WSOP Quest Part 1

Being a teacher it’s hard to find big live tournaments that I can play in.  I nearly got through the Aussie one but that would have been during term time so I don’t even know if I would actually have been able to play in it.  So when I heard that this years world series main event was during my summer holidays I set my mind on trying to qualify for it.  Although I’m a much better online player (IMHO) I felt that the experience alone was one that I could learn from and as were going to be in Vegas during this time anyway it seemed ideal.

 

I had already accumulated about $1k in $w on Poker Stars so decided to use some of these to try to qualify for one of their satellites, $640 entry I think so 1 in every 18 got a seat.  Most of the quallies into this main satellite were double shootout type games, 2 table structure where you need to win and win.  During Easter I played quite a few of these, as if you played during the morning there tended to be quite an overlay, with only 2/3 people in the first round.  I found I was often getting through to the final table but had didn’t really get anywhere close to winning.  I tied one or two single table quallies but again had very little success.

 

So one morning when Chris was still in bed I did some scouting round to try and find the best way into the world series.  A lot of quallies were 1 for every 50 or so, not ideal so I wanted to find the best value route.  This led me to Betfair.  At first I was interested in their rake qualification route – if you earned them so much in rake back they would give you anything between a free WSOP seat to a freeroll for some of the smaller events.  I considered this for a while but after we sat down and did some calculations, with coming to the site after this promo had already started we soon realised it would be near impossible to actually rack up enough rake back in the time left, unless I didn’t work or sleep that is….

(Continues tomorrow)