Travel Report, NAPT Venetian: Day 2

Another day of professional tourney poker is in the books, as the NAPT Venetian completed its second day of play (of five). Was another smooth day both in terms of the play and over on the reporting side, and as the field continues to shrink the excitement continues to grow.

It appears 149 are returning for Day 3. Tourney is going to be played eight-handed from here on out, and so they’ll need 19 tables for today. And, of course, the final table will be eight-handed, following the format of the European Poker Tour (as the NAPT has in other respects, too).

Andrew “LuckyChewy” Lichtenberger is the chip leader heading into today. He returns with over 600,000, a little down from the 700,000 or so he won in a single hand yesterday versus Lars Bonding. I got over in time to see the chips get counted down -- was an A-A vs. K-K situation in which LuckyChewy’s aces held. Andy “BKiCe” Seth and Steve “MrSmokey1” Billirakis are way up there. Men “the Master” Nguyen also has a lot of chips, as does Nam Le. Picking these things is a silly exercise, but if forced to choose a winner this far out, I’d take Le for the win.

There are three Team PokerStars pros with big stacks, too -- Vanessa Rousso, Bill Chen, and Greg Raymer. One other, 1983 WSOP champ Tom McEvoy, is still alive with the short stack he was nursing all day yesterday. I did manage to see him play a hand yesterday, one in which he had an even shorter stack all in and won. I expect he’ll probably keep folding for the first while today, too, as we are about 20 spots from the cash.

The day went by quickly -- or seemed, too, at least. A dinner break had been scheduled, but it was decided midway through the day to forgo it and push on through.

Ended up having to find a moment to run up to the second floor to Tintoretto, the little Italian bakery, and grabbing a yummy bruschetta with tomato, mozzarella & basil, an Italian sub, and a bunch of freshly-baked almond cookies I shared with my colleagues. There’s the canal, blurry as I’m racing past it.

After the night was over, we got word of a media tourney, and soon about 25-30 of us were gathered around four tables for the event. The Mathematics of Poker co-author Bill Chen was playing, too, sporting a fashionable pair of shorts. So was Bernard Lee, whose attire included a shirt with the Foxwoods logo, indicating his new gig as spokesperson.

There might have been a couple of other faces familiar outside of the media world, but I didn’t get to inspect the field too closely, as I somehow managed to be the first one out. No shinola! My streak of media tourney victories -- begun last August in Kyiv -- ends at one.

What happened? Picked up pocket aces on just the second hand and, well, they didn’t work out for me as well as they did for Lichtenberger. Ended up overplaying them like a true amateur. I wouldn’t say I got “married” to them. ’Cos, well, I never once had any loving feeling about the hand. But it was definitely a case of ’til death to us part.

Got two callers of my preflop raise, and after a 10-7-4 rainbow flop, I didn’t get the message when one of them called my oversized c-bet. Guess I hoped he, too, was overplaying, say, top pair, but if I had thought for just a moment longer, I’d have realized he had to have a set. Soon I was all in on the turn and drawing to just two outs. Silver lining -- got to bed early, and so am well rested for what could be a longish Day 3.

To try to guesstimate what we are looking at today... the plan is to play down to 24. They start today with the average stack at around 175,000 or a little over 43 big blinds. So we’re right about at that 40 BBs mark where F-Train notes “the number of chips in play catches up to the structure” -- i.e., the shipping of chips begins. (Actually, I think we’ve probably been in that neighborhood for a level or two now.)

So we might see a lot of eliminations early, especially once that cash bubble bursts (at 128). Looks like the blinds/antes move up relatively slowly over the next few levels, though, so things may well slow down as the day-slash-night proceeds. Check in over at the PokerStars blog to see how it goes.