My Experience Playing In The Grand Poker Series At The Golden Nugget

Being a poker player, I was pretty excited to be moving to Las Vegas because this is the home of everything poker! 

The last month has been so exciting because of the World Series of Poker, but that is just one of the many series that takes place in this town over the month.

If you are like me, dropping anywhere between $1500-$10,000 for a poker tournament is a little steep. 

That is the range of the WSOP so I didn’t plan on playing any of the events unless I won a satellite that got me there. 

But the Golden Nugget Grand Series has a lot of events for more affordable buy-in prices. 

I’m not going to lie, I never heard of this series but a friend of mine was in town just to play poker and he invited me to play the Grand Main Event last night and I figured why not. 

But when I looked at the grind schedule, I’m upset I didn’t know about it because there were a ton of events that I would have loved to play but missed out on. 

Oh well right, now I have something to look forward to next year!

Some Details About The Tournament

So here is the deal with the Main Event. 

The buy-in is $570 and the tournament guarantees half a million dollars. 

The event has three flights where if you do well enough, you get to play in the final day. If you happen to bust, you can always buy back in or play another day. 

After the first two days both flights combined for over 1200 entries so I’m going to guess there will be close to 2000 entries when everything is said and done. 

If you do the math, the event will have a prize pool of a lot more than $500,000.

On To What It Is Like

I must admit I was semi nervous at first because I’ve never played a live tournament this big, and it was crazy seeing the conference center filled with poker tables. 

But once I got comfortable with it, I was able to just focus on my table and play my game. 

The tournament is a grind and I can’t emphasis that enough. 

Play starts at 11AM and if you make the last day, you will be there until 1AM or later. 

You start with 25k chips and levels are 40 minutes long. 

This is obviously a deep stack even, and the blinds move real slow so you aren’t forced to go all in during the first couple of hours. 

Some Familiar Professional Players On-Hand

There were a few familiar poker faces in the field I recognized from TV, and I even sat with two players. 

Here’s the funny thing, I knocked out one, and my night (or I should say early morning since it was 12:30) was ended by the other one. 

If you watched the main event last year on ESPN you know who Will Kassouf is.  

I was semi star struck that he was moved to my table at about 11pm. 

I’m not going to say I was nervous, but it felt surreal because I did watch last years main event. 

Just like everyone else who watched (and plays poker), I couldn’t stand him and semi fantasied about knocking this guy out of the tournament. 

I will give credit where credit is due, he wasn’t nearly as snobbish in real life as he was on TV last year. 

He didn’t take 5 minutes every time action was on him. 

But he’s still annoying, talks too much, and is overly animated. 

Bottom line is I had a Q9 of diamonds and I raised just to get called by him. 

The flop came down Jack ten two, and he raised so I went all in with a straight draw. 

I have to admit I may have played the hand different if it was someone else, and even though I grinded it out for over 12 hours, I wanted to tell my friends that I knocked the biggest villain in poker out of a tournament (we were evenly stacked at the time). 

When push came to shove, he had a set of 2’s.

I didn’t hit my straight and was sent home packing. 

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What I Took From The Experience

Bottom line is I had a lot of fun, and it was worth the experience. 

The structure of the tournament and the people that were in it was a lot of fun because it was quite the cast of characters participating (as there are with a lot of poker tournaments). 

I wish the end result was better, but what can you do! 

I can’t wait for next year because I’m going to hit up a few events in their series. 

If you are a poker player on a budget, I recommend you check out a few yourself because it doesn’t get much cheaper than some of the events they have at The Golden Nugget.

We hope you liked our review.

Chris | @thedailyroto | XtraMoney.co |  

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