Wall Street Poker

What would you do for a buyin?

2012-01-13T12:54:00.003-05:00

Oh man, it's been so long since I made a post. My job's been making me crazy busy and I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down and just write a post. Also, marriage, while wonderful in every sense of the word, is a huge time suck! I have a beautiful wife who always wants to spend face to face time with me and I'm not used to it. I mean, I absolutely choose her every time, and twice on Sunday. But it also means that my other pursuits get short shrift. Well, you can't have everything.

I actually did manage to get away for a poker weekend a few weeks back to Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. The wife was busy on Saturday with girly stuff and I somehow convinced her that I would be able to spend a weekend by myself at the casino. I couldn't convince anyone to come along except for The Slayer Slavin, who came up for Saturday.

I have no good stories to report, only that I had a terrible weekend. After quickly losing a buyin Friday night and Saturday morning, I managed to climb back to even Saturday afternoon. But by Saturday night, I was back down to zero, down two buyins total. The slide was long and painful. I was unlucky for some of it, but I was also playing way too many hands. I've noticed that after long layoffs from poker, I tend to want to capitalize on the few hours I get to play so I become very speculative. It's a leak for sure and I'm glad I can recognize it. Now to plug it up...

I'm leaving in a few hours for AC with Darko, W and Christine. I'm looking forward to a few days at the Borgata and, hopefully, some inspired playing and profit. We shall see.

So, back to the title of this post. I just had to share this link with everyone. Check it out. It's an article about how Johann Van Der Sloot was sentenced today to 28 years in a Peruvian prison for killing a woman in Peru a few years back. He's the douchebag who is widely suspected of killing Natalie Holloway in Aruba in 2005. He was the last person seen with Natalie but her body's never been found and he was never charged in that case.

The crazy part of the article comes at the end:

"Van der Sloot faces possible extradition to the United States in a matter tied to Holloway's disappearance and her family.

In June 2010, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted him on charges of wire fraud and extortion after allegations surfaced that he tried to extort $250,000 from Holloway's mother, Beth. Van der Sloot offered to provide what turned out to be bogus information about the whereabouts of Holloway's remains in exchange for the money, according to the indictment.

He was allegedly given a total of $25,000, and authorities believe he used that money to travel to Peru and participate in a poker tournament, where he met Flores." (my emphasis)

So, after probably killing a girl, you call up the mother and offer to exchange knowledge of her body's whereabouts for a quarter million? How fucked up in the head are you? And then, you use the money to buy in to a poker tournament?!?

My mind reels....

My painful recollection

2011-09-12T17:20:00.002-04:00

I did not watch the news coverage of the tenth anniversary of the attacks. During the entire day, and the days leading up to it, I maintained a defiantly flippant attitude towards the proceedings. "I'm so over it," I said. It had been ten long years since that horrible day and I had long since turned a corner. In my mind, it was so far away and I didn't want to remember any of it.

The reality is that I was, and still am, far too near to it. This feeling was confirmed for me when, prior to the start of the thrilling Jets/Dallas game, the TV camera panned to an image of a soldier in full dress uniform, located in Brooklyn Heights with a perfect view of Lower Manhattan. He was standing ramrod straight, a trumpet in his hand. There was no distracting crowd, or tourists, or any other human carnival to divert our attention. Just a soldier with a trumpet and a pristine skyline. And then, he raised the horn to his lips and blew 'Taps'.

Barely three notes had drifted out over the Hudson River and in a rush, the feelings I experienced that day welled up in me. I was alone at that moment in my apartment, my wife having gone to the game with her father, leaving me to complete some important work for my job. And in that second, I felt more alone than I had in a decade. Through a painful divorce, through a re-structuring of my life and friends, through the loss of my mother, I hadn't felt that alone and small. But watching this defender of our walls pay solemn tribute, not to other warriors, but ordinary citizens of the world who had lost their lives in horrifying fashion, made me feel naked and vulnerable as an innocent baby left alone in a forest, the sun setting behind him.

Walking through the streets of Manhattan on that day was at once a terrifying and life affirming experience. There was a thick shroud of fear and uncertainty covering the landscape as all of our touchstones were turned around. Everything we had known and taken comfort in was wrong, all at once. The avenues, always a rat's maze of north and then south and then north, were all moving in one direction. The people, throngs and hordes and teeming multitudes, were walking uptown like zombies, lurching and moaning. They streamed out of the buildings in Midtown, looking for an escape and joining with the dust covered downtown workers who were stumbling their way to safety. The hazy thoughts of the crowd floated up out of their heads, through their ears, until they joined in a cacophonous cloud of noise above the streets. A deafening roar of confusion. There was no clarity that day, or the day after. There was no water to wash away the dust and no drink to drown the empathy for those who burned. All we had was a memory of the life we had only a few hours before.

In the ensuing years, I only got closer to the events. I moved into Lower Manhattan and lived there for six years. I discovered that one of the victims was a High School classmate of mine. I worked in the World Financial Center for three years, looking down into the pit of rubble every day. The water has never come to wash away the dust. It has only been absorbed into the soil of our city and bonded with our bones. We breathed in the bodies of the victims and forged our resolve in the furnace of a burning pile of the rubble that was our previous existence.

We've moved on in the trappings of life now. Widows have re-married, posessions have been sold and address books have been updated. But in the mind of the generation that lived in it, and for the citizens of this great metropolis, the day will go on forever; a neverending hum deep behind the walls of our homes.

Inching closer...

2011-08-17T14:03:00.002-04:00

Congress is seriously looking at legalizing online "gambling". In the wake of Black Friday, any move towards getting online poker legalized, and regulated, is a welcome step. However, I'm hesitant to lump 'gambling' in with poker. Those in the know (read: readers of this blog) know that poker is a skill game with luck playing a diminishing part as time goes on. That's why this article intrigues me when I see John Kyl, an adamant opponent to online gambling of any form, is making a clear distinction between poker and general gambling games like Blackjack or Craps.

The ultimate prize, in my opinion, would be for the public to finally understand the nature of poker, separate it from general gambling, and legalize it online along with heavy regulation. Even better would be if the rake online would be nationally capped at a decent amount that isn't onerous (10% to $5 max would be acceptable to me). Regulation helps avoid the cheating scandals that have marred the industry recently (UB, I'm looking at you), though online collusion is still an issue.

What's even more intriguing, however, is the idea that nationalized legal online poker on the Federal level might pave the way for legalized brick and mortat poker in every state. I salivate just typing that. I long for the day when, just as in California, legal poker with professional dealers is available within a 30 minute drive of nearly anywhere in the country. It remains to be seen if legalized online poker will lead to legalized B&M poker, and I have serious doubts it will. Nevertheless, just a chance of it happening is enough to make me anxious to see the outcome.

August 2011 trip (3 of 3)

2011-08-15T15:03:00.000-04:00

I forgot a little detail in my last post; namely that I saw what I think might be the saddest sight I've ever seen in my drive from Harrington, DE to Charles Town, WV. Towards the end of the drive, maybe 20 miles outside of Charles Town in a remote part of North Western Maryland, there was a relatively desolate stretch of highway with a, shall we say, 'Gentlemen's Club' on the side of the road. Oh hell, let's just call it what it was, a titty bar. It was non-descript and kind of sad looking, all things considered. It wouldn't have registered a second thought for me had it not been for the marquee, which read:

'Appearing August 6th, Amy Fisher: "The Long Island Lolita"'

This is the saddest thing ever. Amy Fisher was 17 when she shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the face, launching herself into infamy. That was 1992. 19 years later, she is still trading on her infamy to scrounge a living by traveling to the middle of nowhere to work the pole for a bunch of working class fellows who probably don't remember who the hell she is. The sad part is not that she has hit the bottom of society, depending on the porn/stripping industry to keep her afloat. No, the sad part is that instead of running from her past and trying to pull herself up to be a decent member of society, she's completely embraced her sullied reputation. It would be as if O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbit got together to give paid classes on proper knife handling techniques. I mean, let's be honest. Amy Fisher is not, nor was she ever, attractive. At least not in the conventional 'porn/stripper' sense. So for her to be the headliner at a strip club, any strip club, is based completely upon the fact that she was famous once for shooting a woman in the face.

So there's that.

I woke up Sunday morning and tiptoed through the puddles to my car, which stood up well to the deluge of the previous night. The rain had stopped, but the smell of wet grass hung in the air and the sky was still threatening. Without even stopping for food, I got in and pulled onto the highway to meet my next destination; the Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs in Wilkes-Barre, PA. It was an uneventful 2.5 hour drive to get there. In fact, most of the drive was uneventful, which both excited and irritated me. I was excited that there was spectacularly little traffic during my entire excursion, which included some of the most heavily trafficked roads in the North-East. I was irritated that there wasn't more for me to see or do; not that I would have taken the time to do it.

I arrived at the casino and quickly found the poker room, which was essentially the basement. And when I say basement, I mean it. Try to imagine the basement of someone's home, largely expanded (think a Mansion's basement), but totally done up like a 70's man cave. Plush carpeting, a full wet bar, a foozball table, a pool table and, in the corner, about 15 poker tables. It looked and felt just like the basement of someone's home, which isn't the worst thing. It made the room feel comfortable and cozy, which I liked. I entered myself into a tournament which was starting in a few minutes; $60 buyin plus a $5 dealer add-on buys you $10,000 in chips. The structure is exactly the same as The Showboat in Atlantic City, which is widely considered to be the best daily structure in that town. I must say that the tournament was *extremely* well run, even to the point of the dealer at my table telling the floor that they needed to turn off the NASCAR event on the television to put up a tournament clock that she could see. Very professional. This is NASCAR country and most of the room was watching the race in progress, which was taking place at the nearby Pocono Raceway, so this was no small thing she was requesting. The floor changed to the clock immediately and we were on our way. 65 participants took the field and I did poorly. I was straight up outplayed on a few hands and my one opportunity to triple up and get some chips was thwarted by a good decision on my part.

I had T♣T♦ UTG+1. Blinds were 150/300 with a $25 ante. I had about $7,000 in my stack and I opened the pot for $750. I was called by Seat 6 and Seat 7 and then the Button min-raised to $1500. I contemplated giving it up but the body language of Seats 6 and 7 told me they were going to flat the raise, giving me enough pot odds to set mine. I called and Seats 6 and 7 did the same.

The flop was 8♣ 9♠ J♥. The flop went all around me, and while I missed my set, I managed to flop an OESD. But considering the pre-flop action, there was no way I could lead out at this extremely connected board. I checked, Seat 6 checks and then Seat 7 leads out for $2,000. The button, who had min-raised, pushed all-in for $5,000 total. It gets to me and I cry inside. There's a huge pot brewing but I have to consider my outs. A 7 is a perfect card for me and there are 4 of those in the deck. A Ten is a less perfect card, considering that QQ is well within the range of the button's hands and a ten would give him a straight. A Queen would give me a straight, but again, it was likely that is what the button is holding. Well, possibly KK or AA too. So, in the best case scenario, I have 10 outs (four Queens, four sevens and two tens), but in all likelihood, I have 4 outs (four 7's). Also, Seat 7 may have JJ, which means my 2 tens as outs are DEFINITELY dead. Given this analysis, I folded, flashing my cards to the person next to me moaning, "I'm gonna regret this". Seat 6 folded and seat 7 called. The turn was 7♥, naturally. I died inside. The river was a brick. The button showed QQ, which is what I feared and Seat 7 showed 89 suited for a flopped two pair that held up. So I made the right call, in retrospect, but it was tough to live with. I whittled down from there and didn't survive much longer, losing when my A♣J♣ lost to KQo.

I was disappointed that I had busted, very far out of the money, but I was happy to have participated in a well-run tournament. I didn't stay for cash games, mostly because I had one more casino to hit before a long drive back home to Connecticut. So I high-tailed it out of there and drove 45 minutes to my last stop at Mount Airy Casino in Mount Pocono, PA. Mount Airy is almost on top of the Pocono Raceway, and given this was a race day and approximately 100,000 people were descending on this spot, I was expecting horrific traffic. Fortunately, I had anticipated this and asked the locals at the previous casino if they had a route around the traffic and they did! I was given a local route which avoided the road closures that surround the races and happily pulled into the Mount Airy resort on time and on schedule.

The Mount Airy resort is a very impressive facility and not at all what I was expecting. If you grew up in the Tri-State area (NY, NJ and CT), as I did, you are familiar with the old Mount Airy Lodge radio commercials (~At beautiful Mount Airy Lodge, all you have to bring, is your love of everything~). These commercials were a desperate attempt to draw people to a fading resort that had it's heyday in the 1960's and was now a relic of it's time. But, as I learned, the old resort was demolished and a new one built in 2007, so the entire complex is brand-new. The casino, which is spacious, but not huge, reminds me very much of the Red Rock casino in Las Vegas. The casino floor is circular, and the poker room is in an antechamber off the side. The room is on the smallish side, but the brush desk was responsive and handed me a buzzer when they put my name on the waiting list for a $1-$2 table, a nice touch which allowed me to roam the casino floor while I was waiting for a spot to open up. It wasn't more than 15 minutes before I was called in and seated at seat 5. I sat with $200 and wasn't at the table for more than one hand when the large older gentleman to my immediate left looked over at me with a knowing look. When I didn't respond, he lifted up his sunglasses and said, "Hi there. Nice to see you again."

"Do I know you?," I asked politely.
"Don't you remember me? We played here last night.," he replied.
"Sorry," I said, "this is my first time in this casino."
He looked very disappointed and shocked.
"Really?," he sputtered, "But..but...you look *exactly* like this other guy I played with."
I joked with him, "Well you know, all Jews look the same."
That got the table to laughing and he put in the punchline by saying, "Well, he *was* Jewish!"

Of course he was.

After giving the table a nice laugh and establishing an easy comraderie with everyone, I proceeded to get hit by the deck. Everything held up for me in this short 20 minute run. Kings, Aces, AK, AQ, I couldn't lose. It got to the point where they stopped playing in pots with me because for 20 minutes I showed down the nuts every time. But I wasn't complaining. In the middle of this run, I got a text from my friend Lauren, who happened to be at the NASCAR race with her boyfriend Joel. She had seen my check-in at Mount Airy on Facebook and wondered if I wouldn't mind eating lunch with them. They would come up to the casino to meet me, and I happily agreed. I was up $250 at that point, only on the table one hour, and I welcomed the opportunity to rack up and keep my winnings. Besides, it'd give me a good opportunity to go home a little early and beat the race traffic. The race was only on lap 140 when Lauren showed up with Joel; turns out they didn't much care for the experience so they left early. I racked up at +$240, said my goodbyes and ate at the buffet with them. It was over-priced for the quality of the food and I wasn't impressed, but buffets can be hit or miss. After a too-short lunch, they left to go home to Manhattan and I stayed behind to digest. It was a 3 hour drive for me and I didn't want to go on a full stomach, so I donked off $60 playing pai-gow while I digested my heinous food. The dealer was on a tear, beating just about everything that came his way. I had JJJ22A*Joker*, a nearly unbeatable hand, which chopped to KKK44AQ. If you've not going to win with Jacks full and Aces on top, what the hell *are* you going to win with?!?

In a more perfect world, I would have gone back to the poker table and played for the rest of the afternoon. But I had had a nice run over the weekend and didn't feel the need to sully it with a possible loss. Not to mention that I was happy to be bright eyed and bushy tailed for the long drive home. Nothing's worse than driving in weekend traffic while you're tired.

Two last notes:

1. I would highly recommend Mount Airy Resort for a golf/poker weekend. There's a very nice 18 hole golf course on the premises and I can totally see a guys weekend where we get up early for a round, retire for nap, have a nice dinner and then play poker until the sun comes up. That would be a Saturday worth remembering!

2. I don't know when my next weekend away is going to come, but when it does, I have an itinerary set. I fly into Syracuse and play all night at Turning Stone. Then I drive in my rented car to Buffalo and play there, before driving down to Salamanca and then finally to Pittsburgh to play in the two rooms there before flying back home. I could easily accomplish this in a weekend and knock 5 more rooms off my tally.

August 2011 Trip (2 of 3)

2011-08-10T15:32:00.002-04:00

I woke up Saturday, August 6th, in Harrington, Delaware at the Holiday Inn Express. Depressing. I wanted to be out of the hotel and on the road by 8am because I knew it would take approx. 2.5 hours to reach my next destination, which was Charles Town, West Virginia. I wanted to arrive well before 11am in case there was a tournament. 11am seems to be a common time for weekend tournaments to start and I was hoping to play in a cheap one. the one I *really* wanted to play in was the $150 'Survivor' tournament in Grantville, PA that was happening at 11am that same day, but it didn't work out for me to be in that area at that time. Really, I messed up the whole trip in terms of scheduling. If I had planned more thoroughly, I would have done the entire trip in reverse, which would have allowed me to:

A. Be in Grantville, PA for the 11am $150 'Survivor' tournament (The tournament ends when the money bubble bursts and everyone makes the same payout, hence 'Survivor').
B. Be in Maryland Saturday night for a real Maryland Crab Dinner.
C. Avoid the possibility of traffic caused by the Nascar Pocono Speedway race on Sunday.

Unfortunately, I did not plan the trip to this level of detail and ended up missing some of these great opportunities. Such is life, as my Mom used to say.

Where was I? Oh yes...Charles Town.

It was an arduous and boring 2.5 hour drive to Charles Town, but I did arrive when I wanted to, only to find there were no tournaments on Fridays and Saturdays. The good news is, the reason for this is that the room is *jumping*. The Hollywood Casino (a large 22 casino national chain) in Charles Town, WV is a racino, like so many others. In this case, they race thoroughbreds, and the track has a grand history to it. Up and away from the casino floor, in a wonderful niche that they've carved out that feels a bit like someone's attic, they've managed to place around 25 poker tables. By the time I sat down to a $1-$2 NLHE table at 10:45a, there were at least 15 or more tables going, including a few $2-$5 tables and a $5-$10 table. There were also more women playing at this room than in any other room I've seen on the trip. I made some inquiries and found out that the reason why the room was so busy is that it's the only viable option within a 2 hour drive, so it draws a lot of people who have no other place to go. It's a testament to monopoly, really. This is why Atlantic City has some dead poker rooms on weekends while you can get a completely full poker room during the week out in the middle of nowhere.
I was seated at a new table and bought in for $200. I was mostly up at the table, which wasn't particularly aggressive or difficult. I did get involved in one memorable hand, though. Here's how the action went down:

I was in MP with 5♥ 5♣. There is a raise to $12 from UTG+1 and I call. Seat 8 calls. Seat 10 min-raises to $24. The BB calls! UTG+1 calls! It gets to me and I start debating in my head. I'm 100% certain I'm behind here but a few factors make me think about calling. First, I'm positive the min-raiser has a monster hand that he might get married to. QQ, KK or AA is my range for him. 3 betting by min-raising in a multi-way pot is SUCH an amateur move that I can safely put him on these three hands and, more importantly, safely assume he will stack off if I flop a set. Second, there are so many callers that I can also assume that many high cards are already in play, making the odds of me flopping a set slightly better than normal. And yes, I know the *true* odds are the same, but if you know information about the cards in play, it affects the odds for that particular scenario.

With all of this in my head, I make the $24 call, fairly confident that everyone else will simply call as well. So I call. And then Seat 8 moves all in for $41! Crappies. After cold calling the first bet, he shoved with a small stack and re-opened the betting. Seat 10, who could now shove for $180 if he wanted to, just calls! Unbelievably bad play on his part. That leads BB, UTG+1 and myself to also call.

So now it's 5 way into a $200 pot pre-flop. I flash my cards to an Asian guy to my left who I've been chummy with and he whispers to me exactly what I've been thinking, "You're definitely going to hit this flop." The cards come out 5♦ 6♥ T♠. Bingo. UTG+1 checks to me and I hesitate for a second. I decide to try to represent AT and I float out a silo of $100, which covers all the remaining players except one. Seat 10, predictably, calls for his last $85. The BB, after a small tank, also calls for his last $70 and UTG+1 folds. My guess is that he had two high cards (Ak, AQ, KQ) or small pairs which missed. Everyone except Seat 8 shows their cards and I'm up against Q♦Q♠ from Seat 10 (knew it) and 9♠ 9♣ from BB. The board runs out with a K♦ on the turn and a K♥ on the river. I do a little dance and expect the $500 pot to be pushed towards me when Seat 8 flips over...K♠ 6♠. Ewwww. I'm lucky he was short stacked when he pushed and I was still able to make a profit from the side pot, but still. Ewwwww. When asked he just said, "They were suited so I said, Fuck it." I hate it when guys like that get rewarded. But this is why we love the game, right?

I left my Charles Town session after 4 hours at +$165, my high point for the session, which I was happy about. I had a two hour drive in front of me to get to the Hollywood Casino in Grantville, PA and I didn't want to dilly dally.
One note about the Charles Town area. Charles Town, WV is a very historic area, only 5 or 6 miles away from Harpers Ferry, the site of the famous John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid slave uprising in 1859. It is also the location of the place where West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland all meet in the Shenendoah Valley. It's such a pretty location that George Washington himself convinced most of his family members to buy property there and their descendents still live there to this day. In fact, Charles Town is named after it's founder, Charles Washington, who was George's Washington's youngest full brother. And, the Antietam battlefield is only a few miles away as well.

The reason I am expounding on these wonderful qualities to the area is not to convince anyone to visit. It's simply to point out that I did not get to see any of this great stuff. One of the great tragedies with my poker trips is that I am often pressed for time to the point that I cannot indulge in the sightseeing that I would like to partake in when I am in a particular area. This is my curse. With great power comes great responsibility. I'll avenge you Uncle Ben!

Sorry...I turned into Spider-Man for a second there.

Anyhow, Boo-Hoo to me. I can't always see the sights. Maybe I'll come back one day.
So on to Grantville, PA I went. Grantville, incidentally, is only a few miles away from Hershey, PA. Chocolate-town. I was expecting a lot of Hershey stuff but I didn't see anything. I guess it's restricted to the town of Hershey itself. The Hollywood Casino in Grantville is pretty nice, I have to say, even if it's poker room could use some stretching out. It's located near the track (another horse racino) and open to the casino floor. Also, there's no cage, which is wierd. You buy your chips from the brush desk. I got to the poker room at around 6:00p and was immediately seated at a $1-$2 table. This turned out to be my best session of the entire trip and I was able to cash out at around 10:30p with $750 for a +$550 profit!
The session started wierdly. I'm a pretty affable guy and I like to loosen people up sometimes by making table banter, just to get people in a good mood. On the wall opposite my view was a TV screen that was tuned to the TV show COPS, with the sounds turned down but the closed captioning turned on. If you've never watched the show with closed captioning, I think it lends an even more surreal quality to the proceedings. It was really distracting to me because every time I looked up, I couldn't help but read the captions and laugh at the transcripts that were occuring. For example, a woman was being arrested in some rural area (read: she was White, Tattooed and as Trailer Park as it gets) and the police were asking her about the drugs they had found in her car.

Cop: Do you know why we stopped you?
Drug Addled Girl: No, I have no idea.
Cop: There was a strong smell of Marijuana coming from your vehicle. Have you been smoking weed in the car?
Drug Addled Girl: No, I..
Cop: {Interrupting} Have you been smoking weed?
Drug Addled Girl: Just a little. Is that illegal?

I burst out laughing at the table. Some of the other players started watching it and also thought it was pretty funny. Except for Seat 1, who got real indignent with me. He said, "This show is really scummy, you know? To be making money at the misfortune of others." That kind of made me feel bad, although I tried to slough it off. But then Seat 1 said the magic words which made me feel a whole lot better: "I mean, I've been there before. Arrested. It's not fun."

Says you, my friend. For the record, after having thought about it for a bit, I do feel like some slack should be cut for people who are accused of crimes. But COPS doesn't show people who are accused, they show people RED-HANDED breaking the law. There's a difference, I think, between publicly humiliating someone based on a charge where only a court case can prove guilt and humiliating someone who's being filmed running from the police with a gun in their hands!

Anyway, back to the action. My run at this table was very very good and it helped that I got some decent cards to work with. I made a decent pot when I flopped a set of 7's vs. an AK where the flop had an Ace. I also got paid off on a river value bet with my KK vs. a guy's KQ where the flop was Queen high. When he paid off the river he said, "I just didn't believe you." That's what I love about weak tables and weak players. No matter how much you show yourself to be a solid player, they just convince themselves that you're bluffing (of course, sometimes you are!). And then, after two hours of playing and chipping up to about $375 from $200, the hand of the weekend went down.

I had 7♣ 9♦ on the button. UTG raises to $15, a strong bet from UTG from a super tight amateur player. I immediately put him on a big pair. Just like my previous big pot at the previous Hollywood Casino, I saw this guy as having a big pair that he just wasn't going to lay down. This informed my play later, as you'll see. Seat 4 calls and then Seat 5 in MP moved all in for $26. I asked the dealer out loud, "Does that raise re-open the betting?" This particular dealer was pretty awful (though the rest were perfectly fine) and I wanted to make sure he understood what I was asking. He blinked, like a deer, and I asked him again, "Does the all-in raise re-open the betting?"

The dealer replied, "Yes, that's an all-in".

I did the math in my head and then answered back, "Wait a minute. If the initial raise is $13, then shouldn't a valid raise be $28? ($15 + $13)"

The dealer, and several other table participants came back with, "No, the re-raise needs to be twice the raise. Since the all-in was $26, or twice the $13 raise, it's a valid re-raise and the betting is re-opened."

I knew I was right and I pressed the point again. "The raise was $13 up to a total of $15. Another $13 raise would make the total $28."

Finally, I got through to the dealer who finally agreed with me and announced that more raising was not possible. Actually, it was possible, by me and the SB and the BB, but not by anyone after that. But the point was the same, which was that if I called, I could expect that the original raiser could only call if it folds to him. After publicly announcing that I was trying to figure out if I could be re-raised if I flat-called, I made the call for $26 with 79o. The UTG raiser and Seat 4 both call and we see a 4 way flop.

