2024 WSOP!

Oh interesting. I will buy too!

And any of these states !

Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

LOL

That was a reply about the April fools joke about not shuffling chips at WSOP.

I had a buddy who used to run a home poker league and based the structure off the Sahara "big sandwich" tourney. We played it while out in Vegas for the WSOP back in the day, def a fun tourney and def the structure went south after the break. Before the tourney, I sat down at 3-card to get a "free" drink and dusted off a really quick $200 haha.

So now that the dust has settled on most of the major summer series schedules, what is everyone planning to play?

When I think of the WSOP, the most unique elements are the mixed games offerings and the cheap mega field tournaments with great structure. I was initially planning to play the Milly Maker or Monster Stack, but I was lucky enough to cash the Monster last year and I don't like the new third starting flight in those events, so I think I'll be skipping them. Current plan is actually to arrive Memorial Day weekend and try my luck in the $600-1100 Wynn and Venetian events. If I can bink a healthy score there, maybe I'll try to play the WSOP Main in July. It's the white whale on my tournament bucket list. If I crash and burn in May, I may not actually fire a WSOP event this year, though the $600 Deep Stack Championship and $500 Salute events in late June will be great value options. I've booked travel for three separate short trips built around these options (May, June, July).

Looking ahead, the $1.5k dealer's choice is something I want to play in future years once I've expanded my mixed games repertoire. You can play good NLHE events any time of the year, but these mixed games tournaments are quite scarce on the calendar.

The dust has cleared? Did Orleans and Nugget release their schedules and I missed it?

Nope, a quick check on Kenny's spreadsheet will show. Not MGM yet either.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...

A lot is still missing 6-7 weeks ahead…

I was as baffled by that comment as you were. And what about Aria? I think there are still more schedules unreleased, than released.

I feel more unreleased than released.

I’m sure you will be able to find someone in Vegas to help you out.

Still no WSOP online schedule released? They still putting it together?!

I see that I spoke too soon. WSOP/Wynn/Venetian were the big dominoes for me, so I was maybe too quick to assume that the same applied to everyone else. I will say that it's hard to get excited about anticipating the schedule for a venue like Aria when their engagement with summer poker has typically been a lazy copy+paste of generic NLHE events with maybe the odd PLO tourney mixed in. Nugget and Orleans do some cool stuff, but the distance from the strip is a consistent deterrent for me.

Oh, I agree with you there. Aria seems to put so little consideration into its schedule I wonder why it always takes the casino so long to release it.

Speaking up for those of us who do play almost exclusively NLHE, I actually like that Aria has such a simple summer schedule. When I go for the WSOP, I have a week at most, and that's usually taken up with firing two or three bullets at bracelet events. I like that when I have a single day to fill with something else, I can usually count on the Aria having their $600 one-day tournament going. I like that tournament's combo of structure, price point, and field size. Yes, I know it can go pretty late on some days, which could screw up your sleep if you're entering a WSOP event with a 10 AM start time the next morning, but if I'm playing that late I can at least count on a pretty good cash to make it worth it.

...beat...beat...BWHAAA HAAA HAAA!!!! Thank you for that akashenk, I needed a good belly laugh this morning!

I was thinking about playing some of those during the last (or 2nd to last week) of the WSOP. How late are we talking about that the Aria $600 gets done?

Speaking of lines, early in the Series the line for that can be brutal. A couple years ago I had to do that stupid covid verification, so I was there at 6 a.m. The CC verification line at 6 a.m. was plenty long too.

I didn’t see anything like that last year, but to be fair, I didn’t pay super close attention.

I played in one of those years ago before it got bought and remodeled. I swear, they were using original chips from the 50's and 60's. You could probably get 22 of them in a rack, they were so thin.

Nights and vampire hours are the best time for no lines.

You could be waiting 2 or more hours if you breeze in the morning of the event you want to play.

Wynn and Venetian have been running the milestone satellites for a while.

In my limited experience, they are an interesting alternative and provide some new strategic wrinkles. Maybe they favor stronger players more than traditional satellites, but keep in mind that as soon as someone hits the milestone, that player is removed from the tournament. In that sense the fields actually get easier in the later stages.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever had 10x the starting stack in any the satties I've won.

O’Kearney makes some interesting points. As a non satellite-player myself, I don’t have a strong opinion on the milestone format. I do wonder, though, whether the format makes for faster satellites in general. If it does, then there is the reason for why it will not only be a variant, but become the standard.

Venues are always looking to make more money, and there are poker influencers who are happy to make a little extra money themselves at the behest of venues. Whenever new variants are created with supposed benefits, it is almost always possible to find an equal number of warts. IMO, when a new variant seems like a solution in search of a problem, then the actual problem is likely to be on the venue’s side, not the players’.

Here is O'Kearney's main point;

"A big negative of Milestone Satellites is that they favor superior players and can be off-putting to amateur players. They favor a more aggressive chip accumulation strategy, which on the surface sounds like a good thing, but in our opinion betrays one of the big promises of satellites. A satellite should always be about getting weaker, amateur, players into big ‘bucket list’ type events. While the slow, stalling, chip preservation strategy that is required in satellites may seem against the spirit of the game, it is one that a relatively new player can adopt successfully. Our question to you if you don’t like regular satellites is, don’t you want weaker players in the target events? Stalling seems like a bug in satellites, but we would say they are a feature."