Vegas Tourney Play

[lgas]

MGM has $65 tournaments every day (I think) at 11am. No rebuys. I just came back from playing in one for the first time (fwiw, I took third out of 91 players). Its not a bad tournament except that the blind escalation gets ridiculous near the end... they start at 25-25, then go to 25-50 then double every 20 minutes, so you get 50-100, 100-200, 200-400, 400-800, 800-1600, etc... at some point it changes over because I remember winding up at 3000-6000 (then 5000-10000) but its pretty steep. The upside of this is that the tournament is over in about 3 hours (well, ours took closer to 4 because there was a snafu when coloring up to $1000 chips which caused about a 40 minute delay of game while they went to the surveillance tapes to straighten it out)....

But anyway, this is one of the better small tournaments I've played in Vegas. The MGM has a surprisingly nice poker room -- the tables are nice, they aren't crowded together like a lot of places (*cough* Wynn), cocktail service is great, you can order sandwiches at the tables, etc.

If you wanna stretch your budget a little you might also look into the $1000+60 tournaments at the Bellagio... they have satellites you can get into for $240 which gets you a seat plus some cash.

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John