The flop comes down 6♦ 8♣ 9♦. This is an almost perfect flop for me. Yes, there is a diamond draw on the board now, which worries me a touch, but I flopped top pair with an open ended straight draw to go with it. Now I have to figure out if the initial raiser has the premium hand I thought he did, or just AK or AQ. It checks around to me and my suspicion is that I am leading the field with top pair/OESD. I lead out for $25, thinking this will win me the pot right now. Also, it's a feeler bet. If the original raiser shoves on me, I can make a decision about what I want to do knowing exactly what he has. It gets to the original raiser and he min-raises me to $50! OMG, what an amateur play. Unless he flopped a set or a straight, min-raising is about the worst play imaginable. Seat 4 folds to the min-raise and it's left to me. It's a super easy call: $25 into a $175 pot with 13 outs to improve my hand (four 5's, three 7's, two 9's and four 10's). So the pot is laying me 7-1 on a 4-1 draw. The only hand I can worry about is TT, which I just don't think is in his range for the line he's taking and the read I have on him. I call and the turn is gin, 10♥. He doesn't even consider a 7 to be in my range, and I don't blame him, so he pumps out another $50 value bet. I shove for the rest of my chips and he snap calls for his remaining $85. He tables K♥ K♠, Seat 5 holds on to his cards (and later tells us it was AQ) and I show 79o and the table explodes! The river bricked out and I dragged a $475 pot. Seat 6, the *second* best player at the table (ahem...), is a middle aged Asian guy who's super impressed with my play. He can't stop gushing about it. "Wow, that was so great. So *that's* why you were asking about the raise"...etc, etc. An hour later, he's still deconstructing the whole thing with the guy to his right. Seat 1 (the guy with the arrest record who hates COPS) says, "Wow, I thought you were a lot more conservative than that!". Seat 6 says, "I gotta call you Tyson," and starts shadow boxing muttering, "Seven Nine, Seven Nine" while throwing allegorical punches into the air.

I found it kind of amusing. I'm glad the play was appreciated but it's not god-like or anything remotely close. Some of the crappier players at the table commented, "You play that crap? How lucky for you!", but the better players understood what the intention was. Stacking a weaker player. I don't mind calling a raise, or even a re-raise, to a player that I KNOW WILL STACK OFF for the right flop. The choice of opponent is critical here. A better player would have pushed me off on the flop (or tried to since I doubt I could fold given my outs and his stack size). An even better player might have folded his Kings given the pre-flop information I gave out about wanting to know whether the betting had been re-opened. I practically gave away that my hand was speculative and that straight type of flop could have (and did) hit me very well. But some would say the hand played itself and the Kings couldn't do much, other than shoving the flop. So I speculated and I mined some gold. It happens, but I'm happy at least that I had a game plan for calling, in position, that particular time.

The rest of the night went well for me and I finished +$550 on the session, finishing up around 11:30p when I started to get really tired. I drove to the Days Inn where I was staying, in the middle of a monsoon as the sky had opened up after three days of oppressive humidity, and fell asleep quickly, visions of big pots and adulation still floating in my brain.

Morbid is as Morbid does

2011-08-10T08:49:00.004-04:00

Trip Report 2 of 3 is being written, but might not be posted for a few days.

In the meantime, I just want to comment how sad I am that the Wall Street Poker Dead Pool never got off the ground last year. I got a lot of private emails from people telling me how sick it was, but I just don't see it that way.

August 2011 trip (1 of 3)

2011-08-09T16:25:00.004-04:00

It's been a smidge over a year and a half since my last poker trip (to Arizona), and I have to say that I've missed it tremendously. I'm like an addict who's been sober for so long he's convinced himself that he no longer likes the taste of alcohol. But then, one night, he has a shot with an old friend and then another and then he finds himself laying face down in the gutter with a smile on his face. Poker, and poker traveling, is definitely an addictive hobby. It takes concentration and focus for me to remember that the life that I've chosen (married husband trying to build a family in the suburbs) is WAY WAY WAY more important to me than the excitement of seeing new place, meeting new people and dragging pots off of them. But that doesn't mean that I can't figure out a way to combine the two in a healthy manner. A level below "addict" is a "problem drinker", and a level below that is "social drinker". That's kind of what I'm aiming for; social poker at a frequency which can keep the interest up and yet not anger my wife.

This past weekend, I had the first opportunity in 20 months to make that balancing act happen. Ali has been going to Cape Cod every summer with her family for the last 20 years. They rent the same cottage, go to the same restaurants and visit the same beach for two or three weeks every single year. It's a comforting ritual, and exactly the kind of thing I'd like to do with my own family once I breed them. It's a wonderful thing for a family to have their own special place that they can go to where a different set of rules apply and you can escape the stress of your normal environment. But as the children get older and more entrenched in adult life, the ritual is starting to become harder to do. Alison, the oldest of three kids, is married now. She has also just gotten her first job as an attorney, starting August 15th when she returns from the Cape. Her schedule may no longer fit into the same narrow confines as her family anymore, and this may very well be her last trip up to the cottage with everyone else. So Ali left Friday evening with her family and left me alone at home. I am going up to meet them Wed. night, but am not taking the entire week off as it costs too much money for me to take this kind of vacation, as I am billing daily at my job (I'm a contractor) and do not get paid time off.

So as our schedules would leave me alone for a weekend, I decided to take a long awaited poker trip! I counted the days until my trip would arrive, getting feverishly anxious as the day drew closer and closer. Friday came and I leaped out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5:45a. Since I would be driving my own car on this trip, I decided to drive into work and then leave from Manhattan at noon. Wanting to avoid morning traffic into the city, I got up early and left my house at 6:15a to beat the rush. It was a good plan as it took exactly 60 minutes, with almost no traffic, to get from my place to my office at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street. I parked at a lot nearby, telling the parking attendant to have my car near the front because I'd be out by 12:15pm latest.

At work, I was anxious the whole time I was there. My mind could barely focus with the external stimuli of poker racing through my brain. Every sound I heard was the click of poker chips banging together. Every number I crunched turned into pot odds. Every chart I saw morphed into a dance of face cards. At 11:55a, I raced off to the Men's room to wash up, mumbled goodbye to my office-mate and raced out the door. To the parking attendant's credit, my car was easily accessible and after paying them an exorbitant fee, I was on the road.

It took me nearly 40 minutes to escape the city because I made the huge mistake of going to the Holland Tunnel rather than the nearby Lincoln Tunnel. There was no traffic through the tunnel, it just took me that long to get from one end of the city to the other. But I was forunate in that once I made it through, I had virtually no traffic for the entirety of the weekend. Fortunate indeed since I was planning on driving 800 miles in the next 59 hours and every second counted.
After an uneventful drive down I-95, I arrived at my first casino; Parx Casino just outside Philadelphia, PA. I parked in the outdoor lot and bounded inside with the energy of a 16 year old who's going out on his first date. The poker room at Parx is magnificent, with about 30 tables in a plush setting away from the casino floor in it's own area. It's the nicest poker room that I visited on the trip and I was very sad to not be able to spend much time there. Because I was so worried about traffic through the I-95 corridor, and because my final destination of the night was to be Harrington, Delaware, I had decided to push my way through the first few poker rooms in a hurried manner so as to beat the rush hour traffic as best as I could. So I unfortunately only spent 30 minutes in this fantastic room. I played $4-$8 and dropped $20 in a rushed half-hour session. The only thing that I don't mind about blowing through the room, though, is that given it's close proximity to Manhattan, I will surely be back.

I got into my car, still warm from when I left it, and proceeded to the next casino; Harrah's in Chester, PA. It took about 45 minutes to reach the Harrah's and I was somewhat disappointed. Like most of the casinos in Pennsylvania, this was a "racino", or a casino tacked onto an existing race track. In this case, the track features Trotters, otherwise known as Harness Racing. The poker room is upstairs off the casino floor and well spaced out. It's a Harrah's room, so it's predictably well run, but the lack of walls gave it a very open feeling, which is actually a negative in my book. Walls keep outside sound out and give a feeling of intimacy to poker rooms which I prefer. The sound wasn't terrible, however, given that the casino floor was downstairs. Though there were at least 20 tables running when I got there, there was a waiting list which I prefered not to be on (thinking about traffic again), so I collected my souvenir chip, saw a harness race and left.
Back in my car, I started out to my 3rd casino; Delaware Park in Wilmington, Delaware. The parking lot for Delaware Park is awful; long and narrow with space only in the far back, a solid 6 minute walk from the casino entrance. The building itself, also a racino, is also long and narrow. One thing I've learned from my poker trips is that, like your gate at the airport, the poker room is almost invariably located in the casino at the farthest point from the entrance. And so it was with Delaware Park. The building was so long, in fact, that it took about 15 minutes to walk from my car to the poker room. Quite annoying. Once there, however, I was able to get a $1-$2 NLHE seat fairly quickly and I sat down with $150. I was trying to work out the rust in my game, which is why I came in with so little, and I'm kind of glad I did. The table was sharky and they ate me up something good. I can't remember any memorable hands except to say that I put my last $40 in the pot with 3♦-5♦ on a board of 5♣-7♠-Q♦. I was on the button and I had limped in and when it checked around to me, I shoved with bottom pair, only to get called by 7♦-5♥ for a flopped two pair. The turn was a diamond, giving me some hope, but the river bricked and I got up and walked away. The main table shark asked if I was going to re-buy, a sure sign that you are the big fish at the table. I think I picked up speed walking away when he said that...
The news wasn't all bad, though, as I stopped in for some $5 Blackjack on my way out and picked up $40 in profit, cutting my losses somewhat. It made me feel a bit better as I took the long trek back to my car.

The next stop was Dover, DE for the Dover Downs casino. It was another 45 minute drive, which I took in stride and arrived at the casino at approx. 6:30p. The building is impressive looking from the parking lot and I strode onto the casino floor like I was looking for victims. The poker room, which is a small 15-18 table affair, was gearing up for a 7pm $75 $5,000 guarantee tournament, one I would have happily played in if I wasn't under time constraints. However, as nice as this tournament sounded, it threw the poker room management into an absolute tizzy. When I arrived, there was 5 people on the waiting list for $1-$2 NLHE and about 10 tables of cash games going. There was, unfortunately, no one behind the counter to add me to the list. I had to stop the extremely young room manager (seriously, he looked about 25) while he was flitting around to ask him to add me to the list. He did, to his credit, and went back to setting up his very important tournament. As time wore on, people started getting up from their tables in anticipation of the tournament, leaving plenty of open seats for cash game players. But as there were only two floor people in the room at the time (the manager and one other), no one was being seated at the cash games! There was no one behind the brush desk and our pleas to be seated at the empty seats were being ignored. After 15 minutes, the table participants started to wave us over, but when one person tried to sit down, he was shooed away by the manager. The official reason given was that the cash tables would be collapsing when the tournament started, which is reasonable enough, but surely he could keep track of the late comers and pull them off if necessary. As it turns out, it took 45 minutes (!) from that point for the tournament to start, leaving myself and a dozen other players steaming from not being able to play. One table did indeed collapse, but I couldn't help thinking that a bit more organization and one or two more staffers could have avoided this situation and the room could have been making rake from at least 10 more players for an hour.
At least I did well during my session. I was able to leave the room with +$155 off of some standard plays. Nothing spectacular to speak of and nothing memorable. I was so peeved with how the room was run that I put any memory of the game out of my head. Besides for which, I was starting to get very very tired, having been up since 5:45a and having driven hundreds of miles already. I was still a good 40 minutes away from the last poker room in Harrington, Delaware and I needed to stay awake.

The ride to Harrington was uneventful. I stopped into my Holiday Inn Express first to check-in and then immediately went to find the poker room at the Harrington Raceway. I've hardly seen a more pathetic excuse for a 'casino' in my life. The casino entrance was nearly impossible to find from the road, which is unusual considering there are usually big bright neon lights everywhere pointing you to where you need to go. Nothing was lit at all. In fact, the whole thing was just a pathetic add-on to a worn down racetrack that looked closed. I found the entrance by wandering onto the grounds and following a car who seemed to know where he was going. I found the main raceway entrance and took an escalator up to a tiny 6 table poker room that had a whole two tables going on a Friday night. I put my name on the list and waited, like a fool, for 20 minutes until an opening appeared. It was a mistake because I was getting more and more tired by the minute, and I played poorly. By the time it was over, I had lost my initial $200 buyin and I headed back to the hotel. It was my fault for playing tired when I shouldn't be at all. Bad decisions cost you in poker. At the end of a very very long day, I laid my head down in my bed in Harrington, DE and crashed. Hard. I was down $225 on the trip and I needed a fresh start.

Hello boys, I'm baaaaaaack!

2011-08-03T16:37:00.000-04:00

It's been...too long since I made a post. Oddly enough, the frequency of my posts has an inverse correlation with the major activity of my life. It's been about 10 months since I made a post and in that time:

1. I got married - Alison and I tied the knot in Aruba with a close group of family and friends and had a blast honeymooning in Hawaii on the Big Island.

2. I moved out of Manhattan - Manhattan and I had been growing apart for some time and finally she asked me to move out. It was around the time I got involved with Alison that Manhattan started growing suspicious. She got colder and less interesting and really, it was just a matter of time. It's for the best, of course, since Manhattan isn't going to settle down anytime soon, unless you've got major money. She's a great time, but really only for the single-minded amongst us. Anyway, I got a job with UBS in Stamford and moved out there with Alison just after our wedding. 4 months into the job, the group I was with (it was a contract position) was unceremoniously let go after my contract engagement manager managed to piss off the wrong people. I'm working now at Credit Suisse back in Manhattan (you cold bitch!). My commute is 90 minutes, but it's tempered by the fact that I can telecommute from home once or twice a week. I'm enjoying it tremedously. Also, my new townhouse in Stamford is more than twice the square footage of my old Manhattan apartment and is only a two block walk to the beach!

3. There was a flurry of Wall Street Poker alumni activity - Matty Ebs got married and had a daughter. The Slayer got married in a beautiful wedding at Bethpage State Park (Home of the ocassional US Open of Golf). Pauly Walnuts and Abbie M got married (to each other!) on the same day as the Slayer. That was a hell of a day. Their wedding was equally beautiful, on the shores of the Hudson River overlooking Wall Street (natch). Many Wall Streeters were in attendance.

4. Andy Frankenberger proves it's not a fluke - Franky, who I previously blogged about in my last post in October when he won the WPT 'Legends of Poker' tourney, ended up winning the WPT Player of the Year after winning another tourney and final tabling one or two more. Any other player would have called that a good year, but he then went on to the World Series of Poker and managed to win a bracelet in Event #28 ($1,500 NL Hold'Em) by beating out 2,499 other participants and taking home the $600,000 first place prize! So sick.

5. Alison passed 3 bar exams and got a job - In an effort to make herself more marketable in this difficult economy, Alison took the NY and NJ bar exams one after the other. Then she took the Connecticut bar exam six months later. This made her...interesting to live with while the stress took it's toll, but it paid off handily. Not only did she pass all 3 exams on her first try, but the results of the NY bar exam (probably the hardest one), came out on our wedding day. Some of Alison's law school friends, who had already found out their results that morning, pulled me aside during the wedding and said it'd be a fun idea to announce to Alison and the wedding party the results (only if she'd passed of course). Alison didn't even know the results had been released when I snuck away to our room to check her email. It made for a wonderful moment when I finally was able to announce to a puzzled audience (who didn't understand why I had hijacked the proceedings) that Alison had indeed passed! The whole party burst into applause and shouts and the mood, already lightened by the seaside wedding and plenty of alcohol, shot into the stratosphere. I can honestly say it was the most fun I'd ever had in one night. Alison just accepted a position at a small firm in Westchester doing civil litigation and insurance defense and she starts August 15th. I couldn't be prouder of her.

So that's what's been keeping me busy. My lust for poker remains strong but my opportunities remain relatively few. In the last year, I've played live poker maybe five times, with three losing sessions and two winning sessions. I played in Atlantic City and at the Mohegan Sun but haven't seen any new poker rooms.

Until this weekend....

That's right. This Friday, I will embark on my first poker trip since my Arizona trip in late 2009. Alison is going up to the Cape with her family for a week and I will be joining her Wed. night. But I'll have the entire weekend free and I'm using it plan a monstrous poker weekend. I will leave work in the early afternoon and hit these poker rooms in order:

1. Parx Casino, Philadephia, PA
2. Harrah's Chester, Philadelphia, PA
3. Delaware Park, Wilmington, DE
4. Dover Downs, Dover, DE
5. Harrington Raceway, Harrington, DE
6. Hollywood Casino, Charles Town, WV (Yes, West Virginia!)
7. Hollywood Casino, Grantville, PA
8. Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs, Wilkes-Barre, PA
9. Mount Airy Casino, Mt. Pocono, PA

Nine poker rooms in two and a half days spanning three different states. Not bad.

I'll have a full write up sometime next week. Oh, and I want to send a huge shout out to "DownTown" Michael Brown, who is turning 60 this year on August 12 (my birthday too!). He's having his party this same weekend I'm doing this and I was super conflicted about it, but I ultimately chose the poker trip. I *know* Michael* will understand!

Former colleague kicking ass!

2010-10-06T00:13:00.002-04:00

So one of the guys I used to work with at JPMorgan, Andrew Frankenberger, recently won the WPT 2010 Legends of Poker tournament to the tune of $750,000! Wow.

When I knew him, he was not a particularly great player, though he wasn't terrible. He's also played a few times in my home game, way back when. Now he's taking down major tournaments!

Coincidence? I think not!

Florida Heat

2010-09-14T15:30:00.002-04:00

Gaming opportunities are few and far between these days. My own poker game has dried up, Atlantic City is too far away for anything other than a weekend (which I can’t spare) and my job in midtown, coupled with the intense summer heat, has precluded me from playing competitive Backgammon with the usual crew. So what’s a gamer to do when the itch comes?

For me, I try to take the time to enjoy my wonderful relationship with my fiancé and spend the bulk of my remaining free time planning our wedding and honeymoon. The wedding date is November 6th, in Aruba, and even though the hotel takes care of a lot of details, there’s still so much more to plan. Finalizing the guest list, the music choices, the flowers, the cocktail hour details, etc… is pretty close to a full time job. A pleasurable one, but a job none the less. On top of all that, Alison is busy spending her time looking for work. It’s a miserable job market for newly minted law school graduates, which is only driving her to work twice as hard to find a position.

Incidentally, if anyone out there knows of a job for a Dartmouth undergrad, a Fordham law grad, and a super hard and organized person (all Alison, natch), please give me a buzz!

In the midst of all of this craziness, my father has been bending my ear for months to come see him down in Florida. He’s been alone since my mom passed in November, but there hasn’t been enough time to fly down for a trip, until now. Ali and I took a JetBlue flight from JFK to Fort Lauderdale this past Thursday night, returning the next Monday night. My dad was in great spirits and we had a good time together. My parent’s condo is on the beach in Hollywood, and beach going would normally be a priority, but the temperatures were in the mid 90’s and the humidity was oppressive. Ali and I managed a few hours here and there to go in the ocean (bath water temperature) but it was in the late afternoon, when the sun was low on the horizon and the beach was shaded by the 30 story buildings lining the beachfront. We ate Golden garlic crabs at the Rustic Inn in Dania (a huge favorite and highly recommended), really good Cuban food at Little Havana in North Miami and had some kick ass breakfasts at the local bagelry.

But one thing was missing from my usual Florida frolics: Poker. I had already warned Ali in advance that since Florida has recently approved No-Limit Poker, there would be ZERO chance that I wouldn’t sample it for at least one session. I saw my chance Saturday night when we came back from our Cuban dinner. Ali was sated with food and it was about 9:30p. I announced my intention to go play cards and got surprisingly little resistance, only an admonishment from my father not to ‘stay out all night’. My legendary (in my parent’s mind) all night session of 10 years ago (where I came back at noon of the following day) had still not been forgotten. I promised I would try my best, but I never made any guarantees and I headed out.

I debated going to the Hollywood Hard Rock hotel for my one and only poker session of this short trip, but discounted it for two reasons. One, it was a 30 minute drive to get there, which meant I’d be shaving off a precious hour of playing time. By comparison, there were three other poker rooms within an 8 minute drive, allowing for much more time on the felt. The other reason was that the Hollywood Hard Rock is, by far, the most popular poker room in South Florida and likely to be the most crowded. I envisioned a long waiting time for a table, and I would have been pissed if that occurred. I opted instead for the Mardi Gras racetrack and casino, a greyhound pari-mutuel facility which had recently, according to news reports, moved its poker room downstairs and expanded it. I wanted to check it out anyway so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.

I was inside the poker room within ten minutes of leaving my father and Ali and I have to say the room is impressive. It’s about 35 tables with nice tables, auto shufflers and plush chairs. The room is on the dark side, but the tables themselves are lit up quite nicely and the dealers were way above average in skill and friendliness. The opponents were also nice people and, more importantly, not particularly good players (more on this later).

Even though it was Saturday night, the room was not as busy as usual according to the local players. I can only imagine the Jewish holidays had something to do with that. Even so there were still 16 tables going with 1-2NL, 2-5NL, 2-2 Limit, 1-2 Limit and 2-5 O/8 spread limit games going. After a short wait, a seat opened for me at a 1-2 NL table and I took my seat in seat 2. The man who was in the seat got up and moved to seat 7, a glum look on his face. I knew the look. "The seat is that bad?," I asked. He just grunted. "You’ll see. Of course, now that I moved, you’ll probably win every hand!"

His prediction wasn’t far off. My second hand, I was dealt ATo in early position. I was new to the table and wary of the other players, so I wasn’t about to get cute and raise with a middle Ace. I limped and a few people limped as well. The button raised to $6 and everyone who limped called. Pot builder. The flop was TT6, as good as it gets. I checked and it checked around. Turn was 8♣, putting a club flush on board. I bet out $20 and got a call from the button raiser. Curious. Club draw? I couldn’t tell. The river was a harmless 2♦. I bet out $40 for value and he squirmed but finally made the call showing pocket Queens. I tabled my trips and he grimaced. Congratulations on your marriage to Queens pal, now ship the candy.

The hand after that, I got 2♦3♦ and limped with it but folded after a mid table raise to $15. One of the risks of limping in early position with speculative hands is that you will lose a lot of limps having to fold to raises which will almost be in position on you. But I’ll do it early in a table because I assume most 1-2NL tables are limpy. Until I’m proven otherwise, I stick with the game plan of limping with suited connectors and hoping to flop big. The flop was 33A! As it turns out, I would have cracked a guy with AK. The next hand, I got 66 in the BB and saw a flop of 633. This time, I fired out and got no takers. I had hoped somebody would have a three, but no go.

So my first few hands were definitely successful but then it quieted down. I was up about $80 on my $140 buy-in about 2 hours in when a very pretty Cuban girl sat down to my left. My standard playbook on pretty girls is that they can’t play poker very well, but this girl proved that first impression wrong. She was active pre-flop, made plenty of c-bets and was taking down pots with alarming frequency. We got to talking and it turns out she was here with her boyfriend, who was at another table. They had met about a year ago at a Miami poker room and were only here in Hollywood because of some friends they were visiting in the area. She was nice enough to tell me about some great authentic Cuban restaurants in the Miami area and I was trying to be friendly. I was also looking to move seats to get position on her. I don’t mind putting up a friendly façade with a strong player, but I’m still looking for an advantage. And it worked because we got involved in a bunch of big pots during the session. I had lost half of my profit on the session at this point trying different things on the table and not getting any traction. Finally, I’m dealt JJ in the hijack seat (button minus 2). It limped to me and I raised to 8 and Cuban Girl re-raised me to 15! This was the first pre-flop three bet that I had seen at this table so far so I immediately put her on a big hand. I was absolutely ready to give up the hand except that three other players cold called and the pot odds were quite heavily in my favor to set-mine. The flop was a very beautiful J♠6♦3♦. I would have slow played if the flush draw wasn’t on board, so when it checked to me, I fired out $25. When Cuban Girl smooth called, I immediately put her on an over pair. Which one, I didn’t know, so I was praying quite heavily for small cards on the turn and river. Unfortunately, the turn was a King. Ouch. It was on me and I froze for a moment. My brain snapped me out of it quickly and I fired out $35. She called again. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed my hesitation on the King peeling off on the turn and luckily she didn’t. A better player would have shoved on me and I almost definitely would have laid down my set considering the situation. But she wasn’t world class, merely a good player. The river was a blank and I was feeling better about my situation. I had to figure out what she’d call and I saw her stack at about $135. I put out $45, probably too small as it turns out, but she called quickly and showed me QQ. I scooped another nice pot and she re-bought for another $100.

A little later on, her boyfriend sat down at the table next to her. They were a nice chatty couple and he seemed to be a slightly better player than her, but they weren’t too dangerous in my eyes anymore. I was on the button when the UTG straddled to $4 (yes, straddles are allowed in Florida now!). One weak player limped and it folded to me. Perfect time to steal, right? I had KJo, which is a reasonable hand and could even be best at this point. I raised to $20. Cuban Girl, whose stack had been knocked down to $93, smooth called. So did the straddle and the limper! I wasn’t expecting this at all. Then my mind got the better of my instincts. I was less worried about the straddle and the limper and more worried about the SB Cuban Girl, who probably wouldn’t call a $20 PF raise without a real hand. The flop was A84, rainbow. It checked to me and I decided to represent the Ace on an otherwise non-threatening board. I bet out $55 and the SB immediately re-raised to $73 all in. The other two players folded and it was $18 for me to call. $18 into a pot of $210. A clearer call I’ve never seen, but I STILL contemplated folding, knowing I was trapped perfectly. But I decided to make the call and try to talk up my attempted bluff. Cuban Girl was surprised to see my total bluff and happily showed AA for top set. It happens sometimes. Soon afterwards, I was able to move into position on Cuban Girl and her boyfriend and plotted getting my chips back.

I was back to even at my initial buyin of $140. Three hours down the drain. {Sigh}.

