WHEN THE END GOAL OF THE ALL IN Magazine Project is for Jayde Nicole—a pure poker novice when this experiment began on July 29, 2009—to go as deep as she can in the 2010 World Series of Poker Main Event. She has learned from some of the best poker players in the world over the last several months, including world champions Chris Ferguson and Jamie Gold, and honed her skills in various live and online tournaments. But there’s only so much preparation you can achieve for the Main Event without gaining first-hand experience in a major-tournament environment.

This past month, Jayde gained some of that experience. She entered her first massive-field, big-buy-in tourney, the $10,000 main event of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure at the Atlantis in the Bahamas, and though her result was nothing to write home about, the hours she logged at the table could prove vital when the WSOP rolls around.

“I lasted almost eight hours, in other words eight levels, which is the longest I’ve ever played poker consecutively,” Jayde reported. “I’ve never experienced a tournament of that size before, walking into a huge room with hundreds of tables. It was definitely a learning experience and I think it’s definitely going to help me for the World Series because it’s a similar style of tournament where there’s so many people and it lasts for so long and you have to play for like 12 hours every day.”

Every starting table at the PCA has its tough spots, but Jayde’s was particularly intimidating because it happened to include the reigning world champ, Joe Cada.

“I was like, Really? Come on. How does this happen to me? How am I sitting across the table from the guy who just won the Main Event?” Jayde said. “I was not happy about it. But he’s actually a very sweet guy and he actually ended up busting a couple of hours before I did.”
Jayde’s eight-hour odyssey included very few confrontations with Cada, but she did get involved in a handful of critical pots with other players. One occurred on her very first hand after she sat down at the table. She was in the big blind and looked down at pocket nines, and though Jayde typically likes to fold her first few hands while she acclimates to her surroundings and shakes off her nerves, she couldn’t very well fold a medium pair to a single raise. So she called and later took the pot down with a bluff, forcing her opponents to immediately respect her game.

From there, her confidence grew—until she lost a large portion of her chip stack with pocket kings.

“This is one of my weaknesses, and I know it—I’m not good at folding even if I suspect my hand is beat,” she said. “I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think there was a possible flush out there, and I watched the way my opponent was betting, and I was betting strong too, so he knew that I had something, and I kind of had an inkling that he had something that was going to beat me, but I just didn’t want to lay down my kings. It turned out he had me beat and I lost a lot of money in that pot. As I was calling, I knew that I shouldn’t be, but I just couldn’t lay them down.”

As the blinds and antes went up, Jayde’s stack kept getting smaller, until she made a stand with pocket jacks, got called by an opponent’s A-K, and watched an ace crash home on the river to end her tournament.

“Overall, I’m proud of how I played,” she said, “but the pocket kings hand was a mistake, and I also think I didn’t play enough hands when the blinds and antes started going up. I was too patient, waiting to make a move.”

Jayde got a lower-stakes chance for redemption later in the PCA, when she played in the amfAR/PokerStars Charity Tournament. There she found herself at a table that didn’t have any world champions … but did include the all-time tournament money king, Daniel Negreanu.

“Kid Poker” and Jayde have tangled before, competing on FOX’s PokerStars.net Million Dollar Challenge. Because of their brief history, an interesting exchange ensued.

“As soon as I sat down, he was like, ‘You’re screwed,’” Jayde recalled. “And I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ He was like, ‘Well, I’ve seen how you play and I know how you play now, so I’m going to beat you.’ And I was like, ‘Um, I don’t think that you do know how I play, because the thing about me is that that was a couple months ago and I’m constantly learning, so I don’t have a set way of playing yet.’

“We ended up playing three hands against each other, and I won all three hands. And the last hand I played against him, I went all in, and I pretty much took him out of the tournament, he only had like two chips left after that, and I was like, ‘Obviously, you don’t know how I play,’ and he was laughing really hard.”

Jayde is still planning on taking lessons from Negreanu at some point in the near future. This past month, however, her focus was all on playing. In addition to the PCA tournaments, she played in an event at the Hustler Casino as part of Larry Flynt’s Challenge Cup, where she had the unique experience of having a bounty on her head. The highlight for Jayde was making quad aces early in the tournament. The lowlight was pushing all in with A-K and getting called by a small pair, as she learned the hard way the added dangers of wearing a bounty. She lost the race against a hand that might have folded if not for the $1,000 bonus for eliminating her, and that was the end of her tournament.

If Jayde does well in the WSOP Main Event in a few months, she’ll look back on the tourneys she played in January as critical learning experiences. She outlasted WSOP champ Cada in one of them. In July, her goal is not just to beat Cada, but to be this year’s Cada.