealt QQ, KK, or AA

- I flopped 2 sets, but got almost no action. Both were against the guy to my direct right, who thought I was picking on him, but in reality I just kept getting hands against him (plus I noticed he was opening light, so I called/raised lighter against him). He had just finished semi-complaining that I was "always bluffing" him, and then I flopped my second set against him. I was waiting for him to take a stand, but sadly he check/folded the flop.

- What could have been my best pot of the night was ruined by a brutal turn card (see tweets above, where the Qd fell). I actually said in my head "Please no queen of diamonds", and there it came. On the plus side, I got out cheap, putting zero chips in after it fell.



The table draw was also what I'd categorize as "okay, not great". On the plus side, I didn't recognize anyone, and nobody had a particularly tricky or difficult-to-deal-with playstyle. On the minus side, most at the table generally knew what they were doing, and most people also generally took the attitude that they weren't going to spew off chips.

There was one really weird player at the table. This was a guy in his 60s, who seemed European, and didn't speak English well. His vision was REALLY bad. He had to lift the cards and put them up to his face in order to see them. Someone who wanted to cheat could have easily positioned a friend on the rail (though nobody did this). He also needed to stand sometimes to see the flop, and often asked people to read him the flop. You might think this was just a normal older guy with bad vision, but he also had a bizarre playstyle, often opening huge pre (like 3k-4k, with no raises in front of him), but then getting very passive postflop. Somehow I kept getting KTo whenever he did that. I probably got it like 5-6 times, and folded each one. Most of the time he wasn't entering light (because he wasn't playing that many hands), but toward the end he started opening a lot more, so I assume at that point he was. I did look him up with 9h8h in the BB against his 2k button raise (I had 600 in the BB), and flop was KhJh3s. Knowing he was passive postflop, and knowing he was opening lighter, I just donkbet the flop, and he folded. But other than some early hands with him, I never got the hands to really look up his big preflop raises, and I didn't want to do it with KTo. Not in this tournament at this stage.

People were joking about him on our end of the table (someone said he won an EPT bracelet, and then a new guy at the table was told that the guy had 3 EPT bracelets and a circuit ring), but this dude's hearing was also not very good, so it's clear he had no idea people were talking about him. Also, the guy barely spoke English.

The ages at my table were very mixed. Recall in 2019 when, at age 47, I was the youngest at my starting table by several years. Not at this one. There were two young guys (one 25, one 33), a bunch of middle aged guys, and that one older guy.

We return on Tuesday. I'm not sure how they are going to handle this, since Day 1F is also Tuesday, and it's expected to be a big field. Our Day 2 (combining with the 950-or-so total survivors from Days 1A and 1B) will probably have over 2000 players, so that should eat up a lot of the capacity. I'm not sure what they're going to do, and they haven't announced anything. We start before they do (ours is at 11am, Day 1F is at 12pm). Supposedly the WSOP assumed a bigger Day 1D field than they actually got, while at the same time understimating the likely Day 1F field. Oops.

There were rumors Day 1D would be 10-handed, which would have sucked. They decided to not do that, and instead were going to cap it at 2500 entrants, and stay 9-handed. They have announced that Day 1F might be 10-handed, and also might have alternates. Yuck.

I'll post seat assignments as soon as I get them.

The money should hit early Day 4, or possibly end of Day 3. Long way to go.