My stock oscillated for the next hour. I was down $85 at one point and I picked up J♠8♠ in the cutoff. Cuban girl raised to $6 after a few limps and I decided to see a flop. 7 players saw a flop of A♠K♠6♦. Cuban girl bets $10 and I’m the only one to call, in position on her now. Turn is 9♠. She checks to me and I bet $15. Her boyfriend laughs and says, "Oh no, no checking here!". I was kind of pissed because he obviously put me on the flush and seemed to be gently communicating that to her. To my surprise, though, she check-raised me to 30! Given her pre-flop raise, I couldn’t put her on a Queen flush since the Ace and King were already on the board and I held the Jack. Would she raise PF with Q♠T♠?!??! It didn’t seem like a possibility given what I’d seen of her play. So I put her on a set or two pair (AK) and opted to call, hoping the board wouldn’t pair. I was in position, after all, and could possibly lay it down if the board did pair and she shoved. I had $47 behind. The river is 7♥, a harmless card in my eyes. She checks to me! At this point, I’m legitimately confused and I said so. I muttered out loud about how weird her play was. She check raised me on the third spade but opted to check the river when I called her min-raise. After about 30 seconds of this, I gently put the rest of my chips in and she quick called, showing A♥9♥ for a turned two pair. Her boyfriend yelled at her when I showed the second nuts. I guess my Hollywood had convinced her that I couldn’t beat two pair, or I was bluffing with a busted draw, but her boyfriend knew better early on. The two pair which gave me the flush kept her in and she didn’t want to believe me when the river bricked for her. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; most of the profit in this game comes from your opponent’s mistakes, not your own skillful play (although one sometimes begets the other).

After my double up and a few more smallish pots, I was back to about $220, or +$80 on the session. I picked up AKo UTG. I raise to $6 to pot build and immediately curse myself for not making it $11. A loose older foreign man, rocking an awesome white ‘stache, called from UTG+1 and that drew in three more callers. The flop, though, was a very pretty A♠8♦6♦, rainbow. I bet out $25, intending to take it down right there given the diamond draw but the ‘Stache called me. $25 was considered a pretty big bet on this table, so I was concerned he had flopped something big. A set, maybe, or two pair. I didn’t know if he would cold call on a diamond draw, but it was a possibility. There are plenty of 1-2 NL players who will call on a flush draw heads up even though common sense says they probably won’t get paid off if the draw hits, putting the pot odds against them. Good players will call in position knowing they can bluff successfully if a diamond hits, but this guy wasn’t good. I had already seen him crack JJ with 84o when he called a raise PF and flopped two pair. So I knew he wasn’t beyond playing trash for a raise. The turn was 4♠. Now there were TWO flush draws out there. I figured I’d better lead out again for a substantial amount and maybe he won’t want to draw again. I bet out $45 and he instantly called "all-in" for $190 more! He had me covered and now *I* was the one squirming! I started to talk it out loud, "two pair? Set? 5-7?" In my mind, all I was beating was a pure bluff and I just didn’t see this guy bluffing. It took me a full minute to come to the conclusion to fold but I finally remembered Doyle Brunson’s maxim of ‘Don’t go broke with just top pair’ and I kicked in my cards. He tabled his 5-7 for the nut straight and said, with a heavy greek accent, "I show you, so you no feel bad". He gave me a fist bump and then asked what I had. I told the truth, hung my head and slogged on. I was back to my starting stack of $140.

It was now 2:45a and I was thinking about just picking up and leaving, calling this an even session. But the play was so crackable and I hadn’t played poker in so long that I couldn’t bring myself to leave! I started to chip back up, finally getting back to ~$220 again. I ground it out and it was a small profit, but two hours later I was finally ready to leave. I decided I’d play until UTG for a straddle and then leave after that hand. At this point, the table was down to 5 players (Cuban girl and boyfriend left) and it was definitely late. People were starting to make small errors due to fatigue and I was trying to take advantage. It got to me UTG and I made the straddle, which every player called. I looked down at A3o and checked my option. The flop is a pretty nice A♠K♦4♥. It checks to me and I decide to check because a weak Ace might be best here, but almost any other Ace beats me. I wanted to see what the table would do. Fortunately, it checked around. The turn was the 3♠. Beautiful. I now had top and bottom pair, and probably the best hand. George, a strange looking local with a crazy bad case of lazy eye, bet out $20. He was called by a youngish kid in the BB who had $45 in his stack, leaving him with $25. I figured him on a spade draw. I decided that with one card to go, I would isolate the spade draw. There was all this dead money in the pot, so if I bet huge, I should knock out everyone in the pot except the kid on a draw and I’d get my bet back minus $45. So I put out a silo of $100. A 30’ish loose guy, who had taken ‘Stache’s seat an hour ago, surprised the heck out of me by shoving for $179! Wow. George, who had been counting out his chips to call me (!) folded. The kid I put on a draw, naturally, called for the remainder of his small stack. It was now up to me for $79. If I folded, I’d be nearly even on the session. Calling and losing would leave me with a big loss relative to my starting stack. On the other hand, I was getting 4:1 to make the call. Still, I couldn’t figure what the guy had. I looked at the board and it hit me like a ton of bricks: Darko. The Darko, named for everyone’s favorite former Wall Street Poker player, Johnny Darko, is 2-5. The Darko would have given this guy a turned wheel. And he *did* get to see the turn for free after all. It totally made sense to me. He calls my straddle because, what the heck, it’s late and this might be our last hand. He flops a gutshot and fills it in when the flop is checked. Every instinct told me to fold the loser. But then I started to debate it in my head. Literally, I got up and started pacing the floor. If he had the wheel, I still had outs. Plus, he might only have an inferior hand of some sort. But I couldn’t figure out what that hand would be. I tried to fish for information verbally ("You got a wheel?") but the floor person told me to be quiet since there were other people still in the hand, even if they were all-in. Finally, after two or three minutes, probably out of sheer frustration but certainly egged on by my 4:1 odds call, I pushed my chips over the line. He asked, "You have a set?" Hmmmm, that’s nice to hear. "No," I said, "just two pair". "Me too," he said. He showed a 4 at first, and I fully expected him to turn over an Ace with it, but no! He had K4 for a slow played two pair that turned into disaster! I turned over my better two pair. The kid whom I thought had a draw actually had A9o. George told me after the hand was over that he, wisely, folded K3 for yet another inferior two pair! He told me, also, that he would have called me if the other guy had folded, which means the pot would have been for nearly all my chips no matter what. I had to dodge a 4, 9 or King to scoop the entire pot and I was elated to see the T♣ peel off on the river! What a last hand!

The table broke up immediately, after having busted two players, and I racked up. After my tip, I had $460, for a $320 profit on the session! W00t!!!!

Finally, at 5am, I got into the car and drove back home, visions of my next session already dancing in my head. I love a good win.

Backgammon hustle story

2010-08-23T10:41:00.002-04:00

After a wonderful week at the Cape with Ali and her family, I am finally back in New York and finally able to watch my stored up WSOP broadcasts. Unfortunately, I can't post this story that came up in the first Day 1 broadcast of the Main Event, but it's awesome!

Erik Seidel recalls a story about how his mother was hustled at Scrabble to the tune of $160. Seidel got so pissed at the guy that he goaded him to play him at Backgammon and Erik emptied the guy's pockets. Finally, the unfortunate hustler had nothing left to play for except his boots, so he puts them up for grabs and Seidel wins them too! It's snowing and cold outside and the guy isn't going to give up his boots, but a crowd forms and chants "Boots! Boots! Boots!" until the guy takes them off, hands them to Seidel and walks home in the snow, in his socks. That's epic.

Say what you want about poker, but the best hustle stories come from games other than card games. Pool, Chess, Backgammon, Monopoly, Scrabble, Candyland (!). The only hustle stories I hear about in poker involve outright cheating. Anybody got a good poker hustle story for me?

The real action

2010-08-23T10:36:00.007-04:00

What do poker players do during the World Series when they're not playing in a tournament? Well, sometimes they play in the juicy cash games that spring up. And sometimes, they play high stakes Backgammon. Here's a clip of Phil Laak playing for $240 a point in a side game during the 2010 WSOP.

Man sentenced to play poker

2010-08-09T09:21:00.002-04:00

Samuel McMaster Jr., a former insurance agent who lists his occupation as 'professional poker player', has been convicted of fraud to the tune of $500,000. As part of his sentence, a judge in New Mexico has ordered him to go out and use his mad poker skillz to win back the money he stole!

Interesting. The article mentions that since the IRS recognizes professional poker playing as a legitimate profession, then winning the money in poker tournaments is, likewise, a legitimate sentence.

I am the law, bitches! I am a lawyer! (Part II)

2010-08-01T02:10:00.001-04:00

Seeing how Helpful Local (HL) was playing so LAG (Loose and Aggressive), I really wanted to get a seat change in position on him. But the table wasn't moving anytime soon. The only seats that opened up were the guy to my right, who for some reason felt this table was too passive (!). And Convention Guys 1 + 2 (CG 1+2), were directly on the right of HL and not seats that I wanted to take. Incidentally, it hurt a LOT that CG1 + 2 left at the same time, with big profits for both of them. If they didn't have to go to a 'meeting', their mobneys would eventually find their way back into my stack. As I'v said before in many previous posts, one of the downsides to playing poker in new casinos is the limited amount of time I have to give myself. Usually it's because there's another casino I have to get to in order to maximize my visits per trip to the end of accomplishing my goal of visiting every legal American Poker Room. This time, it was because I had to pick up Ali from the Jersey Bar exam. I gave myself until 2:15p, which would give me 90 minutes to traverse the normal 60 minute trip, allowing myself time for traffic and such. To be late to pck her up was NOT an option. Have you ever seen a woman just after having taken an 8 hour exam?!? Yeah, that's what I thought.

So it took me about another hour of dicking around before I was able to get a seat change in position on HL, and sure enough it was helpful to my chip stack. I was down to $110 in my 3rd buyin, which put me at -$490 for the session, the lowest point I would reach.

I was in the BB when I looked down at AA, the most beautiful thing you can see in a cash game. I *love*, like totally heart, being in the BB with rockets. It allows me to gather all the possible information pre-flop before making my move. In this case, there was a few limps and then a Young Gun (YG), who had taken my old seat, raised to $15. It folded to me. I decided right then and there that I wanted to play for a big pot. Instead of re-popping, I called and saw most of the limpers fold except for Friendly Black Guy (FBG) who called as well. We took the flop 3 handed and the flop came out K-6-6. This was a very good flop for me. I'm almost certain I'm good here and I'm even more certain that the King paired somebody. I lead out with $20, FBG calls and YG, who only has $65 behind, pushes! YG raised pre-flop, so it's hard to put him on a 6, but even if he did have the 6, FBG outchipped both of us. So I did something clever. Rather than re-raise for isolation, I smooth called the raise, thinking that my call might induce FBG to call as well. If YG has a 6, I could still break even by winning a sidepot with FBG. FBG obliged by making the call and it was heads up into the turn. I had about $50 left. The turn was an 8 and I threw in my last $50. FBG called and I turned over my Aces. YG flipped up KQ and said, "Wow, you're sweet here". FBG kept his cards to himself. River was a harmless 4 and FBG mucked! The dealer pushed me my nearly triple up pot and I was back in business!

About 30 minutes later, I tangle with HL in a big pot. I have Q♦T♦ on the button. It limps around and the flop is A♦ K♣ J♥. W00t! I flop the nuts and I feel great. What's more, there's a great possibility that someone hit that flop hard. It checks to HL who bets out $20. I Hollywood for a bit before calling. One guy at the end of the table calls too. Turn is the 8♦. I'm not invincible here, except for a higher flush draw, of which there's only one out there (the King). But the odds of that are long against so I don't feel badly. It checks to HL who bets out $45. I do more Hollywooding (And the oscar goes too....) before calling. The other guy folds. The river is the 3♦, which is a bad card for me because I want the board to be a rainbow. He checks to me and I have to figure out how much to extract from him. The pot is at about $160 and after a breif delay of thinking, I put out $65. He snap calls and I curse myself for putting out the wrong number (too low). I flip up the flush and he has to look at it a few seconds before he realizes the runner-runner flush didn't mean anything to me. "Oh, you flopped it," he says. Yep, sometimes I get lucky.

Now I'm sitting at around $450 and I'm feeling better about myself. HL leaves and is replaced by Lesbian Golf Pro (LGP). LGP is actually a married older woman, but if you met her, believe me, you'd think she was a Lesbian Golf Pro (Not that there's anything wrong with that AT ALL). LGP is a pretty solid player but I get the best of her when my JT bests her KQ on a board of Q97K4. I flopped the OESD, she didn't bet enough to put me out and I turned the nuts to her top two pair. I raised her on the river and she called to the tune of a $110 profit hand. I was now only $60 down for the session and it was 1:30p. I had around 45 minutes left, which I spent diddling around. By the time I left, I was at $512. An 88 dollar loss on the session, but a far cry from the $500 I was down a few hours before. I'm convinced that if I had had more time, I could have turned a profit on the table. If only...

I cashed out at the cage and turned the $5 slot credit I got for free for signing up for their players card into $10. I cashed out at the ultra-slow cage and walked away with my head feeling high.

Here's my final recommendation for the poker room at the Sands Bethlehem casino: It's not time yet.

Everything good takes time to ripen and the 'just plucked off the vine' feeling of the Sands poker room leaves more of a grape juice taste in your mouth than a fine wine. It's got plenty of potential, it just needs time to age. They need more tables, for starters. With just the 12 tables there is going to be a HUGE line to play $1-$2 if you go on a weekend before around 9am. And who wants to arrive at 9am on a weekend? Weekends are for sleeping in. But not for waiting 3 hours or more to get a seat. Also, the dealers and floor, while more competent than a starting poker room ought to be, still have a few kinks to iron out. The most RETARDED rule that I've ever heard in any poker room came at the Sands. This is not a floor RULING, by the way, but a bona fide rule of the room. Not just some floor person's odd opinion.

The story went like this. There was a guy in the 7 seat who made a raise to $15. The guy in the 8 seat hadn't done anything yet and the guy in the 9 seat, who by all accounts hadn't realized seat 8 hadn't acted, announced a re-raise. Before he could call out a number, seat 8 spoke up and said he hadn't acted yet. Seat 8 then announced a re-raise to $45 at which point seat 9 tried to fold. The dealer stopped him and told him that HE WAS OBLIGATED TO HIS VERBAL OUT OF TURN RAISE! Now, in every other poker room in the country that I've ever been in, the only time seat 9 would be obligated to raise would be if seat 8 had folded or called. When seat 8 re-raises, it changes the material action that seat 9 was basing HIS raise on, and therefore a new action has commenced and seat 9 can take a different course. The floor was quickly called and confirmed that verbal actions at the Sands Casino are binding, EVEN IF THEY ARE OUT OF TURN AND THE ACTION HAS CHANGED IN BETWEEN! Therefore, if seat 8 had called all-in, seat 9 would be OBLIGATED to raise on top of that amount. Clearly, that's madness. So if you are at the Sands Bethlehem casino playing poker, make DAMNED sure you know where the action is at all times. You were warned.

So there you have it. I heard a rumor that the Philadelphis Parx casino will be getting a 100 table poker room soon (which would make it the largest poker room on the east coast) and that the Mount Airy and PA Bethlehem casinos would be expanding soon. When that happenes, I will wholeheartedly recommend it. But, for no, the Borgata is still the King for New York Players. Most bang for the buck, poker-wise, even if it is a slightly longer commute to get there.

My trip back to Somerset, NJ to pick up Ali from the bar exam was entirely uneventful. The rain from earlier in the day had cleared up and the traffic was flowing smoothly. I arrived at 3:20p and discovered that the test had not only started late, but they were going to let all the students out all at the same time so they could count the exams returned as some sort of anti-cheating measure. I laid on the grass and read from Ali's Kindle in the meantime, a bucolic experience that I hardly get to do in the concrete jungles of Manhattan. It wasn't until 4:20p that Ali finally walked out, exhausted yet glowing from the knowledge that she was finally and completely done with her law school experience. I am as proud of her as I have ever been of anyone or anything. She worked really really hard in the last two months to prepare for these exams, and I'm confident she did well. I wish the job market could be kind to her, but that's something we'll take as it comes. We drove back to Jersey City, NJ, where I had rented the car from to drive her out. I had gotten the car at Dollar Rent-A-Car, next to the Newport Mall, because it was less than half the price of a Zip Car. We dropped off the car and had burgers, fries and beer at a P.J. Clarke's ripoff that was in the mall. The beer was good though. And we took the PATH train back to the World Trade Center. The 15 minute walk back to the apartment was the longest walk of my life. Both of us were pretty wiped out and every step amongst the throngs of tourists felt like agony. But boy, there was no better feeling in the world than cranking up the air conditioning in the bedroom, stripping off our sweaty clothes and flopping into bed for a well deserved rest.

A huge chapter in Ali's life has been closed and a new and exciting one can begin now. But first, August. There will be nothing in August for her except greatly deserved rest and relaxation. We're taking a week off in mid August to stay with her parents and siblings at a rented house on Cape Cod in Falmouth, MA. They've been doing it every year for twenty years and it's a very nice tradition. A full week of lobster dinners, clams, oysters, sand, sun and ocean. I'll go on a whale watching excursion, rent a bike for a day on Martha's Vineyard and do some local antiquing. I have a hankering to buy a nice painting of a ship at sea, if I can find one that isn't a hack job made for tourists. Then September and October will be busy with job hunting and wedding duties. Plenty going on, but for now...peace.

I am the law, bitches! I am a lawyer!

2010-07-30T19:00:00.002-04:00

5:30 in the morning. Is there a more ungodly time of the day? It was at this hour that the alarm rang and Ali did something I’ve never seen before and will probably never see again. She bolted upright, at 5:30am mind you, and got out of bed instantly. Without any prompting on my part. You see, it was Thursday, July 29th, 2010 and today was the last day of her official academic career. Today, New Jersey held their bar exam and, after taking the Multi-State exam and the NY Bar exam the previous two days, Ali would be finished with taking tests, studying and stressing out. She probably didn’t sleep a wink.

I, on the other hand, was resting peacefully when the alarm woke me abruptly. I struggled to consciousness and waited for my turn in the shower. We were out the door at 6:15a. I had taken the day off to drive Ali to the exam site in Somerset, NJ. We didn’t want to risk the possibility that public transportation would be flaky at that hour. Plus, the site of the test, the Garden State Exhibit Center, was not within walking distance of the Somerset train station. I didn’t know if there were going to be any cabs available going back and forth, so I bit the bullet and rented a car for the occasion. There wasn’t a lot of traffic going there and it took us a little over an hour to get there. I dropped Ali off to go register and went forth on my day trip. I had most of the day to kill before I had to come pick her up at 3:45p, and I had a car. Hmmmmm…. There will be poker. Oh yes, there will be poker.

Atlantic City was too far. It was still nearly two hours back and forth which wouldn’t leave much time for poker playing. So I decided to hit up the new game in town, otherwise known as the Sands Casino in Bethlehem, PA. A mere 55 minutes from Somerset, the casino had just opened up a new poker room 11 days before and I was itching to see it. I made the drive out with little traffic and pulled up to the site.

Upon arriving from the direction I was coming, the first thing you notice as you close in on the casino is the enormous shell of a factory that is next to the main building. Actually, the casino building is dwarfed by the old abandoned hulk that lay next to it. This is Steel Country out in Lehigh Valley, and the Sands Casino is built on the site of the old Bethlehem Steel plant. At once, it is a sad reminder of the greatness that this country once had in manufacturing, and also serves as a notice that the old can be born again anew. I drove into the large parking structure and easily made my way onto the casino main floor.

The casino floor itself is quite large. It’s laid out in a single large rectangle, perhaps 300 feet wide and maybe 1500 feet long. The ceiling is very high, maybe 8 stories or so, and the steel beams of the structure are exposed, reminding you that this once the site of major steel construction. In the front half of the casino, the ceiling has hundreds of artfully placed red and orange cylinders hanging from overhead. The shimmering colors and the staggered heights of the light displays strongly evoke the look of molten steel pouring out of some long forgotten cauldron, forging the destinies of the thousands of families who used to work here. Now they forge quite a different destiny altogether. I’m a big fan of historical sites and I love when casinos, or any other operation, takes over a spot yet builds the history into their building’s character. The Sands Corporation (of The Venetian fame) deserves a lot of credit for keeping the character of the building intact, or at least as much as can be done within the confines of casino construction.
There is no hotel on site as of yet, but a May 2011 expected opening will see 300 rooms. There is also a 40 store shopping mall being built as well. One would expect, with 4700 parking spaces already allotted to the property, that 300 rooms will not be NEARLY enough to accommodate demand for such an impressive property (The Borgata, by comparison, has 2,800 rooms). However, given the location only 90 minutes from Manhattan and the proximity to many area motels, I would think it will be easy to stay close by if necessary. I recently found out that Zip Car has upped their mileage per day to 180 from a previous 100 or so. This make the prospect of renting a Zip Car for a weekend jaunt a real possibility. Sharing the cost of the rental (gas is included!) with 3 other visitors could be very cost effective for everyone involved. At this moment, the only bus service I’m aware of from Manhattan is from Transbridge Lines. Unfortunately, with no hotel room on site, it would very inconvenient to stay at a local motel for a weekend excursion. There are other issues with this as well, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

So I get onto the casino floor and immediately scope out the poker room. The ‘room’ is a gated off area with nothing more than a waist high rail keeping out the spectators. It is located on the left side of the casino about halfway into the room. The location is advantageous for several reasons. First, the bathrooms are close by. Not right on top of the poker area, like at the Borgata, but they’re not on the other side of the casino either. Second, the room is directly in front of the food court area. This makes meals convenient, obviously. The other thing making meals convenient is that there is food service at the tables! This was an unexpected treat to hear and I saw many a player ordering lunch delivered right to them as they were playing. Drinks were free, including beer although they served the beer in cups and not in bottles. The cups were plastic and large, a full 12 ounces. I don’t know if alcohol was free, but I’d suspect so. I arrived at the poker room at 9:20a on that Thursday morning, fully expecting the room to be dead as so many local casinos are on weekday mornings.

Nope.

There were two 1-2 NLHE tables going and there was a list quickly building for a new table. I put my name on it and by the time I walked to the cage to get my chips (also located adjacent to the poker area), the table had been called. One of the major disadvantages of the poker room at the moment is that if you are not RIGHT IN the poker ‘room’, you will not hear your name being called for a new table. The brush desk, really just a small one person affair right at the entrance when you come in the poker area, has a microphone but it’s not hooked up to the casino’s main PA system. So if you wander off to play Pai-Gow (like I almost did), or even are tardy getting chips at the cage, you might miss your turn. Luckily, I was called and my table was underway with 6 players at 9:30a. It took another 15 minutes to fill the table.

My session did not start well at all. I bought in for $200 (max buyin was $300) and tried to get the feel of the table. The table was a mix between locals who normally played Atlantic City and newcomers who didn’t play poker well, or at all. I was in the 9 seat. Two guys sat in the one and two seats with $200 each and I could see immediately that they would be the fresh meat at the table. The Convention Guys (they were here on a business trip) didn’t know how much to bet, when they could bet or what the ‘blinds’ meant. A helpful local was helping them out with the rules while simultaneously trying not to drool. How bad were these guys? Convention Guy 2 (CG2), who looked EXACTLY like Milton from Office Space, after limping into a pot 5 ways, tried to bet $1 when it got to be his turn. A single dollar. He hadn’t made a mistake or anything. He wanted to bet a dollar. But he got the hang of the betting patterns real quickly. I was never directly involved in a pot with him, but CG1 and CG2 donked it up something fierce and ended up doubling their money by sucking out in the most awful ways that only a rank beginner can. How bad were these guys? Well, in one hand I can remember, CG2 raised pre-flop to $10 and got calls from a few people including Helpful Local (HL) and Friendly Black Guy (FBG). The flop was A23, rainbow. CG2 makes a continuation bet of $25. HL calls. FBG goes all in for $150 total. CG2 instantly calls for the $150. HL thinks for a few seconds but also calls for slightly less. I’m expecting to see at least one wheel, one two pair and a set. Right? That’s the only thing that could engender such betting madness. But no. FBG shows AQo. CG2 shows 55!! Really? You couldn’t put someone on an Ace there? HL, who just saw a big bet, an all-in and a call behind him, tables A4o. Holy Fuck! He’s got the worst possible Ace and CG2 has two of his outs! The 4 isn’t an out because it would make CG2 the straight. Right away, on the turn, a 5 pops! The river bricks out and FBG shakes his head in disgust. He played it perfectly and got cracked anyway. HL, meanwhile, shouts out “The Nuts!”. I decline to tell him the 46 is actually the nuts here. CG2, meanwhile, pays off the other guys like it’s all in a day’s work. He seems a little confused.
I, on the other hand, can’t get a damned thing going. HL and FBG are the two best players at the table! And one just called off his stack with top pair/weakest kicker and a gutshot draw! Into two players! How am I not rich?!?! But no. I got a succession of weak hands. The few strong hands I got, mostly AK and AQ paid off exactly zero times. My entire first hour was this:
ME: A♥K♥ Yay! I raise in early position.
Table: We call.
Flop: Junk-Junk-Junk, no hearts.
Table: We bet. And raise. And bet some more.
ME: I fold. ~Waaaaaaah~

I ran through my first buy in that way and rebought for another two. The line at the cage can be daunting simply because the cage employees are completely clueless and obviously newly trained. Luckily, I was able to take advantage of another nice feature of this poker room, chip runners. When available, a runner will bring you new chips. Unfortunately, due to Pennsylvania state law, the dealers are NOT allowed to sell chips to players from their racks, so don’t ask. One of the dealers told me that the Mount Airy Casino, 45 minutes north of the Sands, got fined $25,000 a few days ago when one of the poker dealers was caught doing just that. Yes, it holds up the game when dealers can’t sell but you’ll just have to wait like everyone else. For the record, when you give the chip runner your money, you will NOT be dealt a hand. You can’t play ‘behind’ at all. Play commences when you have chips in front of you. I’m curious to what that means, though, if the blinds pass you. I assume you will owe the blinds just as if you’d gone to the bathroom. I don’t know about that one.

