LAS VEGAS -- Back at a railed-off table in the corner of the Wynn's brand-new poker room, there's a guy with short blond hair with a boyish frame, silver stud in his left ear, looking intently at the felt. That's Daniel Negreanu, the poker ambassador at the Wynn's poker room. Recently he issued a poker challenge, that anyone can take him on in freezout games of between $100,000 and $500,000, any games they wish. Early this morning, he was in his fourth match against cash game superstar Barry Greenstein, the guy who donates most of his winnings to charity. A huge line of people crowded a rail at the back wall near his table. For the better part of an hour while I was there they battled back and forth and then broke at midnight, which people there say they usually do. Negreanu got up and brought his rack of chips to the cashier in the poker room, a daypack over his shoulders. Seeing the pros there gave a nice feeling to playing at the room, but I really wanted to just play. I hopped in a nice $1/2 $100 minimum NL (no cap)- I bought in $200. I was really rusty and wasn't used to all the crazy raises that people at the table made. Bad raises with bad cards and even worse, bad calls. This one guy at the end of the night who looked like a young Gus Hansen, reraised a gray hair's raise to $32 with AJs. Flop was AKK, the young Gus kept betting into him and the old timer was like "No way possibly you could have any of that." Why? Well, the gray hair had AK. They turned their cards over and the young Gus spiked an A on the river. Pzzow! That split pot had the old guy muttering over and over of how he had been trying to trap the young gun only to have to split from a 1-outer. "That's poker," I say to him. I was so rusty, not raising like I should and having to flee pots when people had the better of me. I got frustrated so at one point I raised preflop with Q2o under-the-gun. Five people called me. The flop, luckily, was AQQ, so I bet it out and everyone folded. I showed the cards and it gave me some extra room to work with. Whenever I raised in the future, I'd tell people I had the ol' queen-deuce again. At about 3 a.m. (Las Vegas time) I left the Wynn and went up the Strip to the Excalibur and entered another fishy $1-3 NL game there. I ended up down about $100 there, making a mistake against a short stack who bet $50 preflop, I had just limped with QQ and the guy had been making raises with terrible hands throughout the night. So I jumped over him and put him all in. Unfortunately he had KK and that's poker. Interestingly enough, I sat to the right of a young guy also from Atlanta who said he played in the Buckhead game there and a really loose Midtown game. That game has a $300 cap but later on in the night you can rebuy "up to the second highest pot." He said that game is much safer than the Buckhead game, which I've never been to. I'm up early surprisingly today and I plan on making the most of my time here. A weekend (that's about the amount of time here I have this time around) is too fucking short! More later. (Reminder: New Party Poker bonus 20 percent up to $100- bonus code KURO1).

Source: Poker Cats