On my second buyin, I tried playing a little more loosely to see if I could win a big pot, I played suited gapers for limps and got frisky with a few marginal holdings. It didn’t work. I lost $70 by playing A♦8♦ with HL. He had raised PF to $10 and I called him. Flop was K83. He bet out $20 on the flop and I called. I had seen HL lose $200 in the last hour calling down with middle pair so I didn’t necessarily put him on a King. The turn was a blank (I think a 4). HL bet out $65. I got to thinking about it. I almost raised him, thinking it might be a raise or fold kind of situation. But my instincts were off and I didn’t believe him. I called. The river was another brick. This time he checked! I really thought he’d call anything I put in so I checked to and he showed KQ for the win. I was down to $130 of my second $200 buyin when I got into a pot with T♣7♣. I was on the button and HL raised to $10. HL had been very aggressive, raising with nearly any two cards in any situation. This time, he got a smooth call from Older Local Man (OLM), FBG, me and CG1. Flop was Q♣T♥7♥. Bottom two pair is good, but the possibility of QT worried me. HL bet out $20, OLM calls, FBG folds and I pop to $65. To my astonishment, CG1 calls! This is a big bet for this table and is shaping up to be a big pot. HL calls! OLM calls! WTF?!?!?! Turn is a J♥. Oh crappies. I have only $50 left. HL bets out $30. The damned Jack made straight and flush draws, but there’s so much money in the pot that I feel almost obligated to call. OLM calls, I call and CG1 calls. I have $20 left and it’s going in no matter what the river is. My mind does the dance of Ten, 7, Ten, 7. River….3. HL bets$55, OLM calls all in for less as do I. CG1 calls. HL calls out ‘Jacks Up’ and flips over only a Jack. I guess it must be QJ or JT, which means I was good at the flop. I ask him to flip the over card and the dealer reaches over and throws up a… King. AngleShooterSaysWHAT? He had flopped an OESD which ended up being a pair of Jacks on the river. OLM turns over AA for the worst played pair of Aces I’ve ever seen in my life. And what did CG1 win with (you knew I lost this, right?)? What did he have that he called a bet and a raise with on the flop and then cold called the turn and the river with a flush and straight showing? 89. 89 offsuit mind you. He had flopped an OESD, turned the worst straight card in the deck for him and held on for dear life. Meanwhile, a $500 pot got pushed his way and I couldn’t understand again how I was losing to these idiots.

REBUY!

Part II to come later featuring – a nice comeback, an exhausted Alison, a long drive home, a dinner in Jersey City and last, but not least, my Sands PA casino resort recommendation.

Skipping out of town - Part II

2010-07-23T15:48:00.000-04:00

A funny anecdote about my sleepless Friday night. I was staying in W's room and as far as I understood, it was just me and her. I took the bed farthest from the window when I went to sleep. W was nowhere to be found, given her propensity to play until 5 or 6 in the morning. I went to sleep and was woken, groggily by the sound of what I assumed was W entering the room and getting into her bed. It was about 2:30a, which was about right. I promptly fell back asleep. About 4:30a, the door opened again. It woke me up once more (I wasn't sleeping well at all) and I was more than surprised to see W walking through the door! It was 4:30a. I got out of bed and wiped the sleepiness out of my eyes. Was I imagining things? I looked over at W's bed, and it was hard to make out in the half light, but I could swear I saw the blankets wrapped around someone's body. But if W was just coming in, who the hell was in the bed?!?! Turns out it was just DJ, who didn't have a place to stay that night. W had offered our room without telling me and I got a bit of a shock. Luckily, I've met DJ before (even if he didn't remember me) so I wasn't creeped out too badly. This contrasts with an event that happened a few years ago when W invited a complete stranger she had met at the table three hours earlier to share our room! I was NOT happy and slept with my wallet under my pillow. That hasn't happened since but I thought I might have been seeing a repeat! Fortunately not.

Ok, on with the story. I woke up at around 11:30a, refreshed and ready for a new day. Chris, Viv, Paul and Abbie were on there way down and had just hit the city, according to some texts I had received when I was still sleeping. W and DJ were still out cold. I showered and dressed and the two of them woke up and we all recounted last night's victories and defeats. I went down to the poker room to sweat Chris and Viv, who were already playing. Paulie and Abbie had gone to the Showboat to play cash and then the 2PM tourney. I wasn't playing at the moment because I had plans to see an old friend, Erin, who I had recently re-connected with on Facebook. Erin lived in my dorm at Hofstra and we had really great times together way back when. She grew up in Atlantic City and moved back there after college, so when I knew I was going to be there, I called her to have lunch with me and catch up after 18 years (old, so old). She arrived at 3:00p and we had a great time, eating lunch at Bread and Butter (awesome grilled cheese w/bacon!) and then walking around just shooting the breeze. It was 5:30p when I walked her back to her car and I felt really good about meeting up with her. She's very different than how I remember her, more mature I suppose. Still a lot of fun, but 10 years of marriage and a 5 year old daughter is enough to make anyone grow up.

At this point, half the day had passed by and I still hadn't been dealt a hand of poker! W was of the opinion that the entire group was going to go the Showboat to play the 7pm tourney, but Viv and Chris looked at me like I was nuts when I floated the suggestion. Leave their precious 2-5nl tables?!?! Hells to the no. I went to the Showboat myself to enter the tourney and ended up getting there about an hour early. I played cash in the meantime. The table I got was friskier than the usual Showboat table I normally play at. The players were raising and re-raising PF quite a bit and the action leaned towards heavy. I had bought in for $160 and chipped up to $180 or so when I blew my stack in one shot on a real cooler. I'm dealt A♥J♥ on the button. It limps to seat 8 who raises to $12. He gets a caller and I call as well. I think there might have been another caller too. Flop is AJ5. Top two, huzzah! It checks to seat 8 who bets out $30. I put him on AK and pop it to $65. It folds back to him and he flats. Turn is a brick. He checks to me and I bet $65 (about half my remaining stack). He shoves on me! I call and he shows 55 for the bottom set. Ouch. The river doesn't save me and I call for another buyin. I have to leave before I can get my chips back and I head into the tournament thrown for a bit of a loop. The cards are conspiring against me.

So it was W, Abbie, Paulie and I in the 7pm tourney. 52 entrants yielded a mere 5 payouts but it's still a fun structure. I had even worse cards than I did in the previous tournament and tried to bully again. It didn't work as well as last time. All 4 of us made it down to the last two tables when we started busting. Paulie was first, in about 18th place. I busted in 15th place. W and Abbie, meanwhile, were somehow sitting on the biggest stacks in the tournament! Or at least in the top 5. Rather than go back to the Borgata, I decided to rail them and provide as much info as I could about players I had had experience with. Due to a combination of aggression (Abbie is monstrously aggressive!) and lucky cards (W busted two big stacks with QQ>JJ and JJ>99), both of them made the final table with ease and were the 1 and 2 stacks coming into it. By the time they were down to 6 players, they each took out $20 for a bubble prize, which the short stack promptly collected by busting out with a marginal hand. Then they played for a while and W had a nearly 2-1 chip advantage over the next player. They discussed a chop at the break and agreed to ship W $1500 with everyone else taking $650. Everyone was happy about the outcome, especially the short stack who had about 2 BB's in his stack! I was amazed that they didn't wait until he busted to make a deal considering they were already in the money! If the short stack had busted in 5th place, he would have received $250 and the same deal could have been made with W taking $1500 and the other players taking nearly $900 each! Quite a difference. But I wasn't involved and I would have felt guilty about suggesting anything considering my deal FAIL at the tournament the night before. All of us, Paulie, Abbie, W and I, each had a 10% profit sharing arrangment, meaning we'd split 10% of anyone's profits should they cash (after entry fee and tips). Which meant I got about $60 back of a $100 tournament entry. Not too bad and I was really happy for my friends who crushed the tournament like it was nothing. Seeing W in her comfort zone with a big stack is something to behold. It doesn't hurt that she was getting hit by the deck when it helped, but she was playing very well. Abbie too. I'm very happy and proud of them.

W, predictably, hadn't eaten anything in a while and wanted to hit the noodle bar at the Borgata for a late night dinner with her friends Alan and Patty. I obliged, even though I wasn't that hungry. I just wanted to chat and break down the tournament in conversation. We had a great discussion about aggression and three betting, but you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Alan, for instance, seems to be a pretty competent player when you talk to him. He and his wife Patty are very nice people and Alan paid for the late dinner with black card comp points. So I really like the guy. But when someone tells you, with a straight face, that they have a 'system' for Blackjack and they're employing a card counting technique, you have to look at them with some suspicion. At least I do. I'm going to make this clear for my readers and anyone else who might be interested. There is no 'system' for any casino game. Not Blackjack, Roulette, Let It Ride, slots, video poker, or any other game the casino spreads (with the obvious exception of live poker). There have, in the past, been ways to game the system. Roulette, for instance, still uses a physical ball and wheel to choose numbers. There are documented instances of people having used the laser from a PDA (Palm Pilot or some such) to surreptiously read the rotation of the wheel and discover that a physical abonormality might slightly favor a particular number. Such small changes in the standard deviation could wipe out the house edge and throw it in the player's favor by anywhere from 2% to 5%.

Blackjack, years ago, had a similar exploit that was detailed in the movie '21'. By keeping track of the high value cards left in a deck, a player could exploit the advantage to the player towards the end of a shoe of cards. But this doesn't work anymore for the same reason you can't get away with the Roulette exploit anymore. The casino knows about it. Period. End of story. They won't let you anywhere near a Roulette wheel with anything that looks like a Star Trek Tricorder, and they won't let a big better onto a blackjack table in the middle of a shoe either. Lest we forget how the blackjack counting scheme works, a 'counter' counts out the deck and then silently signals the 'big bettor' to put down the real money when the shoe is in his favor. yeah, they won't let you do that anymore. Also, they don't go down to the end of the shoe anymore. The cut card is specifically left so that there could be as many as 100 cards left in the 450+ card shoe when they re-shuffle. This throws in enough variation so that the player edge from counting is wiped out.

So to all the gamers out there thinking they're getting an advantage off of some 'system' they bought off the internet or saw in a movie; You're being suckered. All of the true exploits are things we haven't yet thought of and it's going to take work and money to develop them.

Back to my story. I had dinner with these nice folks and was too tired to play poker as it was now almost 1am and I was still mentally beaten from not having made any money on anything so far this weekend. The noodle bar convieniently sits near the Pai-Gow tables at the Borgata. Pai-Gow is my one table game weakness as a poker player. I'm probably net up a bit playing the game over my lifetime, but mostly I just play to de-stress. There's not a lot of thinking involved, pots are usually split so I can be up in free drink money, and my routine of rubbing the table to get good cards and shouting 'MONKEY' at the dealer is relaxing. The tables that night had gone up to their usual Saturday night $40 minimum, which is more than I wanted to spend. I was about to walk away when I decided, "Fuck it". I'll put down $400 for 10 bets and see what I can do. To soften the variance a bit, I decided to play two hands at a time, which was a good strategy since I will usually not lose both unless the dealer has a monster (boat over Aces or some such nonsense). I did well initally, going up $100 in short order. I decided that +$200 profit would be goal before quitting and then an evil woman dealer came in. She beat the table mercilessly, with the worst hand being that my King Flush over QQ chopped, barely, (to an Ace flush and JJ). On that particular hand, my other hand lost, so a chop turned into a push and a loss. I went down $240 at the table before deciding to switch to another table. My luck would change considerably and I went on a run that was so nice that I decided to up my bet to $60 each hand. It was when I was up around $60 that I started playing the Dragon Bonus for $5 each. Normally, I know a sucker bet when I see it, but the bonus bet ended up being a good way to alleviate some of my losses. More often than not, I got three of a kinds or straights that paid me off. I was up around $80 when my big hand occurred. I got quad Aces on one of my hands and the dragon bet paid $125 on my $5 bet. In addition, the dealer made a Queen high Pai-gow and I won both of my hands. I counted it up and I was +$240 on my original $400! Enough was enough. I collected my money, got colored up (woo-hoo $500 chip!) and left.

I went to the poker room to say goodnight to everyone who was still awake at 3:00a (most everyone) and went back to the room and fell asleep. In the morning it was back to the poker tables. I played $1-2 NL and finally did well. I bought in for $200 in my first session right after lunch and played at a really tight table. It was boringly tight until a maniac took an open seat and started playing every hand for a raise. I sat tight and managed to flop a set of Ten's vs. his KK and doubled through him. Woohoo! I worked up to around $450 before the maniac busted and we were back to our boring ways. I racked up and cashed out, catching a late 1:30p brunch with W, Dj, Viv and Chris at the Borgata buffet.

When we were done with Brunch, we all went back and I sat at a super crazy 1-2NL table. Initially, there was just a single crazy maniac playing a lot of hands and successfully betting everyone off on innocuous flops by simply grabbing a handful of random chips in his stack and splashing the table. Then another maniac sat to his right and started playing back at him. It was the battle of the crazies and the action was intense. I successfully moved seats so I could be in position on them and the fireworks started. I bought in for $200 and was down to $60 at one point when I managed to triple up when Maniacs 1+2 and I all moved all in preflop. I had QQ. Maniac 1 had Ad6d. Maniac 2 had JTo. I faded everything to take it down and I was back in position again. Maniac one ran his $250 starting stack to $1400 at one point. Maniac 2 ran his $100 starting stack to $900 (!) by calling all-ins with bottom pair and catching up on the river. It was a luckbox extravaganza. I was able to double my stack to $500 with AA vs. Maniac 1's AJ on a Jack high flop. At this point, Maniac 1's girlfriend had sat behind him to sweat him and he managed to lose his ENTIRE stack in about 90 minutes. It's what happens to all maniacs eventually. Maniac 2, also, had dropped from $900 to about $200 when I doubled him by overplaying QQ. The action went like this. I was in middle position and I opened for $12. Maniac 2, re-raised to $25 from the SB and I called. My game plan, in my head, was to drop the hand if an Ace or King came on the flop. The flop was A♣9♥5♥. Maniac 2 bet out $45 and I flat called. The turn was 3♦. He bet out $100 and I called again. I just didn't believe he had an Ace. I put him on JJ or TT. I got away from my game plan and I paid for it. The river bricked and he went all in for his remaining $65. I called and he showed AKo. He gave me a back handed compliment by telling me 'that was a good play. Normally I have shit there.' I didn't take it like a compliment and he racked up and left with $500 before I could get my chips back. By the time I had to leave, I was sitting on about +$100 profit for this little session and I eventually had to pick up and leave.

I drove all the way back to New York in Chris' car, with viv, Abbie, Chris and Paul in tow. Even though the trip took just over 3 hours, it was fun to have them on the ride and even better to spend time with them. My weekend ended up being about +$160 after expenses, which is never a bad thing when you come back from AC with more than you left with! Still can't get last QQ out of my mind though. Serenity now, insanity later.

Florida: All grown up

2010-07-22T19:42:00.002-04:00

My life has been a bit hectic lately, but while I wasn't looking, Florida dropped it's $100 max buyin limit on poker! Evidently, the state has signed a compact with the Seminole Tribe (FINALLY!!!!) and now full on gambling is legal at the reservation casinos.

List of games and limits at the Hollywood Hard Rock. I can't WAIT to visit my dad for a long weekend.

Jersey to take over Atlantic City

2010-07-22T11:36:00.002-04:00

Not a joke.

The state of New Jersey, under a proposal by Governor Chris Christie, is planning to take over the administration of Atlantic City (the gaming district only). The state will take over municipal functions like policing and garbage disposal and also plans to expand non-gaming facilities to compete with the new Pennsylvania and Delaware options. Gaming regulations might get re-written to make the action a bit looser (Razz on the way, anyone?). Basically, they are planning a complete overhaul in order to bring in more families and gamblers.

Bravo, I say. Governments motivated by money can accomplish miracles, although they can also destroy industries. Who knows which way this is going to go? Time will tell...

Article on Backgammon Hustling

2010-07-20T17:37:00.001-04:00

Shocked, Shocked I am!

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/289817/backgammon_con_artists_hustlers_and.html?cat=19

Skipping out of town

2010-07-20T17:35:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, with the blessing of my far better half in order to give her room for her last push towards the NY/NJ bar exams in 8 days from hence, I made the trip down to Atlantic City with a larger than usual crowd of the usual misfits. Joining me in newly procured poker rate rooms at the Borgata were Viv, W, Chris (sporting a beautifully pregnant belly), Paulie and Abbie. Also meeting us down there to share in the festivities were DJ, and W’s friends Alan and Patty. I made the trip early on Friday, taking a 2:30p Academy bus from the Port Authority and plunging headlong in traffic that was unbearable. It took 3 hours to reach the city of the air conditioning and when we were in sight we were informed by the bus driver that we would be arriving at Bally’s instead of Caesars because Caesars wasn’t taking passengers. Why not you ask? It turns out that some sort of water main break had knocked out the air conditioning to Caesars, the Pier behind Caesars AND Trump Plaza. This unfortunate turn of events would ripple through the whole weekend by simultaneously filling up the Borgata hotel and depleting the city of gamblers. How? Well, Caesars and Trump Plaza promptly placed their hotel guests who were staying Friday and/or Saturday into new hotel rooms across the city. However, new guests who were arriving at those casinos Friday and Saturday nights as new guests cancelled their weekend reservations. It was the talk of the town this weekend.

The only person down there already when I arrived at 5:30p was W, who texted me that she was playing the 6:00p tourney at Borgata. After waiting a few minutes for a Jitney outside of Bally’s and seeing two full Jitney’s pass me by, I flagged down a cab and proceeded to the Borgata posthaste. After dropping my bag off at the bell captain’s desk, I caught W walking into the poker room and we both registered for the tourney together. I had no idea what I was registering for, I just knew that I wanted to play a tourney to get my feet wet for the weekend. As I found out when I was in line, it was a $150+$30 survivor tournament. The top 10% of the field get paid equally. 62 people ended up registering and the top 6 would get paid $1500 each. The 7th place finisher would get a whopping $21 (the remaining amount of the prize pool after the mandatory dealer tokes were taken out). On a side note, the next time you enter a tournament, do make sure you find out in advance how much of the prize pool gets reduced for dealer tokes. It’s usually anywhere from %3 to %5. And the poker rooms don’t advertise this very well to encourage people to tip on top of that. Personally, I usually give about %5 of my prize to the dealers, so if the room takes %3, I’ll tip 2% and call it even.

On with the story. We started the tourney and I started up. My second hand, I get A♣K♣. Blinds are 25/50 with a $10,000 starting stack and I raise it up to $200. I get a caller on the button, a Swede looking guy with a long scarf that reminded me of Dario Minieri, natch. The flop came down a very dangerous looking K♠Q♠J♥. Yes, I had top/top but I thought of all the holdings he could have that he would have called a pre-flop raise on the button with. KQ, KJ, QJ, AT, T9. Those are all reasonable flat calls on the button and I’m behind all of them. What’s worse, if he has any of those hands, I’m going to lose a good portion of my stack. Oh, and I’m out of position. And it’s the second hand of the tournament and I know *nothing* about this guy. So I check and he bets out $350. I call. Turn is an 8c. I check, he bets out $650 and I muck. I’ve already lost $550 and I don’t feel like hitting a card which is going to stack me, like a King. After the tournament, I caught up with him (he cashed) and asked him what he had. He said A♠J♠. I don’t blame him for betting and, frankly, he’s in a much better spot with that hand then I am. The Swede, incidentally, was a fantastic player. As I saw later, he doubled his stack early on by catching a stone cold bluff with bottom pair. Bottom pair! The other guy was just a loud young gun who was trying to run over the table and the Swede called him down with A4 after flopping a 4. True, the young gun had given himself away a little by checking the flop and firing on an innocuous turn and river, but still. If the Swede had lost, he would have basically knocked himself out of the tourney. You have to have a big set of balls to risk your tournament life with a pair of fours. Just saying.

As the table images start solidifying, I start to accumulate chips using the only method I can; bluffing. My hands are crap, so I start raising in position and c-betting on scare boards (all low cards, Ace high on the flop, etc…). I chip up very slowly and at the first break, I’m sitting at $12,500. Not a stack to speak of, but I’m ready to storm the next levels. Unfortunately, I still don’t get any great hands I can use to stack anybody. I have exactly one hand in the next hour that I can use to bust a small stack. It’s JJ vs. his 89s. But by the end of the next break, I’m only at about $20,000, just below the chip average. Blinds are 400/800 with a $75 ante and I never really got above 20 BB’s anywhere in the tournament. The structure is just too fast for me to pick good spots. I go back into bluffing mode which serves me well when I have 8♥9♥ in position. A Monster Dick (meaning he’s a huge dick, not that he possesses a big phallus, because I’m positive his phallus is like a grain of rice), whom we’ll call MD, limps in early position and I raise to $2700 on the button. It folds to MD who makes the call and the flop comes down 7♠7♣6♠. MD leads out for $4000 and I instantly shove my stack. He thinks for a few seconds but then folds and I get a little healthier. This is the largest my stack will be until much later.

I’m sitting to the right of a huge luckbox who reminds me a lot of Darvin Moon because he’s making enormous donkey calls and sucking out on people. I get KK in the cutoff and when it limps to me I pop it to $2500 (blinds still 400/800). Luckbox calls and one other player calls. Flop is A♦T♠8♥. It checks to me and I C-bet 4,000, reasoning that I have to represent AK here or I’ll be vulnerable to a big bet bluff by someone else representing it. Luckbox, who is the tournament chip leader with about 55,000 says, “All in”. It folds to me and, frustrated that an Ace came on the flop, muck face up hoping luckbox will do the same. He does, and flips up T8 off! I wouldn’t have been upset if he had turned over just about any Ace, but calling my PF raise with T8 off just makes me mad. I know this guy is gonna spew his chips to someone eventually; I just hope it’s me.

Later on in the level, with my stack down to a dangerous 10BB and the blinds at 1000/2000 with a $100 ante, I double up when I shove A♠6♠ in the cutoff. Darvin Moon Luckbox on my left quick calls with…A♦2♦. Ummm…wow. I flop a six and manage to eek my way into the final table. Unfortunately, I still can’t quite build a stack and I come in as the uber-shortie with something like 7 big blinds. Back when we were down to 13 players, I had started discussing a chop but there were too many players for anyone to seriously consider it. But now, at the final table, I thought I could get some traction. But I got a little friction from one person. Can you guess who it was? Yes, it was Monster Dick. MD was the second chip stack at the table, and he wasn’t hearing anything about a chop of any sort. Even when Darvin Luckbox decided to run his JJ into QQ and bust and then another short stack busted. Even when I tripled up to $45,000. All I had asked was for my money back, just $180. With 8 players left, if they had all reached in to give me $20 or $25, I would have been content. Instead, MD, upon hearing my proposition said, “Are you kidding me? You’re the short stack and I’ll call you with 7-3 off”. Like I said, a Monster Dick. Instead, with $45,000 and an actual shot at winning, but still the second shortest stack, I looked down at AQo. I was UTG+2 and the blinds were 4000/8000 with a $400 ante. So, with about a third of my stack size already in the pot, I open shoved and got a reshove from the guy to my immediate left (not MD) who isolated with KK. Bye Bye.

To add insult to injury, the instant I busted, the table started talking about a chop and ended up giving the 7th place finisher $650, with the rest taking home around $1350. I was livid and W had to walk me away from the table, consoling me as best she could. I had played 5 hours and was the true bubble of the tournament. It was one hand that brought me from the brink of starting off my weekend with a huge profit to starting it off instead with anger and resentment. Fortunately, I was self-aware enough to realize that I was in no mental condition to play cash, so I went up to the room instead and called it a night. It was 11:30p and I was tired, but my mind was so wound up from the awful turn of events that I only got a fitful 2 hours of sleep before I woke up and couldn’t fall asleep again until 6:30a! I watched the entirety of Capitalism: A Love Story on my iPhone (not Moore’s best effort by any stretch) and the distraction helped immensely. I woke in the morning, still seething about my bad luck but at least now able to deal with it.

Part II of the trip to come – Highlights will include, W and Abbie crushing a tourney and me experiencing some more down times before wiping the slate clean and then some.

Life can be time consuming

2010-07-16T10:39:00.002-04:00

I haven't made a post in forever. And the worst part is, I've been playing some poker and backgammon! A few weeks ago, I went to Mohegan Sun with Chris and hubby Matt, Paulie, Liezl, Viet and little Luna. And it was a blast. We even got Darko and his new fiance to come up and officially break their big news. So with all this activity, why no blog post?

Because I'm tired. Or maybe bored. Too bored to write a post. I just haven't been feeling a lot of motivation lately to keep up with my blogging activities. Most of it has to do with the stress I've been feeling at home. Ali is neck deep in studying for the New York and New Jersey bar exams which are coming up the last week of this month and things at home have been a little dicey. Ali's been working like a fiend putting her heart and soul into her studies, but it's impossible to ask someone to wake up early and go to bed late every day for two weeks while doing nothing but going over 3 years of law school notes in between! At a certain point, a person's brain cracks and when that happens watch out! I've been as understanding as I can, trying to provide a good environment in which she can thrive. That means that I'm doing all the cleaning up after meals, not making a sound after I come home from work and generally absorbing any vitriol thrown at me without fighting back. A few days ago, I snapped because I had reached my limit and I fought back. After a few minutes, I was apologizing cravenly and shut my mouth again, like I should be doing. Basically, it's a struggle for both of us (her more than me) and we'll be really happy once it's all done.

There are other thoughts taking up my mental energy usually reserved for blogging. I'm nervous about whether Ali can get a job in this awful market for new lawyers. And I'm consequently nervous (terrified really) about what that will mean for us. Her student loans are coming due in a few months and her parental support will stop and it'll all be on me. The combination of the increased rent responsibility once her parent's stop paying her share and the gargantuan student loans might force us to move to Brooklyn if we can't figure out a way to make it work. And I don't want to move to Brooklyn.

Oh, and there's work. That's kind of important too.

So poker and backgammon blogging hasn't been my first priority. But I have a few free minutes now and I'm taking a rare weekend trip to AC (to leave Ali alone for 48 hours of solid studying), so here I am.

Back to that Mohegan Sun trip. The long and short of it is that I broke even on the trip. Maybe up a few dollars or so. I was up about +$400 at one point in the evening when I got dealt KK in the BB. A new kid, who had just sat down with $200 a few hands earlier, raised to $12. Even though he hadn't been playing long, I could tell this kid was relatively new to the game. He was with a college buddy and their teenage looking girlfriends were sweating them. He looked a little dorky. I've seen the type and they haven't been in the live games long enough to know how to read table situations. 4 people cold called the $12 and when it got to me I re-raised to $100 straight. The new kid shoves for $200! I had little doubt I was beating him but if he had rockets then more power to him. There's already $350+ in the pot so calling the extra hundred is a no brainer for me. But before it gets to me, it folds to a good player who's been at the table for a few hours with me. He tanks! I can't figure out what he might have that he's thinking so long for. He debates internally for about 30 seconds and then says, "All in!". WTF?!?!?! He has $400 to my $680. Now I'm floored. It folds to me and I say out loud, "If I folded this, this would be the biggest lay down of my career." I try to calm down and work it out in my mind and I reason that if the re-shover had AA, he either wouldn't have smooth called the initial $12 raise, or he wouldn't have tanked so hard on the $200 shove. Granted, he could've been acting, but if he was he deserved the academy award for poker acting. He looked really pained about the $200 shove over my $100 re-raise. Normally, 4 bets to you in a 3 way pot indicates AA. But I figured that with the clues at my disposal, my friend with the $400 probably had KK. I made the call and Mr. $400 indeed flashed me two black Kings to my two red Kings. Mr. $200 re-shover showed QQ. Mr. $400 gave me a little fist bump as we both breathed a sigh of relief that nobody had shown Aces. But then the flop was dealt and there was a Queen in the door. A third heart came on the turn, giving me a chance to scoop, but the river bricked and a $650 pot shipped to Mr. I-Overplay-Queens and Mr. $400 and I chopped the side pot. I had only lost $200 on the pot but it was the start of a downslide which would see me lose my remaining $200 profit. The hours of work I had done being patient and building up my stack had gone to naught.

Hopefully, this weekend will show better results.

On the Backgammon front, I actually haven't been playing much except for two sessions with Mr. Hustle down at the 60 Wall Street atrium. My first session I was up 9 points in the first 5 games and I was feeling great. But then the dice turned, and hard. I gave up 29 points in the next hour for a crushing 20 point loss. In one game, I had given the cube back at 4 when I was slightly ahead. A few good rolls saw me up by about 25 pips and I was cruising to the win. Just before bear-off started, he rolls double 6's with four checkers in the outfield to clear them all into his home. Now he's caught up in pips but I'm still up by a checker and I'm on the roll. The next roll, he rolls double 6's again! now he's up two checkers and after my next roll, he re-cubes me and I have to drop. Aaargh! I would have gone from -14 points to negative -10 points instead of to -18 points. An 8 point swing which was important. I stopped at -20 points and left, head held in shame.

But the next day I revisited him and tried again. After a short 35 minute session, I left with a +11 point profit and cut into my losses from the previous day. This time, I was just playing well and getting Mr. Hustle frustrated. When he's frustrated, he takes bad cubes and that's the only way I can beat him. He's much better than me at checker play, so it's harder to beat him that way. But if I can get into a situation where he has to roll his way out with miracle numbers and I give him the cube, he will inevitably take it. It's probably to his advantage too, because he knows he has a much better skill level on his side and he can quickly capitalize on my many mistakes. Just like poker, in backgammon, you profit more on your opponent's mistakes than your own skillful plays.

Hopefully, I'll have a lot of good stories to tell after this weekend!

I've got Costner on the phone

2010-06-10T10:03:00.001-04:00

British Petroleum - Handling spills every day

Not something you see everyday, unfortunately

2010-06-01T01:28:00.001-04:00

Wall Street, the street in New York, not this wonderful blog, was invaded by a swarm of bees today. Let me repeat that:

A SWARM OF FUCKING BEES!

The apocalypse has arrived. Head for cover.

Justice is (slowly) served

2010-05-27T13:54:00.002-04:00

Remember that poker room shooting 2.5 years ago (what? 2.5 years?!?!) that basically put the nail in the underground poker scene? Well, right under our noses there was a trial and two men were convicted of murder. Two more men have already pleaded guilty and are serving time.

I haven't been following the details of the case, so the big surprise to me was that there was an inside man on the job. One of the bouncers/security guys was in on the robbery.

It's a dangerous business being underground. It would be nice if New York got their heads out of their asses and legalized poker, wouldn't it? I have a great place to put the new poker tables too. OTB parlors. OTB is losing money and they could use a new revenue stream. Make OTB the legal poker operators in the state and you've got a built in location that's already known for gambling. This would quiet the argument that new poker parlors would 'ruin the neighborhood' with unsavory types. Have you seen OTB parlors? Unsavory types already live there!

Yeah mom...swimming

2010-05-19T11:52:00.002-04:00

POOLJUMPERS trailer - watch more funny videos

Hawsome.

Quote to live by (Backgammon or Poker)

2010-05-10T18:25:00.002-04:00

"In the short run, there are no guarantees. You may become an excellent player and still lose a 100-point session to a clod, or get knocked out in the first round of six consecutive tournaments, or reach the final of the biggest tournament of your life and lose 0-25. Those are the breaks. If you can't handle that much uncertainty, tough. Go play chess." - Bill Robertie, winner of the Monte Carlo World Backgammon Championship.

Adage of the day

2010-04-30T10:43:00.003-04:00

"When you're telling a story to someone, make sure that both parties are speaking the same language" - ME

I dealt a charity poker tournament two nights ago for a school in Harlem called the Children's Storefront, an excellent institution which offers completely free education to needy kids. It's a wonderful institution which serves a great need in the community and I'm proud to be able to help out in any way I can.

It's also a lot of fun. The organizer of the charity tournament, with whom I've worked for 4 years now, goes all out (or all-in?) for this event and we had 260 players at the Hudson Terrace event space. A bunch of sports and poker celebrities were in attendance, including Justin Tuck, Jeff Nelson, Robert and Olga Varkonyi and Roy Winston. The tournament has an awful structure, as most charity tournaments do, but the money goes directly to the school so there isn't a lot of complaining (except from one incredible asshole who makes it deep every year and constantly bitches about how badly the tournament is run). Prizes are donated and can be substantial. First prize this year was a 7 night stay at a high end Aspen, CO hotel and 100,000 American Express points to use for airfare. 2nd place was a weekend in an East Hampton's mansion on the beach. And the other 7 prizes were equally worthy of inclusion.

As a poker player, I abhor charity tournaments. It's fine to play in one with the understanding that you're basically making a donation to the charity. But if you go into it thinking you have an edge on the clueless players in attendance (some of whom have never played before), then you're asking for disappointment. Charity tournaments, and this one was no exception, suffer from a multitude of major problems; strictly speaking from a poker perspective.

1. They're poorly organized - Though the tournament I dealt went off somewhat smoothly, compared to previous incarnations, there were a couple of organizational issues. First, the dealers were not informed ahead of time as to how the buy-ins worked. Each players, when they bought into the tournament, received a green plastic chip as proof of their buy-in. I was told, at various times, that chip was supposed to be surrendered so I could give them their starting stack OR the chip represented an extra $500 in tournament chips OR the chip was a full rebuy. In addition, I was presented with a lavender chip from a player and was informed that it was a rebuy chip and it was worth either $3,000, $3,500 or $4,000 in chips. Confusion was rampant. Also, rebuy rules were not explicitly defined. Someone told me that we wouldn't be allowing rebuys unless the player was under their starting stack. But what was the starting stack, since add-ons were allowed from the start. With nothing to go on, I allowed all players at my table to rebuy at any level, rationalizing that this was for charity after all and the add-ons were important to the school's functioning. But from a poker perspective, that sucks. Oh, the dealers also weren't given extra chips for players, so when they rebought in the middle of the round, they were often sitting with no chips in front of them! I had to make change from other players constantly.

2. The blind structure is a toss-up - At the start of the tournament, starting stacks averaged around $5,000 (given add-ons) and blinds were $100-$200. Blinds were supposed to go up every 20 minutes and rebuys were supposed to be allowed for the first hour. But by the end of the 3rd level, the tournament organizer decided that not enough people had rebought. So he extended the 3rd level for 30 minutes to allow for more re-buys! It was comical. I understand why he did it, but from a poker player's point of view, taking liberties with the tournament structure in the middle of the tournament is taboo. How could a poker player plan his strategy if he doesn't know what the blinds will be from one hand to another? Also, as happens every year, there are too many players left at the end of the night. With 30 minutes left until we had to vacate the premises, there were still 3 full tables left and the average stack had an M of around 6. That wouldn't do. Out of nowhere, blinds started being raised around every 3 minutes until the average M dropped to 2 and it was a complete luck-fest. This, not coincidentally, is when Mr. Asshole started bitching the loudest. He was sucked out on before the final table, thank the lord.

So charity tournaments aren't a good proposition from a profit point of view, even given the incredibly poor play and low skill level of the average attendant. Case in point, Roy Winston was at my table and decided to shove his stack on a flush draw. A woman called with a pair of 2's (!) and won the pot, eliminating the 2007 Borgata Main Event winner. I saw a lot of skilled players swing through my table and attempt complicated plays and bluffs against players and get called every time. Which brings me back to my maxim at the top of the post. If you're telling a story in a hand of poker, make sure the person you're telling it to speaks the same language you do!

I see this a lot in Atlantic City, Vegas and anywhere poker is being played. Person A, an obviously skilled participant is the best player at his/her table. However, A's chipstack is swinging wildly up and down. Usually the culprit is A's tendency to try and run over the table. What a lot of poker player's forget, however, is that bluffing only works when the person you're running the bluff against is good enough to understand the hand you're trying to represent! This is why beginners don't fold to bluffs very often; they're playing their own hand and haven't formed the first opinion on what you have. What person A is missing, and what all poker players need to work on, is to categorize your opponent's first. Learn who is good enough to fold a good hand and who's going to stay in if they have any piece of the board. Who's going to play back at you and who's going to pick a better spot. In short, who's speaking your language.

Sunday Backgammon tournament

2010-04-26T13:52:00.002-04:00

The 60 Wall backgammon organizer, an exceedingly nice gentleman, has introduced me to many folks in the backgammon community. One of those people is "Wheels" (not her real name), a very nice lady who runs a monthly backgammon tournament in a roving location around the city. Wheels is a high ranking member of the New York Backgammon community and has placed highly in many tournaments over the years. As a result, she has a long list of backgammon contacts she calls on to form these tournaments.

After having gotten her emails for a few months about the monthly tournaments, I finally found the time to go ahead and attend one. When I got there, Wheels was busy dividing the participants (about 20 people showed up) into different categories. She had a Beginner, Intermediate and Open category. Beginner was $10 entry fee, Intermediate was $50 and Open was $100. When I arrived, my backgammon board set in tow, she had already placed my name in the Intermediate category. I asked her how she knew where to put me and she replied, "it's my job to know". Fair enough. Unfortunately, only 3 people were on the Intermediate list and only 2 had shown up! So it was decided that me and my opponent, rather than playing a bracket of one game each, would play the best two out of three to 9 points a match.

I was doing very well in the first match and the score was 4-2, in my favor, when I took a very bad 4 cube which turned into a gammon and the match was over just like that. Just as the match was ending, Wheels came over and said that the 3rd participant had arrived! She said that we could now revert to the original format but I protested that it wasn't fair. If we went back to the one match format, I would be out of the tournament. If I had known that, I might not have taken the cube that ended my first match! So it was agreed that we would simply do a round robin format with each player playing the other and best 2 out of 3 winning the contest.

I won my second match handily and was tied with my opponent 1-1. After taking that bad cube that cost me the first match, my concentration went into laser focus and I was playing great. It didn't help that I was rolling well too. In the 3rd match, I was cruising into the win at 7-2 (mostly because my opponent took an awful double that turned into a gammon win for me) and I just had to hold on for the win. Then I did a dumb, awful and stupid rookie tournament mistake. I was ahead in my game, with the score of 7-2 (remember we were playing to 9 points each match) and I cubed her. Whoops. In my head, I though that she would just drop the cube and move on to the next game. I was well ahead in position. But she took the cube at 2 and then turned around on her next roll and cubed me back! From her point of view, it makes total sense. If she take the 2 cube and loses, the match is over, so she might as well make it 4 to give her better position if she happens to win. And if she gammons? Then she wins the game AND the match. Which is exactly what happened. Even though I had an advanced anchor and had two of her runners back behind a 5 prime, she happened to roll a magic 66 which not only got her runners out, but also hit one of my blots. She then picked up another blot I had out on her next roll after I failed to come back onto the board and just like that I had two on the bar, two on her inside board and she was quickly filling up a prime. Before I could get both my checkers back into play, she had gotten a few checkers off and she rolled doubles twice more, clearing even more checkers and never leaving me a single shot. She gammoned me without breaking a sweat and I felt foolish. It's a mistake I won't be making again anytime soon.

My opponent ended up winning her second match against the late-comer, but their match took so long that rather than play for 2nd place prize money, I simply chopped it with him and got half my buyin back. I did better than that actually, because while I was waiting for them to finish their match, I played a small cash game with one of the beginner players, winning 16 points at $1 a point. It was a very nice guy and his wife who I chatted up and befriended. Hopefully, I'll be able to see them again soon at one of the weekly backgammon meetups that get held in the city.

For those interested in backgammon tournaments, give me a shout and I'll put you in touch with Wheels (if you don't already know who I'm talking about). It was a really fun experience and I'm looking forward to next month!

Backgammon update and a mea culpa

2010-04-26T12:14:00.003-04:00

In my previous blog post, I outed a backgammon player (Pigeon from my previous posts), who had done a dick thing by running up a large debt and then skipping out. I exposed his name and a bit about his background because I thought by shaming him publicly, he might feel badly about himself and make good by paying up. Well, it turns out that I have had to redact my story at the request of the game organizer and I have to relay that I may not have had all the information available to make my charge.

The blogger's dilemma.

Here's what happened from my point of view. I have been playing Backgammon on and off at 60 Wall Street from some time now and I've gotten to know the players pretty well. They all know me as a small time player who will normally play $2 or $3 a point, and sometimes venture as high as $5, but never beyond that. The experienced players are always begging me to play them, knowing their skill level far outstrips mine, but I almost always decline and play Mr. Hustle, mostly because he is amenable to playing me for my $2 or $3 a point stakes. Also, Mr. Hustle is more than happy to instruct me on how to play properly and we have spent many hours debating the benefits of various moves on particular dice rolls and board situations. This is the cost of my education; my tuition, so to speak.

But a few months ago, Pigeon came to roost at 60 Wall and Mr. Hustle stopped playing me and started playing him. The stakes started at $5 a point and Pigeon was losing badly. 10, 15, 20, 30 points a session! Pigeon was very polite and would pay promptly when he lost, always coming back for more in a day or two. I knew Mr. Hustle depended on his Backgammon winnings for his livelihood, so when a particularly bad player like Pigeon was willing to play him for stakes that might result in a real payday, I didn't object when my game with him dried up. For his part, Pigeon refused to believe that he was as bad as people thought. He kept upping the stakes. First, from $5 to $10 a point. He continued to lose. Again, he would be down $200-$300 a session and would pay promptly when he lost. Then, he upped the stakes again. This time to $25 a point. When I witnessed this happening, I was astounded. Isn't it the definition of insanity when you do the same thing over and over and keep expecting a different result? But then again, perhaps Pigeon had this in mind after all. Maybe he was the biggest hustler out there and wanted to lose 100 points at low stakes so he could get it all back with interest at higher stakes.

Mr. Hustle, who gambles for a living, knew that $25 was above his bankroll, even if it seemed like easy money. He stuck to $10 a point and got another player to back the other $15 a point. During that first session, Pigeon broke even. Then $25 became the defacto betting amount for him. For each session, Mr. Hustle would put up his own money for $10 a point and then find someone to put up the other $15. He had no shortage of customers. Based on Pigeon's previous drubbings, it seemed like easy money. I did a few sessions with him myself, at $15 a point, and came away with a solid $250 profit after paying the house rake. But I noticed a disturbing trend around this time. Pigeon started getting frustrated with his losses and he would leave, almost without notice, and wave goodbye saying, "See you tomorrow". Mr. Hustle was understandably upset when Pigeon would leave without settling up, as is customary in any game played for money. But Pigeon would always return a day or two later, settle from the previous session, and continue on.

I warned Mr. Hustle to be wary of this behavior. I told him he should have Pigeon put 20 points worth of money in escrow with the game organizer, a trusted party, and then settle against the escrow amount after each session. But Mr. Hustle ignored my advice. Perhaps he thought that ruffling Pigeon's feathers would piss him off enough to drive him away. Or perhaps he just wasn't interested in confrontation. Either way, Pigeon kept playing his games and upping the stakes. Towards the end, he was playing for $50 a point, with more than one person taking a piece on the other side. After a particularly egregious loss, he left and never returned.

This is where the story gets murky. I came to 60 Wall one day to play and Mr. Hustle said Pigeon had left without paying and he wasn't coming back. He told me that Pigeon had called the game organizer, said he was in over his head and wasn't going to return, nor pay. It was a few days after that information that I made my blog post outing him.

But one day after I posted, the game organizer called me on my cell and asked me to take down the blog post with Pigeon's personal information. He said that Pigeon had always intended to pay and that the payment was supposed to come in a few weeks time. I asked if that had been the situation all along and he said it was. So I felt like an idiot. I had publicly outed this guy based on false information that I had. Don't get me wrong, he still did a dick thing by not paying his debts immediately, but I didn't know that he was negotiating with the participants after the fact. Mostly because I was told a different story from Mr. Hustle!

So I did a good thing for the community and tried to get a welsher to pay, but in reality I probably should have kept my nose out of it. After telling the story to Ali, she asked why I would even bother in the first place. It's not like Pigeon owed *me* money, after all. I replied that I felt that anybody who plays a cash game without the intention of paying, ends up degrading the gambling experience for everyone else. I was doing an altruistic thing by forcing this guy into the light and making the community I was a part of a little bit clearer and cleaner. But I wasn't totally in the right here, given the bad information I received. And for that, I apologize. I don't feel sorry for outing Pigeon, but for acting without the consent of the people whose main business this whole affair was. I should have gotten the permission of Mr. Hustle before I splashed his dealings out in public in this way.

Blogging is a hard thing to do.

The upside is that a day after my blog post and my redaction, Pigeon made good on his obligation. I saw him a day after that, playing Backgammon in Bryant Park (something I'd recommend for everyone on a nice afternoon). We exchanged knowing glances but no words as we each played different opponents. My previously amicable relationship with him is probably broken (not the first time I've burned a bridge to be sure) but I'm much much happier about it knowing that Mr. Hustle is getting his due.

Florida poker: All grown up!

2010-04-22T10:21:00.001-04:00

The Florida legislature has finally passed true no limit poker for the state! The article doesn't make it clear when the new compact goes into effect, but this will have a huge impact on the state of poker in Florida. I can't wait to see how the casino developers take advantage of this!

Catching up

2010-04-19T13:32:00.001-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and there’s lots to tell.

First thing’s first. I got a new job and I love it, so far. After I got laid off from Merrill Lynch in January of ’09, I had trouble finding anything for a while until the summer when I got a contracting position at A.I.G. to automate their financial reporting systems. Flash forward 8 months later and I had done the work I set out to do. Things had been slowing down at the office in terms of work and I knew it was only a matter of time until my manager brought me into his office to tell me there was nothing more for me to do and I would be asked to leave. Out of nowhere, I get a phone call from a man I used to work for at JPMorgan all the way back in 2002. He said that he had joined a new project at Thomson Reuters and the work they were doing was similar to the work I had done with him all those years ago. Being a natural fit, would I like to come aboard? My answer: sign me up! No sooner had I agreed to the interview process than my current AIG manager did indeed let me go from my contract. Perfect timing! I got the position at Thomson and have been there since April 1st, again as a contractor working on a long term project that will go for at least 18 months or more. Yeah, I don’t get health insurance, but my hourly rate is higher than it was at A.I.G. and I can use the difference to buy private insurance when my COBRA runs out in November.

Speaking of November, I’m getting married that month! Ali and I have set the date of November 6th, 2010 to tie the knot at The Marriott Resort in Aruba. We went down there for a little scouting trip from April 9th-12th and thought it was magnificent. I don’t want to give away too many details before the big day but suffice it to say, the beach wedding was a great idea for us. We got to spy on a wedding going on down there and the atmosphere itself, with the ocean gently lapping at the shore 15 feet from the bride and groom, with the sun setting behind them throwing hues of pink and purple on the shoreline, was absolute bliss. We met with the wedding coordinator and managed to get a lot of planning done in the short time we had available to us.

Also, I played poker. I had a very successful poker trip to AC with Christine the weekend before I started my new gig and was able to rack up an impressive +$1,000 weekend playing $1-$2 NLHE. I didn’t have a single huge session, more like a bunch of small wins here and there that added up. +$150, +$290, +$210, etc… Most of the time my wins were of the basic flop and trap variety, but the donkeys were paying me off something fierce. I’ve also added value betting to my repertoire. Previously in my career, when I have a marginal hand on the river but my opponent is out of position and playing passively, I’d check the river in position for fear of being trapped. But I’ve been leading out for 1/3 of the pot lately and more often than not, I will be ahead by a kicker or my small two pair will best my opponent’s TP/TK. The value bet only has to work 2/3 times to be profitable, so I’ll do it in position when I feel my opponent has been playing weak and looking to keep the pot small by check/calling. The strategy pumped up my profits pretty nicely, turning $50 profits on pots into $70-$80 profits.

A few days after that weekend, I went down with Darko for a two day mid-week trip and left with around $100 profit for the two days. My profit didn’t tell the whole story though. I made around $800 playing $1-$2 NLHE and gave back most of it playing $10-$20 OE. The mixed game at the Borgata continues to be my Achilles heel. I have trouble resisting it, even though I know it’s a bad value. First off, I’m a losing player at the game. Not badly (I’m down around $1,000 on the game lifetime over a few dozen session), but enough to know I’m not beating the game. The two main problems are that the players all know each other, leading to a lot of soft play which keeps new money from coming onto the table, and the fact that the players are locals and quite good at the game. There aren’t enough soft spots to feed off of, which should be my clue to give it up and go for something profitable ($1/$2 NLHE!).

So a note to anyone traveling with me: Keep me off the mixed games!!!!

{Story about Backgammon player redacted at the request of the game organizer}

Run horsie, run

2010-03-19T12:22:00.001-04:00

It's been a few months now of watching Mr. Hustle take Pigeon for dozens and dozens of points at the 60 Wall Backgammon games. As I wrote in the past, Pigeon has a habit of trying to catch up to his losses by doubling down his bet and jumping from $10 to $25 a point. Mr. Hustle, though, in the spirit of excellent bankroll management, refuses to play for more than $10. So when Pigeon wanted to jump to $25 two weeks ago, another player, an old Yugoslavian guy, posted the other $15. That session ended in 7 points against Pigeon.

Staking arrangements are common in poker but I've never seen it done in Backgammon. I suspect there's plenty of it going on but I don't see it too often because Backgammon has a 'team play' concept called Chouettes. A Chouette is basically a way for multiple people to play one person. The person playing the others rotates until everyone ends up playing everyone else. Each person gets their own cube and is allowed to challenge the player 'in the box' (the one playing the others) anytime they want. Conversely, the person in the box can cube each person individually; either 'the captain' (the one playing for the team) or any of the other participants. This allows for interesting bankroll management situations in which the player in the box will drop some cubes and take others in the same position just to hedge themselves.

Because of the existence of Chouettes, the poker concept of stakehorsing doesn't happen as often. But here was a situation where the old Yugoslavian guy was essentially a silent partner in the one on one game. He was playing and wasn't giving advice, he was simply take $15 of action on each $25 point. Given how badly Pigeon has been losing, it was a pretty good bet and it worked out for him to the tune of $105. Well, two days ago, Pigeon lost 43 points to Mr. Hustle in a single session and I figured he'd be looking to get even again. The whole thing is funny because he's NEVER gotten even, but that didn't concern me. I know a good business opportunity when I see it. All I needed was the courage to pull the trigger.

I pulled Big Poppa (the guy who runs the games) aside and told him that if Pigeon was looking for someone to cover the $15 overlay, I was the guy. I trust Big Poppa implicitly and knew that he'd be able to handle the arrangement even if I wasn't there at the time the game started. Sure enough, I got a text message from Big Poppa at 11:20a that read, "you're on".

It was happening and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The feeling in the pit of my stomach was EXACTLY like how I feel when I put a position down in the stock market. I didn't have any control but my money was at risk nevertheless. 45 minutes later I got an update text from Big Poppa, "You're at minus 4".

No big deal. Minus 4 just meant that they were pushing and pulling and they were near even. But an hour later, I got another text that said, "you're at minus 12". 12 points is beyond the realm of standard deviation. It meant that Mr. Hustle was being beaten and my money was being lost! I went down to the 60 Wall atrium for lunch and observed the game. By the time I got down there, Mr. Hustle was at minus 17! I couldn't believe my crap luck. The one time I put my money down on a sure thing, I lose big. That sounded about right for me. When I left to go back to work, the session was minus 21 for me and I was getting pretty nervous. What if Mr. Hustle lost his cool and went on a bender. It happens in poker all the time and we've all seen it. You get steamed from taking bad beats and you end up losing your judgement along with more of your bankroll than you'd wanted.

So I pulled Big Poppa aside and told him to monitor the game and text me if the count went to minus 30. At that point I would come down again and make a game time decision to pull out if I thought my horse was losing it. 45 minutes back at work I got a text, "you're at minus 4". It was the beginning of a turnaround. Another 30 minutes later, "you're at plus 6".

At this time, it was near the end of the day so I knocked off work and watched the game until it ended at 7pm. Mr. Hustle was solidly in the black and Pigeon was getting rattled, taking really bad cubes and getting gammoned twice in a row. By the time the game was over, the Pigeon had lost 20 points and I had a nice $300 win booked to start my weekend trip to Atlantic City.

Backing bets, like the stock market, take courage in the face of losses. But if you've made a good deal and you believe in your bet, you need to ride out the roller coaster. It's hard to do, but it's where the good investors make their money. Lesson Learned.

More on how Backgammon is like Poker

2010-03-17T14:07:00.002-04:00

Tim Holland, a former Backgammon champion, died yesterday at the age of 79. Read his obituary in the Times. It's eerie how much he sounds like a poker champion, talking about how he lost money learning the game but got it back from the "sharks" when he finally could play.

For such a simple game, it's endlessly fascinating to my mind. I've been fortunate enough in the past few months to get into the Backgammon scene which is played every weekday at 60 Wall Street (Liberty Park during the warmer months). The guys there have taught me so much about the game that my skill level is now leaps and bounds above where it was when I started playing them for money a few months ago. Granted, I'm still a net loser by far but since I'm only playing them for $2 or $3 a point, the losses are easily handled. More than the right price to pay for such an education. Every so often I can make a good score too, like today when I won 12 points of $3 each in a quick session with another amateur player. I'm slowly improving.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game that I'm observing is the art of the hustle. I'm definitely a target for these guys but I know I'm not being hustled because I adamantly won't play for high stakes. The perfect "pigeon" is one who has a much greater idea of their skill than the reality and won't mind putting up real money. Even more than poker, Backgammon encourages bad players to think they're good because one lucky roll in a game can turn it around very quickly. And since there are only 36 dice rolls in Backgammon, vs. 52 cards in Poker, the lucky dice rolls happen more often.

There's a player who's new to the mix at 60 Wall Street, we'll call him Pigeon, who perfectly epitomizes this role. He showed up a few months ago playing for $5/point, which is relatively low stakes (roughly equivalent to playing $4/$8 limit poker). Not high enough to do real damage, but high enough that a really bad session could mean a loss of a hundo. Immediately, he latched onto my regular playing partner, we'll call him Mr. Hustle and began losing to the tune of 10-20 points a session. The sessions would last for hours and would occasionally end with Pigeon winning 5 or 6 points, but that was a rare event. In most cases, Mr. Hustle was on the winning end of things. Then, one day, I walked in to watch the match (which occurs most days starting around noontime) and looked at the score sheet. On top of the sheet, where the scorekeeper writes the stakes, there was written "$10".

I was floored.

Who in their right mind, knowing that they are a consistently losing player, would double the stakes? If you were getting your killed at $4/$8 over the course of a few weeks, would you suddenly move to $10/$20? I guess it's one thing to occasionally take a shot at higher limits, but only if you're a winning player, right? I asked Mr. Hustle about it and he just shrugged.

"I guess he thinks he can win. I warned him he's gonna get hurt sooner or later".

And there's my first lesson in the art of the hustle: always make sure your mark doesn't feel he's being forced into anything. By telling him he's probably going to lose, you play into his ego. Once his ego is bruised, his emotions take over and he starts chasing his losses.

Mr. Hustle won the first 6 sessions for a total of approximately 50 points net. That's when Pigeon lost his mind. The next time I walked in, the stakes were $25! This is like a $4/$8 player (a losing one), jumping up to $20/$40! This is where the real damage can occur! Mr. Hustle, though, was cool as a cucumber. Rather than risk his bankroll with an unlucky session, he stayed at the $10 level and let another player bank him for the remaining $15/point. Pigeon lost 7 points in that 4 hour session when the banking player had to leave. They dropped back down to 10 and Pigeon lost an additional 3 points before calling it a night. He was down 30 points at one point (!), but managed to make the miraculous comeback that convinces losing players they could be winners, if only they could keep rolling like that! Winning players know differently. Just as in poker, each player will get the same distribution of luck over the long haul. It's making the right plays the rest of the time that provides the difference. A few days later, with no backers in sight, Pigeon lost a whopping 43 points in one session at $10/point! Imagine losing 4 buyins in limit poker in one session and you'll get the idea of how bad that is.

In true Pigeon fashion, they're playing today and Pigeon has won 7 points back. He'll be back again and again and again until he's lost enough where it hurts him to come back. Astonishing.

In all of this Mr. Hustle has smiled, offered advice (not always correctly) and been very friendly. Everytime Pigeon loses, Mr. Hustle tells him how if only this roll had been different or that roll had been different, Pigeon would have won. He bolsters Pigeon's spirits, all the way happily collecting his winnings.

Hustling for money isn't something I ever plan on doing, but boy is it fascinating to watch human nature at it's most basic. And just like poker, the best advice is always to be dispassionate and analyze your position as coldly and in the most calculated fashion possible. Check your ego at the door.

Skeptical about James Lipton

2010-03-17T01:03:00.003-04:00

There's a meme going around that James Lipton, the host of The Actor's Studio, wrote the theme song to The Thundercats. It has the air of plausibility to it as Lipton has had a long and very varied career. In addition to his enormously popular TV interview show, Lipton has:

A. Written a Broadway Musical
B. Produced Carter's presidential inauguration for TV
C. Voiced a central character on radio's "Lone Ranger"
D. Wrote for and acted on Soap Operas
AND
E. Is a published novelist

So is it hard to think that somewhere in his career he might have written the theme song for one of the most popular and beloved cartoons of the '80's?

I did some research on the internet on IMDB.com (the all knowing internet) and Lipton is indeed listed as a theme composer. I went to his Wikipedia page and he's also credited there. But looking closer I noticed something odd; namely that the Wikipedia page merely links to the IMDB page as proof. I did a general search on Google for "James Lipton + Thundercats" and other than lots of of links to the original meme (and other pages repeating it), I could find no other proof of James Lipton having written the Thundercats theme.

I don't know why I was suspicious to begin with, but it didn't seem...right somehow. My brain is just wired to be suspicious like this. Things that sound too good to be true, or too neat, just don't usually work out like that.

So along with James Lipton as the theme composer on Wikipedia, another name, Bernard Hoffer, was listed. My theory was starting to form that someone modified the IMDB.com page for James Lipton to give him composer credit, for the hell of it I assume, and it took on a life of it's own. I did more research on Hoffer and discovered that not only is he credited as the theme composer on multiple websites and fan pages, he's also the theme composer for Silverhawks, which was practically the same cartoon made by the same production company that came out the year after Thundercats.

So what's more likely, Bernard Hoffer who composed multiple times for Rankin and Bass (the production company) or James Lipton (who you'd think we would have heard of this years ago)?

Occam's Razor, dude. I'm going with Hoffer. All this underscores to me is that information can be fluid and getting the whole picture requires common sense. I take a lot of what I hear with a grain of salt to begin with, so this doesn't change my life all that much. Hopefully, though, this post may put a stop to this stupid ass rumor.

Unless, that is, I'm totally wrong and James Lipton actually DID write the theme to The Thundercats. Which would be AWESOME!

P.S. I'm too lazy to link to everything right now but I might later.

Min cash - Mini-FTops Event #1

2010-03-11T01:36:00.003-05:00

After winning a $0.75 sattelite to get into the first Mini-FTops Event of the season, I min-cashed in 1378th place out of 18,875 runners! Wow, that's a lot of runners. I made $41.53 cents, which isn't bad considering it was practically a free roll.

After being card dead most of the tourney, and never being above the chip average even once, I was looking good to bubble when I got JJ 2x in a row and doubled up on each one of them. First it was JJ > TT and then it was JJ > AK suited. That let me accumulate enough chips to coast into the money, although there was a scare when I had AA with 100 people to go to the bubble. There was a raise PF and I opted to shove my stack vs. playing cute. He folded and I cruised into the money. I tread water for a while, watching people bust out at a furious pace and then managed to triple up when, with 8 BB's left, I called a 4 BB all in with 9♣T♣. When the BB went all in over the top, I was priced in. To my horror, the SB had 4♥4♦ and the BB had A♣K♣! My flush draw was dead. With great luck, I managed to flop a Ten on a board of T♥8♥6♥, hit a T♠ on the turn and rivered the 8♠ for the win!

I was now at the average chip stack and was hoping to ride a wave to make something happen. People at the table were shoving like crazy and I was waiting for my chance. It took longer than I wanted, but I finally got QQ and got a big stack to move all in on me when I only raised 4x the BB with it. He shoved, I called and he showed 88. The flop was 467, the turn was a J and the river was the dreaded 8 (though a 5 would have been just as bad). Cest La Vie.

I'm happy with my performance and cashing is better than losing.

Minimalist Heaven

2010-03-08T11:03:00.004-05:00

My friend Jay has created a slice of Nirvana. A perfect blend of minimalism and post-modern angst.

I present: Pigeon eating a bagel

Why you should only play poker in a casino

2010-03-06T19:13:00.003-05:00

If only for big money tournaments....

SECURITY! One of the most under-appreciated features of casinos is their elaborate and highly effective security systems. You don't see those armies of security guards but they see you, and they're well paid to take care of any funny business. Evidently, the European Poker Tour ignored this fact when hosting a recent 1 million Euro first prize tournament and the tourney was ROBBED, mid-game. The tournament was being held at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Berlin.

Yikes. I'd love to know what the fallout is going to be. I assume the tournament is canceled and all participants (even those knocked out) will get their buy-in back?

UPDATE: Video of the actual robbery has been released! Holy moly.

FTops Warrior

2010-03-06T09:38:00.002-05:00

On a lark, just to spend a few minutes playing this morning, I entered a cheapie Mini-FTOPS satellite to the Mini-FTOPS event #1....and took it down.

See you guys on the felt on Wed., Mar. 10th!

Great idea

2010-02-26T16:34:00.003-05:00

I really appreciate people who are clever, and this is a very clever idea.

Isn't that awesome? I found it from a blog link to this german website. I throw away water bottles every day. If I could just buy these hanger attachments in the USA, I'd be able to screw them in and make excellent hangers! Do you know of any other bits of cleverness like this?

Membership Rewards, paying off (I hope)

2010-02-26T11:20:00.002-05:00

For over 10 years now, I've been a member of the American Express Membership Rewards program. Every dollar I spend gets me a point in the program, which can be used for goods and services at an approximately 1% refund rate. This is pretty standard for the industry. The service costs $40/year, which isn't standard (most of the programs are free), but I pay the fee happily because of what Membership Rewards gives me in return. Flexibility.

Like most people, I use my rewards points for miles on airlines, getting free tickets and such. Unlike most rewards programs, the AMEX Membership Rewards isn't linked to a specific airline. Instead, you have the option of transfering your point to about 20 different airlines, including Delta, Continental, USAir, JetBlue and Virgin. This flexibility has enabled me to scout out the best times for a particular route and get on the plane in the cheapest way possible. In addition, sometimes instead of buying a ticket outright with my miles, I'll fill in the number of miles I need using that airlines rewards program, which I'm already a member of. So if I need 20 more points on JetBlue to get a free ticket, I'll backfill using my Amex points.

As a result of my lust of points, I use Amex for everything possible. When I was married ten years ago, I charged nearly the whole thing on Amex, netting me an instant 40,000+ points. In the ensuing years, even though I've used the miles relatively frequently, I've still managed to accumulate an account balance of 173,000 points on my card.

And now it's at zero. I pulled the trigger today on a sweet deal that Delta was having. Namely, transfer points to Delta's frequent flyer program by February 28, 2010, and Delta will give you up to a 40% bonus on the miles transferred. 150,000+ miles transferred triggers the 40% bonus, so I just dumped all of my miles that I've been saving for 10+ years into Delta. I will come out on the other side with 242,200 miles!

For many years now, I've been imagining what I could do with a whole lot of miles, and since I've been planning my wedding, it's become clear. Ali and I want to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon. We'll be in Aruba for the wedding. That's a long flight. A very long and uncomfortable flight. Which would be made SO much nicer if we flew business/first class the whole way! So there it is. I'm bumping us up!

Overdoing it in AC

2010-02-26T10:57:00.001-05:00

I spent this past weekend in AC for the first time in quite a few months. I've been insanely busy on weekends with family events following my mother's passing and between that and wedding planning, I haven't really had time for gambling jaunts. Fortunately, Ali went dress shopping with her mother and sister in Connecticut and I most certainly wasn't invited!

I booked a room at The Chelsea hotel, which is a new hotel that opened up a few months ago next to the Trop, right on the boardwalk. I was going to take a bus down, but Christine and a few of her friends were driving down so I hitched a ride with them. They were gracious enough to drop me off on the strip before headed to their own fabulous black-card obtained rooms at the Borgata {Sigh}. We had left New York a little late and made a few stops along the way, so by the time I got to the hotel, it was nearly 11P. I checked in and was told that since they were out of the room type I had booked, I'd be upgraded for no extra charge to the Oceanview room! Score. My throat wasn't feeling great either. Ali and I went skiing the weekend before and she had gotten a cold from being out on the slopes for so long. All week I tried to stay away from her, knowing that a cold would probably kill my AC trip, but I guess sleeping in the same bed as a sick person isn't the best way to avoid sickness!

So with a late night arrival at the hotel, and a cold coming on, I did the only thing I could do: I played poker!

Duh.

In fairness, I knew that playing No Limit would be a disaster with the way I felt. So I walked over to the Trop with the intention of playing a low limit game, just to get the feel of cards in my fingers for a few hours. Unfortunately, the Trop is now almost exclusively a No Limit room, with only a few 2-4 LHE games running. I sat down for a hundo and messed around for a bit. Low limit is a bingo game, but there *is* a strategy to it. In my opinion, suited connectors and position (for the purposes of choosing starting hands) are more important than premium card holdings. You have to assume in a game like that that you're going to be up against 7-8 random hands at any flop. So I played hands I knew would stand up if they won. High suited cards, suited connectors and premium starting hands. Of course, the rake is nearly impossible to beat in that game, and I was perfectly content to leave when, two hours later, I was exactly even with my starting stack.

During the limit game, there was a guy in the center seat who looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him. He looked a lot like actor Christopher Meloni and I thought I knew him from somewhere but couldn't tell. During the game, the table was chatting up where they'd played poker and the familiar guy mentioned he had played in underground and home games in Manhattan before. I started to follow up with that and before I could get a word out he said, "Are you Wall Street Poker?". I was floored. Turns out, the guy is Andrew B. who had played in my home game a few times years ago but hadn't been back after we raised the stakes above his comfort level. The name struck a bell with me because I had kept him on my Evite list even though he never came again. We had a good time catching up and it was nice to be remembered. It made me feel a bit like a celebrity!

I went to sleep in my nice and soft King bed overlooking the ocean.

The next day, I got up at around 10:30a and started my morning routine. Chris had texted me to say that they were going to eat breakfast at around noon at the Borgata. It didn't seem like I would have a problem getting there until I went to go take a shower and no hot water came out. The shower was strange. It was a very nice stall shower but the plate behind the shower faucet had HOT and COLD written on it, but the faucet was circular with no arrow indicator! In short, you didn't know how you had to turn it to get hot water; does halfway mean lukewarm, or is that hot and if I go too far I'll go back into cold territory. I ended up trying every combination and still no hot water! I decided that my late shower was coming at a time when all the guests had used up the hot water in the hotel. I called maintenance (who never came) and napped for another hour before trying again. This time, the water was lukewarm which was unsatisfying but good enough for a quick shower. It was 12:30p by the time I got out of the shower and my breakfast plans were ruined. I texted Chris about my rotten luck and she told me to "W" the room. This goes back to the time that W, Darko and I all shared a room at the Trop and we got it for free because W used her awesome powers of bargaining to get the charges nullified because the water in the shower was merely hot and not SUPER hot (true story). However, I don't possess those powers and I didn't ask for anything. The hotel will simply lose my future business for their lack of hot water. #JewPowersActivate #FormUpAHaggler

I ended up having breakfast at Country Kitchen on the boardwalk next to the Trop, which I had wanted to try for years anyway. It was excellent, actually. Just like a Denny's, which totally hit the spot. I cabbed it over to the Borgata and got into a 1-2 NLHE game in short order. The game I was in was fairly aggressive and I couldn't find any traction at all, which sucked big time. The hands I did mix it up in didn't work out for me. For the entire day, I received exactly 5 premium hands. AA twice, JJ, AKs and AQs. The Aces were the only hand that won and they didn't win big pots. I won only with the bullets; pre-flop once and then on the turn after I checked top set and everyone folded on my turn bet. Weak. That's not to say I didn't win a few big pots. I dragged a three way all in pot after my set of Ten's held up against an OESD and a flush draw (I boated up on the river to win). I also got very lucky in another three way pot when I flopped bottom straight with 6♣8♥ on a three flush board. The board was 7♥9♥T♥. One villian bet $30 on the flop and a second guy called. I called as well. Turn was 3♠. Villian 1 bets $55, Villian 2 goes all in for $100 more and I also shove for another $120. I should have folded at this point, even with my open ended straight flush draw, because the action was telling me someone had a made flush. But I was so frustrated from having lost so many pots at this point that I did a dumb thing and shoved for $125 total. Villian 1 called and we went three way to the river. The river was the 2♥. With 4 hearts out I figured I was dead, but Villian 1 showed TT for top set and Villain 2 showed 97 for two pair. No one had a heart but me! Weeeee.

As big as these pots were, though, they were only getting me back to even. I lost steadily on the only other playable cards I had going, mostly suited and unsuited connectors and gappers. Ever have one of those sessions where you play for 12 hours and it just seems like the board is always opposite from what you have? You know, you have 8♦9♦ and the board is AKQ. Or you have Q♥J♠ and the board is 256 rainbow with a bet and a call. There just wasn't much I could do. I played until about 6p, ending down about $100 or so. I went down to Fatburger for dinner with the crew and had a nice meal with great company. Afterwards, we played an hour of Pai-Gow which was a good session for me, netting me $110. I was now even again on the trip, but down $100 in poker winnings.

After dinner and Pai-gow, the girls went to nap and get ready for their night out clubbing. I hit the poker tables again, this time getting what I thought was a better table of less aggressive donks. Again, my hands weren't connecting. If I flopped a flush I didn't get paid and I ran into two coolers which felted my first buyin. The coolers were both flopped two pairs on uncoordinated boards against flopped sets. I got walloped. But I fought back and doubled my second buyin through patient play before finally dropping back to -$45 on the session. Considering the session ended at 7am (!), I'd say that wasn't too bad. If there was anything I could take away from playing that long and losing it was that I didn't get steamed and chase crap. I was proud of myself for that. A less patient person would have been down 3 or 4 buyins with the cards I was getting, but I persevered and played my game and lost the minimum wherever I could.

After breaking myself away from the table, I cabbed it back to the Chelsea and got a few hours of sleep. I woke up at 11a, showered and made it back to the Borgata for a quick lunch and more poker. This time, I felt the lure of the $10-$20 two way game (OE). Sitting down with $300, I oscillated up or down $100 for a few hours until 5pm when Chris texted me to tell me that they were leaving their room to pick up the car and go home. This would be my last hand. I was *EXACTLY* even for the session at this point, with $300 in front of me and I was dealt my last hand of Omaha Hi-Lo. I prayed it wasn't a playable hand so I wouldn't be forced to lose a big pot and then do the walk of shame and feel crappy on my trip home. But it was imminently playable. A♣3♣4♠7♥. Damn. I call for $15 in MP and it limps around with a few players. The flop is pretty nice, 2♣6♠8♥. I flopped the unbreakable low, and a bottom straight draw. This is almost a bettable hand here, but I'd rather have a high hand to go with it because I learned long ago not to bet only the low because getting quartered sucks! A guy bets out with what I assume is only the low (because a lot of $10-$20 players are idiots) and I call. A woman in the SB, who I've played with before and whom I know is a straight up moron, also calls. The turn is the J♣. Now I have scooping possibilities, but again I don't want to pump the pot without a made high because it's my last hand and I'm only looking at 7 clubs here that make me comfortable since two clubs will pair the board and my high might not be good. The moron woman bets out on the J♣ and I can't see how her hand improved with that card, unless she had JJ underneath. The other guy raises! Oh jeez, now it's $40 to me and I might be looking at a straight up quartering of the low, which would leave me with a net loss on the hand. If the woman raises again and he caps, I'm looking at a decent sized loss. Fortunately, moron woman calls and the river is a blank which doesn't make me a flush or a straight. The woman checks, the guy bets and me and moron woman call. The woman has A3XX, nothing but a low and no draws to a high (AARGH!!!). The guy has A3QQ. I turn my hand over and get *sixthed*. I lost about $35 in the hand and gave the moronic woman some choice words about her play before racking up and grumbling all the way to the cage.

All in all, I lost about $80 at the tables, but lost $170 playing poker. It wasn't a particularly good weekend for me, even though I had as much fun as possible given that I was sick most of the time. Chris and her friends were a lot of fun to be with and the ride back was traffic free, which is a nice bonus. My next trip is March 19-21, and I'm staying at the Showboat. Anyone want to come down while I rip this shit up?

Think you're badass?

2010-02-16T13:39:00.005-05:00

Trust me, you're an amateur.

The Dubai government released this incredible surveillance footage of an 11 member hit team tracking a top Hamas official just before they whacked him in his hotel room. This all went down a few weeks ago. The hit team is likely Israeli, though the members of the team are made up of nationals from many different countries, including France, England and Ireland. They were completely professional and left absolutely no physical trace of their existence that could be used to track their identities. This surveillance footage, cobbled together from many different sources, is the only thing they left behind.

That and the big dead body of a longtime terrorist.

This ain't no movie, this is the real deal. Normally, I would feel a little bit of remorse for what is essentially a snuff film, but this guy they killed was a monster. Nobody, Israel or otherwise, puts this much time, effort and precision into killing somebody unless they've done some really awful shit.

Final table cash

2010-02-16T01:54:00.002-05:00

6th of 281

I was a little preoccupied with this tourney, as I usually am playing online. Ali was a little sick from our weekend skiing (too much time outside in the cold?) and she was making me watch the Olympics. I really loved the Snowboard Cross, but it distracted me. Once the coverage went back to Pairs figure skating, I snapped back to attention. :-)

I almost bubbled this tournament but managed to squeak into the money when, with 3 BB's left and 2 out of the money, I limped in the BB with T8o and flopped top pair. I shoved and got called by a guy with K8. I spiked a Ten on the turn and that propelled me into the money. I was happy about that, but then I doubled through with KK and then doubled through again with AT by the tourney chipleader who went all in with A9 on a Ten high flop! All of a sudden, i had a real chance of winning. I made it to the final table but lost momentum when two hands which I should have won got split instead by lucky rivers. The blinds and antes ate me up until I was forced to go all in with 10BB's left with AKo and was called by Ad6d. He flopped a 6 and that was all that she wrote.

Still, I've been running really far into these cheap MTT's. I'm not going to retire off of them, but it's good to know that I can still keep my skillz sharp.

Atlantic City this coming weekend. I'm super excited for it. Ali will be in Connecticut with her family, shopping for wedding dresses. Bonus for me, since it will be the first time in FOREVER that I'll be able to crack out at the poker tables until whatever time I want. The weekend can't come fast enough.

All good things must end

2010-02-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not talking about my poker career, though that's probably on advanced life support at the moment. No, I'm talking about musical acts, in particular my favorite one, The Who.

Last night's performance at the Super Bowl was just flat out embarrassing. The performance wasn't bad as taken by itself. It was just that they are so clearly a pale version of their former greatness that seeing them whore themselves out with a medley was cringe inducing. Medleys are the musical equivalent of a tv show's highlights episode where, instead of producing another show, they cobble together clips from past shows as if to say, "look how great we can be". Yes, you *can* be great, but you're not now. If you were, you wouldn't be doing a clip show, or a medley. Roger Daltrey can't hit the notes or the primal screams that made his voice legendary. Pete Townshend, while still a great guitarist, looks like an old man trying to regain his former youth when his shirt comes undone and his 64 year old belly comes flying out during his windmill strumming. And the other two are dead; Keith Moon at age 32 from a prescription drug overdose and John Entwhistle at 57 from a non-prescription drug overdose. Hey, I want to make a buck just like the next guy, but at least have the artistic integrity to know when enough is enough. Prince, who's been a major recording artist since right around the time Keith Moon kicked it, absolutely KILLED at his Superbowl half time show. The Who only killed their image. Even The Rolling Stones have taken it easy, and they still have the chops to perform at a high level, I think. I'll never know because I don't think Mick Jagger would sully his reputation by playing at a gig where he wasn't giving 110% or more.

Understand that The Who is my absolute favorite band of all time. I've seen The Who in 3 live concerts in my lifetime and the first two shows were amazing. The first was The Who performing at Giants Stadium in 1990. They did the entire 'Tommy' album from start to finish and then took a 15 minute break. I thought the concert was over, but then they came back and did a 2 1/2 hour Greatest Hits set. The power, precision and musicianship on display were mind-blowing. There did a cover of "I'm a Man" by Bo Diddley in which Daltrey got the entire audience to do a primal scream in unison. It was incredible and the live version made it onto the '30 Years of Maximum R&B' box set.

The next time I saw them was in the mid '90's when they toured behind 'Quadrophenia'. I saw it in Madison Square Garden and when the band started up '5:15', the lights flashed to fill up the audience and 40,000 people screamed out the song. It was another very powerful performance and they rocked harder than any metal band I'd ever seen.

The 3rd time I saw them was a few years ago to promote their first studio album in 15 or so years, 'Endless Wire'. What a difference a decade made! Daltrey came out and performed the entire set with a cup of tea in his hand! No joke. The songs just weren't as powerful as the old ones, which is ok because old men shouldn't be angry and rock hard. They can't write that stuff (unless they're Neil Young). The songs were softer and more wistful and I was OK with that. But when the inevitable old songs came around on the set list, Daltrey wouldn't put that damn cup of tea down and he looked exactly like what he sounded like; a grandfather singing 40 year old songs that he can't quite sing anymore. Townshends old man jowls were on prominent display and I felt sad for them a little bit. The only thing making the concert memorable was the fact that I saw it in a private box in MSG, with $150 bottles of wine and gourmet steak for dinner.

As far as the big 60's bands are concerned, there has always, in my mind, been the big 4. Most people will list 3, but I will include one more because it's my mind, not the popular thought. My four "big" bands of the 60's are: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Beach Boys. I bet you thought I was going to say The Doors, right? I fucking hate The Doors. All 4 of those bands solidify something in the emergence of popular rock music. The Beatles were the songwriters, by far the best at it and possibly the best writers of popular music in the history of music. The Rolling Stones were the bad boys. They were genuinely dangerous and wrote about straight up sex, drugs and rock n' roll. When others tried to tiptoe around the subject, the Stones were writing about worshipping Satan, feeding drugs to your mother and starting revolutions. The Beach Boys were the artistes and recording geniuses. They propelled the medium by expanding the palette and experimenting with new techniques, electronic and musical. Their harmonies were unconventional, their sound was unheard of and they pushed everyone else to keep up. The who were the virtuosos. They were the best at their instruments among all the groups and their chemistry was sonically powerful. Roger Daltrey is the best vocalist of his generation, Townshend the best rhythm guitarist, Moon the best drummer (by FAR) and Entwhistle the most entertaining and propulsive bassist. Each one of them would have been the star in whatever band they had joined, like Clapton was when he joined John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers, but the combination of them together was unstoppable. It was pure luck that Townshend proved to be a good enough songwriter to showcase their talents.

Even early on, songs like 'My Generation', 'The Kids Are Alright', 'Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere', and 'A Legal Matter' had a fierce urgency that heralded the beginnings of heavy metal, punk, power pop and any other genre featuring overdriven guitars, howling vocals and the "fuck you" attitude that makes popular music relevant to any time. As they got just a little older, Townshends songwriting pretensions took the band out of purely performance and into the realm of performance art. At this point, right around the album 'The Who Sell Out' (a completely ironic title), the band started to slip away from the safe road of greatness and trod instead on an uncharted path. They were equally great, but more divisive. By starting to put out themed material with songs that connected through a central storyline, they risked alienating their teen audiences. Some of their projects were enormous successes, like 'Tommy', others were great albums but not as good as a rock opera ('Quadrophenia') and one was a complete failure as a storyline but still became arguably their best album ('Lifehouse' which ended up becoming 'Who's Next'). Instead of concentrating on discrete constructions of pop music like their other colleagues, The Who went down the road of telling stories. That's ambitious, but dangerous. If the critics and audience don't like the story, do they pay attention to the chapters?

But the band rode through the tumult and uncertainty and produced some of the best musical moments since Elvis sang 'Hound Dog'. There was the Woodstock performance where Pete Townshend threw Abbie Hoffman off the stage after Hoffman rushed up in the middle of the set, high on LSD, to publicize the plight of John Sinclair, who had been given a 10 year jail sentence for giving (not selling) two joints to an undercover cop. Hoffman, upset at the hypocrisy of the suburban Woodstock crowd getting high and apathetic, grabbed the mic from Townshend and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison!" Townshend, who was there to play music and couldn't give a shit about politics, hit Hoffman in the head with the business end of his guitar and ran him off the stage yelling, "Fuck off my fucking stage!" This was a band of hooligans.

There was the time when they were performing on the 'Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour' TV show, in 1967, when Keith Moon had explosives packed into his drum kit. The Who was known for destroying their equipment after each gig and they were certainly going to do it on live TV. But Moon, ever the impish joker, decided to pack an extra punch. When the explosion destroyed his drum kit, even Moon was surprised by how intense it was and he ended up with a jagged piece of metal cymbal embedded in his arm.

And if you've ever heard the album 'Live at Leeds', considered by many rock critics to be the best live album ever recorded, there is no way you can listen to 'Shakin' All Over' and not feel the intensity of the performance. You feel like you're in the audience on that record, like you're swimming amidst a sea of college students who are drunk or high, or both, and are letting the waves of sound overload their ears like the drugs are overloading their brain. Just going numb and letting it all wash over you and hoping you can take something out of it when it's all over and there's nothing left but an empty echoing hall and paper cups strewn over the floor.

And what about Daltrey's soul scream at the break in 'Won't Get Fooled Again'? Or Entwhistle's bass, in nearly every song, which jumps and slithers like a cat in a barrel that you're throwing firecrackers into? And how about Townshend's impossibly simple, yet mysteriously complicated, power chord rhythms? And Moon's rattling drum fills which never seem to be in time and yet somehow always hit the cymbal on the downbeat?

Is there any band who was better at playing than The Who? Which is why their Superbowl performance is so upsetting. It's one thing to bring out a mediocre act who are still mediocre. I saw Crowded House perform 'Don't Dream It's Over' a few years ago at the Austin City Limits festival and it wasn't sad at all. They did a serviceable enough version of the only song that ever made it big in the U.S. That's all Crowded House ever was or will ever be. But watching Townshend and Daltrey pimp out their legacy in front of a billion viewers is like seeing an inebriated Salvador Dali scratching out a living in his elder years by drawing clown carciatures at bar mitzvahs.

USC robs the cradle

2010-02-05T10:23:00.003-05:00

Is it wrong that I think it's detestable that USC has solicited a commitment from David Sills, a 13 year old 7th grader who plays quarterback for the Red Lion Christian Academy in Bear, Delaware?

This kid's in 7th grade! I mean his promo video looks great, and he's got some mad skillz, but he's playing freaking middle schoolers! There's something very distasteful to me that parents and colleges are conspiring to control the lives of kids who have just hit puberty. Stage moms aren't this bad.

There's a culture of this in this country that is truly sickening. Ali likes to watch this show called "Toddlers and Tiaras" about child beauty pageants and it's stomach churning. 3 year olds being dressed up like prostitutes and being yelled at by their freakish mothers for not hitting their marks on stage. That there are multiple industries in this country which exploit and prey on kids too young to understand what's happening to them is indicative of a serious moral breakdown in our collective consciousness.

Having said that, do you think it's too early for the Jets to look at this Sills kid? ;-)

Responsibility kicks in

2010-02-05T00:27:00.002-05:00

So, due to the enormous amount of money that I'm going to need in the near future, I have decided to do the right thing and cancel my March poker trip to California. Prompting this decision was the $1200 scouting trip to Aruba that Ali and I are taking in April, the weekend Bed and Breakfast and skiing trip in Vermont for Valentine's weekend, the Jury Summons I received today that might result in lost days of work, and the actual 7 days of work I'll be missing in March to go on this trip which will end up costing me a week's worth of wages. Consulting, it seems, has a down side.

On the plus side of things, I feel ever more adult. And I will be taking a weekend in Atlantic City in 2 weeks, plus possibly another weekend in March when I would have been gone.

Anyone else going to be in Atlantic City Feb 19-21 or Mar 19-21?

HOW TO: Maximize your chances of surviving a free fall from a plane

2010-01-29T14:25:00.002-05:00

Ok, it's probably never going to happen to you, but this well written and funny article from Popular Mechanics should be seen anyway.

Hey, you buy Lotto tickets, right? Your odds of being in a free fall from a plane are probably better than that.

Hoax? Or a major issue?

2010-01-28T11:16:00.002-05:00

Darko sent me a link to a blog post about a serious PokerStars error. Supposedly, a tourney was canceled because there were 5 Aces in the hand in a Hold'em game! Check out the link for the screenshot.

I tend to think this is a Photoshop job because if the software couldn't keep track of which cards had already been dealt, we'd see consistent errors in the billions of hands that have been dealt out since the PokerStars launch. But this is the first time I've heard of an issue like this. I would think this would be major online news if this was true.

Opinions?

New blogger!

2010-01-28T11:10:00.002-05:00

One of my poker buddies, Jeff, has started a new blog. Let's show him some courtesy because blogging should be encouraged!

HOW TO: Play in every poker room in America

2010-01-26T13:25:00.001-05:00

So you wanna go on a quest to play in every poker room in America? Well, I don't blame you. I've been doing it now for almost two years and I've been justly rewarded with wonderful experiences and memories. For those of you wanting to have the same experience of spending all of your free time on the back roads of this great land's gambling meccas, I've compiled a few tips that I'd like to share borne out of my experience.

TIPS FOR SEEING AMERICA'S POKER ROOMS:
1. Decide up front if you want to see *all* poker rooms or just the best poker rooms - This is a major consideration for a quest of this type. If you decide you want to spend your vacation time seeing every poker room in existence, you will find that most of the legal poker rooms in the country are small (1-4 tables) and rarely have games going except during peak hours. Unless you are very dedicated, you might be disappointed to find you've just driven 3 hours in the rain in Iowa to see an empty poker room.

2. Define for yourself what a 'poker room' really means to you - This seems like an easy task, but there are a huge number of 'poker rooms' in Montana, Washington State and California which are nothing more than one or two tables in the back of a bar somewhere. The tables are legal, but games don't always run. In addition, the bars rarely open until 6PM or later, which will put a crimp in your driving schedule, and the games rarely get off except on weekends, maybe. To wait in a rinky-dink town all day for a game that might not go off is not everyone's idea of a vacation.

3. Plan your driving schedule to maximize casino time - The previous two tips are dancing around the subject about whether you'd rather spend more time visiting poker rooms, and possibly not playing, for the purpose of saying you saw the place, or reducing the number of spots you visit but having more playing time. Once you've made this decision, you need to map out the places you want to visit and plan your driving route accordingly. I use two online tools for this purpose - ThePokerAtlas.Com and Maps.Google.Com. The Poker Atlas is a fantastic site without which you will find it very hard to complete your quest. It has a listing, mostly current and up to date, of every single poker room in the U.S. along with addresses, phone numbers and even maps and reviews. You can click on a state to get the entire state's poker rooms on a single map. This is invaluable when figuring out how to efficiently plan your driving. Google Maps is useful for not only mapping the route you'll take, but being able to save the spots in the My Maps feature. Also, you can estimate your driving time on each leg pretty accurately and even drag the route to other roads to see the difference in driving time, in case you want to make a detour.

4. Try to spend some time seeing some of the local sites - Poker isn't everything (shocking, I know). Each state you'll spend time in has hundreds of years of history waiting to be explored. Even little towns in the middle of nowhere have interesting stories to tell. Use Wikipedia.Org to research the different towns you're staying in and to find museums or attractions to visit. Also, the town's official website (most towns have one), will have even more information about town history and things to see you might not have ever thought of. When I was in Yuma, AZ, I went to see the Arizona Territorial State Prison, which was fantastic and not something I would ever have thought to do had I not done my research.

5. Compile a packet of information and bring it with you - This packet should include the names and addresses of every casino, along with phone numbers, and all the other destinations you want to visit. Not everywhere you visit will have internet access, so bringing a written copy of your itinerary is crucial.

6. Double check all of your information! - Call each casino and confirm they're still in operation, they have a poker room and what the hours are (a lot of casinos and poker rooms aren't 24 hours!). When you arrive at a casino and start playing, ask the locals if there are any poker rooms they know about that you don't. Sometimes a new poker room will open up that isn't listed on The Poker Atlas.

7. Always chat up the locals - About things to do in town, where to eat and where to play. They live there and they know about stuff that isn't listed in the guidebooks. Plus, they have great stories and will usually be interested in hearing about your own quest to play poker around the country. It makes a great conversation starter.

8. Bring a GPS unit - I can't stress this enough. A dashboard GPS for your car is essential to your success. You'll be able to input your destination and get accurate directions no matter where you are. In addition, the GPS can help locate the nearest gas station, the nearest place to get a bite to eat and the nearest hotel, in case you had to change your schedule mid-trip and didn't book ahead.

9. Use Hotels.Com to book all of your hotels - Hotels.Com has a couple of great things going for it for this type of journey. First, they have a fairly comprehensive listing of hotels for any area of the country. Second, they list the cancellation policy of each hotel in plain language. ALWAYS book hotels that allow you to cancel without charge up to 24 hours before. An amateur will book a hotel for a few dollars cheaper but it will be non-refundable. Poker trips are fluid. You can always cancel 24 hours in advance and re-book at the lower price if you are sure of your plans as the trip is drawing near. Also, hotel prices change almost daily. If you book a refundable hotel and you see the price drop, you can cancel and rebook at the lower price very easily. Lastly, Hotels.Com will give you a free hotel night (up to $400 value) for every 10 nights you book with them for a room of $40 or more. So if you keep your nightly bookings above $40, you're essentially getting anywhere from a 10% to a 50% discount on your bookings! Example: you book 10 nights at $40 each and then go away for a day at a $400 spa you get for free. You've spent $400 for $800 worth of rooms, a 50% discount!

10. Use CarRentals.Com to look at car prices, but don't book through them! - CarRentals.Com is the best comparison site I've seen for cars and routinely offers me the lowest fares because they don't stick only to the major vendors. But once you get the price, go to an online coupon site like RetailMeNot.Com or CurrentCodes.Com and grab a discount coupon you can use on the vendor's site! Then book from the vendor directly. Again, check the prices often and don't get a non-refundable deal because you'll be able to cancel and rebook if the price drops. Another reason I like CarRentals.Com, they allow you to search for cars where the drop off point is different from the pickup point. A lot of your poker trips will be flying into one airport and out of another just because poker rooms are very spread out in most states!

11. Keep a toiletry/drug bag for all trips - One of the best tips I was ever told and now I'm religious about it. Get a toiletry bag and fill it with every accessory you're ever going to need when you travel (travel sizes only, or else you won't be able to carry it onto a plane). Disposable razors, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, etc... Also include cold medications, pain relievers, Maalox and whatever other treatment you might conceivably ever need. Now never use what's in that bag except for when you're going on a trip. When you're packing, simply throw the one bag on top of your clothes and you're ready to go. You will occasionally have to refill the bag with things, but for the most part you won't be without what you need. When you pack things individually I find that I tend to forget *something* which means I inevitably have to buy a replacement when I get to where I'm going!

12. Keep a separate travel bag with extra chargers for all of your electronics - Same concept as 11, except this is for the electrics. In my own bag I have an iPod synch cable/charger, an extra set of headphones, a laptop charger, international plug converters and a car charger for my phone. In addition, I HIGHLY recommend this product, which is a compact 3 outlet power strip which also has two USB ports on the side for charging USB devices (like my iPhone). The best part about it is that you can rotate the strip in an direction when you plug it in, a lifesaver for those times when the outlet is in a strange location, as it usually is in hotels.

13. Get cruise control on your car - Don't leave the lot without a rental car with cruise control. You will be driving hundreds of miles on long empty highways and cruise control is crucial to allowing you to maintain a fast, safe speed. Rather than varying between 5 MPH under the limit and 10 MPH over the limit, set your cruise control to 5-9 MPH over the speed limit and watch the miles fly by with little effort. Very efficient.

14. Use Yapta.Com to check on flights - Yapta is a cool site which has very standard flight comparisons, but has the awesome added feature of letting you track the price! Once you've identified a flight, it will send you an email when the price changes. Once you book, if the price drops below what you paid for it, it will send you instructions on how to receive a refund/credit from the airline! Great stuff.

That's about all I have, that I can remember. If you have any good travel tips for me that are applicable, please comment and share!

Still freaky

2010-01-25T09:25:00.002-05:00

I've been working in Manhattan now for close to 15 years. And no matter how long I've been here and how much I've seen and experienced, one thing will always continue to give me the willies:

The sound of 65 stories of skyscraper above your head groaning and creaking as it sways in the wind while you're at your desk.

There's no sound in the world like it. You can hear the strain of the steel infrastructure in the walls as the high winds move the top of your office building (70 Pine street in my case) 5-10 feet side to side. As you sit in one of the tallest buildings in the world, graphically imagining how a building built in 1932, 40 years before you were born, could possibly crash thousands of tons of steel and concrete on your head, you get very little work done.

A word about bonuses

2010-01-19T17:29:00.001-05:00

It's bonus season on Wall Street and the paper's are going nuts with the news that even though the economy is in the crapper, bankers are receiving "obscene" bonuses (their quotes). I'm here to tell you all to calm down while I explain why banker's bonuses are so large and why they will, and should, stay that way.

These "bonuses" (my quotes) that you hear about in relation to Wall Street are not the same as the bonuses that you and I might receive in our regular jobs. If you work in a hardware store and do an exceptional job all year, your boss might give you a few hundred dollars as a reward for working so hard. Or you might get treated to a nice dinner. Or you might get some form of profit sharing from the company as an incentive to work hard.

Wall Street bonuses are not the same as these type of bonuses. Instead, Wall Street bonuses are VARIABLE DELAYED INCENTIVE COMPENSATION. Let's break that down:

VARIABLE - Varying. Different. Not always the same.
DELAYED - Not right now. Later.
INCENTIVE - A stimulus to promote a certain type of behavior.
COMPENSATION - The important part. What you get paid to do work.

On the surface, this sounds like a Main Street bonus, but the word 'Compensation' is the give-away. The Wall Street bonus is PART OF THE NORMAL PAY. I repeat, PART OF THE NORMAL PAY.

You and I get paid a certain amount of money and that will remain the same throughout the whole year no matter how well we perform. If we do extra well, our bosses may deign to gift us a bonus. Wall Street bankers get paid a fraction of what they're worth throughout the year and are paid the majority of their income (the 'obscene bonus') at the end of the year as part of their normal pay. So, for instance, a Managing Director who is the head of a trading desk might make $400,000/year as their base salary while receiving $5 million as a 'bonus' at the end of the year. That end of year lump sum will go up or down depending on how their trading desk performed, but the total compensation will usually fall somewhere in the range of normal compensation for the banking industry. Lest you think $5.5 million is a lot, a trading desk doing good business can easily make $50 million in profit for the bank. If you are the head of the trading desk and your efforts generate $50 million in profit, would you stay at the bank that paid you $2 million? Heck no! You'd find out what the market could bear for your services and go to the bank that paid you that amount! And a business would be foolish not to pay for someone who could make that much.

If Wall Street bonuses are regulated and/or capped, the only effect will be that the base salary of these bankers will jump greatly to match the market rate for these profit centers. And 'profit centers' are what they are. As soon as they stop making money on a regular basis, they get fired. No two ways about it. I remember when I was working at JPMorgan that a trader got canned after losing a lot of money in a bad quarter and his boss told him, "the company would have been better off if you had just stayed home the last three months". There's a limited number of seats on the trading floor and if you can't make money, and a lot of it, they'll find someone who can.

Keep in mind, that these large bonus numbers only apply to the elite traders and desks who have been proven money makers. Desks which lose money usually have their personnel fired and/or their bonuses cut drastically. And the middle tier of traders and the bottom tier of everyone else (technology workers, research analysts, custodial staff, etc...), get paid MUCH less than the top traders. Which is why the top trading positions are so coveted, of course.

So don't be too upset that some Wall Street workers are being paid this much money. They earned it. Wall Street as a whole, on the other hand, that's a different story.

My 20 yr. H.S. reunion

2010-01-19T09:46:00.002-05:00

This past weekend was the G.W. Hewlett High School, class of 1990, 20th year reunion. As Adam Sandler once said, "I did not attend this event". I really should have changed my schedule around to accommodate this but I let life get in the way of nostalgia. It's a shame, because I'm looking at the flood of pictures from attendees and it looked like such a great time. It would have been nice to have a beer or two with the crew and talk about old times. Some would say that putting on rose tinted glasses to look at one's past is a false feeling, but I truly believe that the class of 1990 was different. We were a small class (about 230), and at the time that I graduated, everyone knew everyone else. Maybe not like best friend's, but we all knew each other's names and at least something about each other's lives. We'd been together since 6th grade, some of us earlier and we lived in each other's neighborhoods. I have such vivid memories of everyone in the pictures I saw that it's almost criminal not to acknowledge the influence that we all had in each other's lives. But we did. It was a pretty tight knit group of us, and by the time we were seniors and had started to broaden our horizons in life, the usual labels and cliques that divided us during school started to fall apart. Nerds, jocks, beauty queens and drama kings all had something to share together. And they did again on Saturday.

At this point in the post, I was going to post the most personal memories I had of as many of my high school classmates as I could remember. But halfway into the first memory, I thought that it might be too personal, not for me but for the people I'm talking about. Maybe not everyone has the desire to see themselves in such a light, even though we're talking about events that happened 20+ years ago! So if you were G.W.H.S. class of 1990, and you want to know what memory I have of you, send me a note and I'll tell you. I can promise you that not a single memory puts anyone in a bad light (well, sometimes me).

I really loved my years in high school, though I wish I could go back and do it over again. What a difference that would make, no? But then again, it wouldn't be high school if we all could bring adult experiences to bear on those formative years.

To recap: You guys are great and I suck for not coming. Peace out.

I love this chart

2010-01-19T09:44:00.003-05:00

Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years"

Attribution: I took this from this link.

Dead Pool - Dead in the water

2010-01-18T09:56:00.001-05:00

After an initial flurry of interest in the 2010 dead pool, no one stepped up to the plate to actually sign up (except Jordan, god bless him). It's too bad, because I thought it would have been a fun thing to do.

I did get a few people who seemed pretty peeved at me for even advancing the concept, too. To those people I say this; Lighten Up. Participating in a dead pool is a morbid activity, for sure, but it's hardly evil. Yes, there is something unsavory about wagering on people to die, but it's going to happen to them whether you do it or not. Why not make a market out of it and maybe have some fun? Unless you're one of those people who feel that having people think about something can actually cause that thing to happen. You know the type. They sit at the edge of their seats during football games and get mad at you if you "jinx" it with something you've said. There's a word for people who think that their words and thoughts can change reality; insane.

Also, there are tons of celebrity websites that make their living reporting on every detail of celebrity deaths, far more intrusively to the families than a dead pool ever would. How is that any better?

As I said to Christine in Arizona, "It's not like I'm praying for anyone to die, just betting on it."

MTT Win

2010-01-18T01:53:00.001-05:00

I was screwing around last night on a $1.10 MTT Hold'em tourney on Ultimate Bet and I won it! 272 players and a $56.98 payout for first place. Nothing to it except tight play and smart laydowns/betting. I maximized when I had it and gave it up when I didn't. The final table became something of a shovefest with the guy I took out in 2nd amassing a 6-1 chip lead when I slid into heads up play. But he faithfully doubled me up with A6 and KQ twice when he held junk. He finally pushed it in with 88 against my AJ and I flopped a Jack for the win. It helps to win your coinflips.

Dead Pool - Anyone out there?

2010-01-08T11:43:00.001-05:00

So is anyone doing the 2010 Dead Pool? Anyone?

Next Friday is the deadline to forward me your list and the moolah. See the link on the right hand side of the blog for the rules.

Well, that's new

2010-01-06T23:30:00.003-05:00

I proposed to Ali in Paris. Stroke of midnight, New Year's Eve, in the bright shining light of the Eiffel Tower, amidst a million screaming Parisians and tourists. It sounds very cliche but the effect is undeniably magical when you actually do it.

I was going to write a beautiful soliloquy, with flowery language describing the depths of my love and the strength of my soul, but when I read it I didn't want to make people sick. Way too personal and flowery. So I'm just going to say that I'm in love and happy.

It's about time.

P.S. She said Yes! I know you were wondering...

Arizona trip report - Part 8 of 8

2009-12-22T01:19:00.004-05:00

Arizona Trip Report - Day 8

Viv and I woke up on the late side and groggily got out of bed to get ready for the day. We went down to the hotel restaurant for "brunch", which was really just lunch since it was around noontime. Outside of New York, "brunch", if they have it at all, is strictly a Sunday affair. This whole thing we're used to here of having special breakfast and lunch options available on Saturday or Sunday from 11a-4p is really a Manhattan thing. Too bad too, because the rest of the country could use a few more brunchy type places. I ended up having some crab cake sliders and a side of fruit to start my day and the sliders were excellent! The restaurant, which sits in the resort overlooking the golf course, was a very grand affair, but mostly empty. I suspect the economy has had a big toll on tourism in Arizona, and definitely in the wintertime when it's harder to golf.

After lunch, we headed to Old Town in Scottsdale, which is the main shopping area. This section is done up to look like an old west style town, with two story adobe buildings, wooden store signs and canopys and even a few swinging wooden doors. I think the building actually date from that period, hence the look, but the stores are not sawdust joints at all. There's quite a bit of high end shopping and a ton of art galleries. I was in the market to get a few Christmas gifts for Ali and her family and Viv was nice enough to come along. I wish I could describe in detail here what I found, but Ali reads this blog and I don't want to spill the surprise of her gift! Suffice it to say, it's very beautiful and in excellent taste (Viv helped pick it out, natch). I also got some nice items for her sister and mother. Amazingly enough, everything I got them was purchased from the same store, the Four Winds Jewelry store in Old Town Scottsdale. If you're in the area and looking for tasteful version of southwestern style jewelry (no clunky ugly turquoise here), I highly recommend it.

As we were walking around, it occurred to me that I could probably use something for myself too, as a memento. I decided on getting a money clip, which I've never used (I have a George Costanza wallet), but which my brother has recently convinced me to try. But not just any money clip; I wanted one with an Eagle Dancer on it. In the hotel we were staying at in Scottsdale is a 3 foot sculpture of an Eagle Dancer, which is a spiritual symbol for the Hopi Indians who populate this land. The sculpture was great but a little freaky. It looked like Iron Man, circa 1966, with feathers running along his back and arms and an eagle mask on his head. Viv, Chris and I took a picture in front of it and it intrigued me so much I thought a money clip with that symbol on it would make a great memento of the trip.
(This is not the sculpture, but you'll get the idea)

Alas, there was none to be found. After dragging Viv into more than half a dozen stores, I couldn't find a single example. Too bad. I'll try Ebay or Google next.

Our shopping trip was short and purposeful, and though I really wanted to peruse the galleries, I could tell that Viv was itching to get another crack at the $2-$5 tables. Besides for which, the galleries were showing mostly southwestern art in their windows and I hate southwestern art. Native Americans and wolves make for really bad artwork. I like the works of Frederic Remington, and a few other painters and sculptors of the western genre, but I mostly detest what passes as southwest 'artwork' these days. The test I normally apply here is, "Do they sell this in the mall?". That weeds out a vast majority of the crap sold as art these days. My next test is, "Is this the work of an 'artist', or somebody who paints for money?". That weeds out most of the rest. With few exceptions, the universe of works that remain can be considered 'art' in my mind, though my own taste and preferences lead me in a particular direction. Oh, one more thing on this subject; There is a special place in hell devoted to Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light". Vermeer, and the rest of the Dutch school, knew how to paint light. This guy is a total hack. If you own a Thomas Kinkade painting, you are a tool and you have zero taste. Here endeth the rant.

So we made our way back to Casino Arizona and went back to our respective tables; Viv to the $2-$5 and me to the $1-$2 table. I don't remember how I did it, but I managed to run $160 into $360 by playing tight and conservative. For the life of me, I can't remember a single hand during this little session, but I was playing well and getting paid off when I had it. After 3 hours, I picked up and Viv and I, and her friend's friend Larry, all went out to dinner at The Mission in Old Town Scottsdale. The place had been recommended to me by more than a few locals and it was great. In addition to having a very young and hip club vibe, the food (Nuevo Latino) was outstanding. We had a great time chowing down on the local cuisines and after graciously stuffing ourselves, at a slow and even pace, we were ready to attack the casino again. I went back to another $1-$2 table that was looser and more aggressive than my previous one. I waited for hands and finally got lucky with pocket Kings. I was in the SB and a few people limped (a rare occurrence). I popped it to $15 and got re-raised by the BB to $45. It folded back to me and I slid out $100 total. He insta-shoved for his stack of $240 and I quick called. He sighed audibly and said, "you got me" and flipped up AQo (?!?!?!). Granted, it was 2:00a when this hand occurred and he was tired, but really? After 3 bets PF you shove with AQo? Man, that's bad. I turned over KK and the flop came K42. A guy said, "Oh man, I folded pocket fours!" before his friend pointed out I had hit my set anyway. A 2 on the turn boated me up and closed the deal. The guy got up and said, "Oh well, I wanted to go home anyway". What a nice gift!

I held on to my profit for the rest of the night, not going up or down. One hand where I could have made an additional $200 bothered me for a bit. I had JJ, again in the SB. Again three people limped in. I raised to $20. This was a very big PF raise for this table, so with just three limpers, I expected to collect the blinds and move to the next hand. But no, two players completed their limps and called. Hmmm... I was first to act on a flop of T♥5♠2♠. A seemingly harmless flop. I put out $30 and the first person called! The second player...min-raised to $60! WHAT. THE. HELL?!? So now I was faced with a conundrum here. I was either ahead of two players or way behind. If either have an over pair to me that they're slowplaying, I'm toast. If either have a set, I'm toast. The only way in which I'm good here is if one has a flush draw and one has top pair. If that's the case, I have to basically shove to drive out the flush draw and hope that the guy with top pair likes his hand enough to call! But what if I do that and both players get committed to the hand? In that case, JJ is a dog to stand up to two hands. So I did the prudent thing, and folded. The first caller called the min-raise to $60 and the turn was a brick. First player checks and the min-raiser shoves for $140 more. The first player thinks about it and calls and shows A♥T♥ (top pair/top kicker), the raiser shows A♠4♠ for a useless over and a flush draw! The river bricked and the A♥T♥ took down the big pot with a pair of Tens. It made me sick to think about it, but I have to think that 8 times out of 10, faced with the same situation, I am well behind there. I posed the question to Viv, "What would you have done?", and the answer was "Raise and find out where you stand". Of course, that's what she always says. My problem was that I'd have to raise to $160 in that scenario and I'd have about $200 left behind. If one of the players then shoves for $400, I'd probably have to fold. But if I call and he shows a set, I'd be the moron who stacked off on an overpair. As a wise man once said, "Don't go broke on one pair". Makes sense to me.

I cashed out at 1:00a +$240, which is perfectly fine for me. For the rest of the night, until 6:30a (nice cracked out session!), I played $3-$6 O/8. They had a Monte Carlo promotion going, which meant that from 3:00a through 9:00a, they had high hand one-time jackpots for any quads, a straight flush and a royal flush. Quad deuces through 9's paid $400. Quad 10's through Aces paid $450, a Straight flush paid $500, and a Royal Flush paid $599. Each hand would be paid only once, so once it was hit the bonus was gone. The best part was that they allowed Omaha tables to participate! Obviously, attendance at the Omaha guy was heavy and the table was full for the entirety of my session. The locals liked this promotion so much that even the straight hold'em players switched to $3-$6 O/8 for that time period. A new O/8 table opened up at 4:00a!!!! While, 4 players at my table did hit a bonus, I wasn't able to capitalize. I flopped sets 6 times but couldn't quad up. I had straight flush draws twice and a Royal draw once. The Royal draw was a sick wrap. I had A♠2♠K♦T♦ in my hand. A great PF Omaha hand, but I didn't raise it. In fact, no one raised. The unwritten rule for this promotion is to come into the hand only with eligible hands and then limp and check the hand all the way down, betting only if the board can't make a bonus. The reason is that if you bet other people out of the pot, the hand might not complete to the river and then a winner won't get paid. So my flop with my big and unbet hand is Q♦J♦4♠. I flopped a wrap Broadway draw, two straight flush draws and the Royal draw. But none of my cards hit. In fact, I didn't even get the low, nor did I make a straight or a flush! The board ran out 2♣4♣ for an awful hand and I mucked. Yeesh. Still, the promotion was a lot of fun and I only left because I was super tired and Viv and I needed at least a few hours before going to the airport the next morning...errrr, this morning.

We cashed out, drove to the hotel, slept for 3 hours, got up, checked out and drove to the airport, boarded the flight and landed in JFK about 35 minutes late but without any other issues. Oh, as we drove out of the casino, I took this picture:

Viv and I, the night before had actually seen these wild horses a few hundred yards off the road. It was an amazing sight to see them grazing in the desert grasses.

It had been a tremendous trip, both profitable (+$930) and interesting. I really would like to go back to Phoenix and Scottsdale because I feel like I missed a good part of the city and it might be worth seeing. It's no New York, true, but few are. Actually, none are. Still, it looks very pleasant. Maybe I can take a golf outing with someone?

My next trip is already planned for March. I'll be flying into LAX and taking a week to drive up the coast into San Francisco. I can't wait. I'll be in Paris for New Year's with Ali and then a long winter until Los Angeles.

And that's all she wrote for now. Join my dead pool!!!!

Arizona trip report - Part 7 of 8

2009-12-22T01:09:00.002-05:00

Arizona Trip Report - Day 7

Chris, Viv and I woke up just in time to shower, dress and check out of the Harrah's hotel. It wasn't the best place I ever stayed, but it wasn't the worst and the price (FREE) couldn't be beat. Rather than going back to Wild Horse Pass, we headed over to Casino Arizona, which is where the best action in the state was. I wanted to play in the $3-$6 O/8 game, which is my achilles heel but I love the game so much! Alas, there wasn't a seat available at the moment so I put my name on the list and sat at an open seat at the $1-$2 table ($2-$250 spread limit hold'em). My second hand at the table, I get 6♥8♥ in late position. There's a few limps and I come along and the flop is A♠5♦7♠. OESD on the flop. There a bet of $10 and 4 people call. I call and the turn is the 3♦. It checks all around. River is the 4♥. It checks to the first bettor, who bets $20. One guy calls. Now, I pop it to $60. I have the stone nuts with the straight to the 8 but the board is perfect for me. Any 2 or 6 makes a lower straight and I'm hoping at least one of the mooks who're in the pot has one. Maybe both. If I'm really lucky, one of them will shove! It gets back to the initial bettor who, inexplicably, folds. I'm guessing he had a high Ace since he led out the betting on the flop, or two pair that he wisely gave up. The other caller tanks for a few seconds and then makes a crying call saying, "If you've got 6-8, you've got me". I show him the nuts and he turns over 6♠7♠. Ouch. But at least he played it disciplined. A lot of weaker players would shove with the second nuts!

I got called for my Omaha table after a few minutes and played there for nearly 3 hours, breaking even, before Chris tapped me on the shoulder. She had to go to the airport to take a bus to Tucson to visit her friend (the real reason she was in Arizona). I had the only car, ergo, I had to drive. Viv graciously picked up from her $2-$5 table too to give me company on the way back. We drove Chris to the airport, a 20 minute drive from the casino, said our goodbyes, and headed straight back. I felt bad for Viv because she came along to keep me company and I ended up on the phone with Ali the whole ride back! Sorry Viv... :-(

Coming back to the casino, I was ready to, FINALLY, crack out for a very long session for the first time in the trip. I parked myself at a $1-$2 table and stayed there for the rest of the night. The table was pretty actioney with a lot of movement of chips around. I didn't get too much traction, losing half of my first $160 buyin in an hour and the rest of the stack when I flopped a pair and a flush draw on a low board and pushed into an overpair which held up. I rebought for another $160 and managed to double up in the next hour with a flopped set of Queens holding up against a flush draw. I was sitting at about even for the session when Viv, who was being brutalized at the $2-$5 table, came to swim with the guppies. I was sitting in the 10 seat and Viv in the 6 seat when I got KK. It limped to me in the SB and I raised to $15, a slightly more than standard raise at the table, getting two callers. The flop was TT5. I was frozen. Most people at this point would bet out to see where they stand, but my feeling is that this hand is vulnerable to a big bluff raise. If I bet out, representing an overpair or a big Ace, and then someone comes over the top of me for half my stack, I'm going to have to make a stone read on the guy to be able to win the pot. A Ten in someone's hand is easily within the range of hands that would call my $15 PF raise, and there were 2 people to worry about! I checked, the second seat checked and the last caller, who was a young kid giving off an 'I'm aggressive' vibe, bet out $65, just over the pot size. It got to me and I mucked my Kings. It hurt to do, believe me, but I was $15 invested and I didn't want to be the idiot who put his stack at risk over $15. It works both ways, I guess. Either I'm the idiot who gives up KK to a bluff, or I'm the idiot who gets married to his overpair against a dangerous board that's been bet out. The second caller, who could have also been slowplaying trips by the way, also mucked. It was a good bluff (he confirmed it was to Viv who was sitting next to him). Viv told me later that she would have "raised to see where you're at", which is her answer to all of the thorny poker problems, coincidentally! (Jus' kidding Viv!). I'm proud of myself for being able to get of overpairs so easily these days. Yes, it sometimes costs me money, but it probably saves me more in the long run. Who has an opinion on this?

I got bet off of that hand and just before Viv sat down, I got bet off of a hand by a woman in the 3 seat. I had 4♥5♥ on the button and the woman had raised to $6 PF, getting a few callers. I came in and the flop was raggedy. 2♥4♠7♦. The woman c-bet by holding out her hand and dropping a redbird on the felt. A second later, she dropped another one, not because she was string betting but because the chip had gotten stuck to her hand. Never the less, I thought I could use this to my advantage and immediately called out "string bet". Before the dealer could respond she came out with, "That wasn't a string bet, the chip was stuck." It stuck in my craw that she would make her own ruling and I was pissed that the dealer didn't say a word. I thought I might be good here, but I hadn't seen her play any hands and she had the table outchipped with $750 in front of her. She was an older woman, maybe 55, and those types of players in my experience are rocks. I don't know how she got her stack, but I thought it might have been through an early double up of a big hand. But I really didn't know. So rather than get involved with middle pair on a board I wasn't likely to improve on, I let it go. She half-smiled at me and mucked her cards. I think she thought she was either a) getting away with something or b) happy she won the little verbal argument about the string bet. I vowed to get even with her. I would take her big stack from her if it was the last thing I did.

An hour later, with Viv now at the table, I was dealt 5♥7♥ in late position. The woman raised to $12 and there were 2 callers. I came along hoping to crack her. The flop was something like K♠2♥8♥. I had a flush draw, but nothing else. The woman c-bet again, $25. It folded to me and I called again. The turn brought 3♠ and this time she checked. I checked behind, intending to bet the river if it was a good scare card. In hindsight, I should have bet the turn, but I thought it would look fishy betting a naked 3. Instead, the A♠ hit the river, completing the flush draw. She checked one more time and I fired out $40. She shuffled her cards (always a good sign of weakness) and mucked. When I tabled the 5♥7♥, I didn't even look at her, but Viv told me that she gave a grimace and a scowl. Tilt had been achieved! GAME ON!

From that point onward, for the next 2 hours, the woman spewed out half her stack. Viv was the recipient of a large chunk of that. The woman had raised PF to about $11 or so and Viv and a few others came in. The flop was 559 and it checked to the woman who bet out $22. Turn was an Ace. Viv, in first position, checked and the woman bet out around $35. Viv check raised to about $90. The woman hesitated, but called. The river was another 5. With a board of 5559A, Viv put out a bet of $125. The woman hesitated again, tanking for a good 30 seconds before finally making the call. I tapped the table to give Viv props. I knew what she had. The woman had A♥Q♥ and Viv had 8♣5♣ for quads. The funny thing was that the river 5 doesn't change anything for the woman. If Viv had the 5, she was drawing dead to an Ace, so why the hesitation on the river, unless you're just figuring out where you stand. Whoops. :-p Viv and I picked up at 4:10a, with the woman's stack at less than half it had been at it's peak. I cashed out +$75, but Viv had run the table for a good score. It was a good night.

Incidentally, since Casino Arizona is *the* place to play in the stats of Arizona, it happens that poker players sometimes bump into each other here, even when they're from other states. Chris, that afternoon, ran into a guy she knew from New York whose wife was in town for a conference. And Viv's friend, who was in Vegas with her, told her that there was someone he knew at the casino that we should hook up with! Poker is a small world indeed.

More to come...

Arizona trip report - Part 6 of 8

2009-12-22T01:06:00.002-05:00

Arizone Trip Report - Day 6

I woke up in the morning and shook the sleep out of my eyes. It was about 11a when I was ready to hit the road again. After having been to all of the casinos in the Phoenix area, I decided that playing the afternoon at Wild Horse Pass would be the best choice. It was the best poker room closest to the airport and I had to pick up Viv at around 3:00p. I went over and sat down at a $4-$8 lhe table. As soon as I got a chance, I ordered a Breakfast Burrito from the waitress (big, tasty and cheap!) and got to work. It didn't take long for me to make a huge pot. There had been some action from a Crazian player in the 6 seat (I was in the 2 seat). I had bought in for $100 and chipped up to about $150 at this point when, for the first time in my life, I managed to more than double up in a single hand, in a LIMIT game, in heads up play. You know how they always say that you can raise unlimited times in heads up play? Well, it finally happened to me.

I had 66 UTG and limped in. A few callers and it came to Mr. Crazian who raised to $8. A few more callers, myself included, and the flop came 6♣4♣6♦. DQB!!!! I can lose to a straight flush (bring on the bad beat jackpot!) or running overcards for higher quads (Mo' bad beat, mo' bad beat!). In other words, I couldn't lose in this pot in any way, shape or form. I was first to act and checked. It checked to Crazian who bet out (overpair much?). I think one person called and I called. Turn was the T♥. Again, I check, Crazian bets, other person folds. I call. Turn is the most perfect A♣. If he was on a flush draw, he got there. I lead out, he raises. I re-raise. He says, "Keep going." I re-raise by stacking more chips. He makes a circular motion with his hand saying, "More". OMG! It dawns on me that he's got Aces full! He's not going anywhere and, what's more, he's acting so quickly now that he's not thinking. I stop stacking chips and just say "raise" every time he does. In a few seconds, we both stop stacking and we just keep making verbal declarations back and forth to each other like some demented tennis match. Luckily, no one at the table says a word, which is good because it was obvious by the 5th raise to everyone except the Crazian what I held. After about a dozen back and forth raises I asked the dealer, "Am I all in yet?" The dealer just sighed and said, "yes". Crazian tables AA like he won the Olympic Gold medal. The gold medal of bravado and stupidity maybe. The color drains from his face when I show my quads. I don't say a word but my hands are shaking with adrenaline as I stack my chips to be matched up, in a LIMIT GAME! W00t!

I played for another hour or so, maintaining my stack for the most part before I had to pick up and go to the airport. I got to the airport and ran into Chris, who had landed and gotten off the plane from New York just before Viv. Viv joined us from her separate flight only a few minutes after that and I drove all of us to the Harrah's hotel where we had a comped room waiting for us. I put the poker options out to the girls and we decided that Wild Horse Pass was the best option for the day. I figured if they weren't running a NLHE game for the girls than we could go on to Casino Arizona where they definitely would be. But there was indeed a $1-$2 game running. The girls took their seats and I found another $4-$8 game where I played for two hours, giving back all the winnings I made that afternoon (D'oh!). Terrible session. I switched to $4-$8 O/8 after that but couldn't get any traction going and ended up even. The three of us had a lovely dinner at the asian restaurant inside the casino and Chris was getting tired after having traveled all day so we went back to Harrah's and dropped her off at the room. Viv and I were still jazzed to play but there was only the $3-$6 game going. Viv was game to play in her first limit hold'em session, even for small stakes, and we had a good time playing until 3:00a. We left after the last SplashPot promotion, both of us dropping a little on the game. Freddy, the guy with the girlfriend issue, was there and he was cleaning house. Too bad I couldn't get some of that money.

It had been a nice day with the girls in a new city. Friday would bring more adventure and some bad laydowns on my part.

More to come...

Arizona trip report - Part 5 of 8

2009-12-22T01:05:00.001-05:00

Waking up on Wed. morning, I had it in my mind to explore the city of Phoenix. Or at least the downtown area. But poker got in the way, as it usually does on these trips. After having breakfast and finding it was around noontime, I decided to ditch my Phoenix explorations in favor of knocking out the rest of the poker rooms in the state. The remaining 5 poker rooms were all within a 45 minute drive of where I was and I figured I'd rather do them today then wait for the weekend when I'd want to be sitting for extended sessions at one place. I was expecting Viv and Chris to join me in Phoenix Thursday afternoon and I would feel bad dragging them to multiple poker rooms for short sessions of $3-$6 lhe! Besides, this way I could scope out the rooms and take them to the best action in the city.

My first stop was the Wild Horse Pass casino of the Gila River tribe in Chandler, AZ on the south edge of the Phoenix Metropolitan area. At first, I pulled up to the casino that my trusted GPS had led me to and found it to be locked and the parking lot completely empty. But I had called a few days before to ensure it was open and was told it was. How odd! It was a cool looking casino too, with the entire structure made to look like a Native American adobe brick house. But the chains on the front door were bumming me out. I called the number for the Gila River tribes to inquire and the nice woman on the other end told me to look to my left.

"See that big hotel in the distance with the blue wave on top? That's the new hotel and casino. We moved there a few months ago."

Aha! I happily drove over another 5 minutes and walked into the front doors of the prettiest and most modern casino in the entire state of Arizona. It was built to Vegas standards and reminded me quite a bit of the Red Rock casino outside of the Vegas Strip. There was a Fatburger in the food court, a Don Shula's steakhouse and a 30 table poker room that was wonderful. The brush desk didn't have an electronic board (the bugs were still being worked out), but everything was flowing smoothly by paper. There were about 12 games going at the time, including a $4-$8 lhe game which I sat in on. All of the lhe games in Arizona are run full kill and the kill requirements are pretty low, 10 BB's. So if you win a $40 pot in this game, the next hand runs $8-$16. So as you can imagine, the games had a lot more action in them than the stakes would imply. I sat next to a really surly looking young woman in a black denim jacket, a Vanessa Rousso hat and sunglasses. A lot of the serious poker players down here were sunglasses at the table, no matter the stakes. I find it retarded to were shades at a lhe game since bluffing is nearly impossible, but they do it anyhow. She, and another local on my left with shades, were playing loose and aggressive and were very tight lipped. But soon enough, my chatter won them over and we were talking amiably about poker in the state, my trips to L.A. and Vegas and the game were were in. The guy on my left, who looked to be about 35, said he played professionally in Vegas for 2 weeks out of every month. I guess he was just slumming around? I wasn't sure how much to believe him though, because he also claimed to have, at one time, run 3 different underground games on Long Island out of Bohemia. Maybe yes, maybe no. All I know is he was sitting at a $4-$8 table. Whatever. After 4 hours of enjoying myself and the fine room, I cashed out +$140.

The next stop was Vee Quiva, also a Gila River tribe casino. This one was old and dirty and had a smaller poker room with a $3-$6 game going which I joined and broke even on after 2 hours. I didn't want to stay so I picked up and left.

I grabbed a bite to eat on the road and headed to a place called Poker Nation on the north edge of the city in the 'burbs. Poker Nation is a retail storefront which sells poker equipment (cards, tables, card covers, chips, etc...) but becomes a small legal card room after that. There was a game of $1-$2 nlhe going on in the two table room when I got there and it was populated by friendly locals who all knew each other. Unfortunately, after 20 minutes of patiently waiting, not a seat had opened up. One of the guys who worked there asked if I was a member and I said No. He informed me that the club, in order to stay legal, charges a one-time lifetime membership fee of $20. I decided that paying $20 to sit in a tight $1-$2 nlhe game was too much for me and I declined. But as I walked out, I bought a card spinner just so I could throw them some business. I don't want to be a jerk after all. I bought a single dollar chip off of them and was on my way.

The second to last stop was Fort McDowell casino which is just east of Scottsdale. They have a decent room with about 30 tables but only a few low limit games were going on at the time. I got a seat at a $3-$6 game that bored me to death and played for 25 minutes before cashing out with a small profit. The Fort, as it's known locally, is a perfectly adequate room but overshadowed by my last and best destination.

Casino Arizona, at the intersection of Route 101 and Indian Bend Rd., in Scottsdale, is Arizona's best poker room. Period. End of Sentence. It's built to look like two big Tents from the outside and inside it reminds me very much of a California cardroom. There are at least 40 tables inside and the room is very spacious, with a huge ceiling and a looong floor space, giving the feeling you're inside an enormous circus tent. There is action going at all hours of the day or night, including multiple $1-$2 nlhe games (really spread limit, but same thing for the most part), $2-$5 nlhe, limit games up to $8-$16, Omaha Hi-Lo of $3-$6 and $6-$12 and a high roller section with $10-$20 lhe, $20-$40 lhe, $40-$80 lhe and a $75-$150 mixed game in progress. I checked out the $75-$150 game and the table was full with an average stack of $4,000 for each player. Lots of money floating around and there were multiple PF raises in the Omaha Hi-Lo game that I saw. Good stuff.

I sat at a $6-$12 O/8 game, which was a mistake because it was around midnight at the time and I was tired. I managed to lost $72 in 30 minutes before I wisely picked up and left. There was no doubt I would be bringing Viv and/or Chris here when they came.

I drove back to Harrah's and popped my head into the poker room to see what was gonig on. They were running a $3-$6 lhe game with a few of the locals left hanging around. It was late, and I was tired, but they had a SplashPot promotion running and I couldn't resist. The SplashPot is a promotion in which a single table is selected at random every hour or two and a set amount, $50 in this case, is added to the next pot to be played. Since there was only one table running, it was no surprise which table won the SplashPot! The time for the next one was 2:30a and everyone played until that time. When the pot was pushed (not to me) everyone picked up and the game broke. I went to bed and slept soundly.

Arizona trip report - Part 4 of 8

2009-12-22T00:46:00.009-05:00

Arizona trip report - Day 4

After my harrowing day yesterday with the chills, spills and thrills that only dangerous weather driving and backroom poker in a strange town can offer, I took it upon myself to sleep late. I woke up around 11am in the Quechan Casino in Winterhaven, CA and puttered around the room getting myself ready until the knock on the door from housekeeping got my butt in gear. I went downstairs to the grill on the casino floor and had a sandwich for lunch before finally hitting the road at around 1PM. Before I did, I made a last loop around to the poker room to see if there was a game going. There was, but it was a $3-$6 lhe game and it was full. Rather than wait an hour to play for an hour, I hit the road for Phoenix. It was going to be a long drive through the desert and I was anxious to end my long driving part of the trip. After making a huge loop around the state, from East to West and North to South, I would finally be back at my starting point. Or at least near it.

It was about a 3 hour drive from Yuma to Phoenix but I was able to get some sightseeing in on the way. My first stop was the only decent thing to see in the town of Yuma, according to a dealer who had grown up in the area. The Yuma Territorial Prison. From 1876 to 1909, the Yuma prison operated as a hellhole stop for prisoners in the area. The cells are located outdoors in the hot desert and there is little protection from the elements as well as no protection from the snakes and scorpions which often got into the cells. Oddly enough, though, this was a very modern facility for it's time. It had electricity, a phone system and flush toilets! Still, some prisoners managed to escape and there was a famous prison riot at one time as well which ended when the superintendant of the prison ordered the guards to shoot the prisoners who had taken him hostage and dragged him to the main gate in an effort to get out. The guards opened fire and the superintendant was injured, but survived. A tough business.

After touring the prison, I went out on the road and it was a pretty uneventful drive. There were plenty of beautiful mountain vistas and sweeping desert views. All along the sides of the road were tall cacti and I desperately wanted to take a picture with me next to one. But the interstates in Arizona have barbed wire along the side to prevent you from wandering too far. Maybe it's private property? Or maybe the state doesn't want you to die on the nearby railroad tracks. Whatever it was, I couldn't get my cacti shot.

About 55 miles outside of Maricopa, which is where Harrah's AK-Chin casino lay near Phoenix, I spotted a sign that said something like 'National Petroglyph Monument, Next Exit'. That isn't exactly what it's called but the idea is the same. Petroglyphs, for the unaware, are symbols carved into rock by prehistoric peoples. The chance to see 10,000+ year old writing was too great for me to pass up. I took the exit and found myself on a long country road. The petroglyphs were ten miles away. As I drove, I noticed there there was no barbed wire along the road! In the distance, I saw a tall Saguaro cactus in the desert (the one with multiple arms) and I stopped the car and took some shots. Finally, a shot of me with a cactus!

I got to the petroglyphs and took a few photos. It was interesting to see the carvings, but after a few minutes you get the general idea. I read the placards placed by the National Park Service and was surprised to find that the symbols are usually archetypes and carry significance and meaning. But that's as far as my attention span would take me. I left the area as the sun was setting and made to to Harrah's in Maricopa, AZ at around 6:00p.

Because I was so far ahead in my schedule (I wasn't supposed to show up to Harrah's for another two days!), I didn't have a place to stay for the night. I was just going to play it by ear and go to a Days Inn somewhere but I took a chance and asked the front desk what they could do for me for a room. They swiped my Harrah's players card and informed me that I could be comped if I wanted a room! Um, sign me up! I checked into my room, which was a long and strange walk along the pool from the casino floor and went to the poker room.

For a Harrah's poker room, it was a little small. There were about 8 tables, of which a single game of, you guessed it, $3-$6 hold'em was going on. However, there was a tourney starting at 7:00p for Omaha Hi-Lo! I signed up quickly and only had to wait a few minutes for the tourney to start. I took my seat for the 3 table tourney and even though I got bad beat on one of the opening hands, I managed to recover and made the final table easily. However, blinds were escalating very very quickly and my holding were crap. Something was going to have to happen. As the table progressed and I managed to stay afloat, I noticed that I was fixing to bubble. 4 places paid and I was the short stack with 5 players left. But luck was on my side when a woman in the 10 seat decided to push with A4KJ and was cracked by the big stack who scooped with Aces full and no low. I thanked him for getting me into the money and promptly scooped the next two hands. With the blinds the way they were and the structure being what it was, that put me near the top of the leaderboard. The big stack proposed a chop and even though the 4th place person had a single BB to her name, I agreed for two reasons. One, I'm not a local and the prize pool was tiny so I was felt like being nice. Two, anything can happen, as seen by my vault into second place in two hands. The 4th place prize was only $30, so I'd feel like an idiot if I busted out in that position. Omaha Hi-Lo is such a fickle game.

We chopped for $81 profit each and moved on to a $3-$6 lhe game. It was a rollicking good time. There was a group of randy older women (who doesn't love randy older women) making completely inappropriate sex jokes and causing your humble naarator to blush something fierce. Seriously, grandmothers making cunnilinigus jokes are funny! Joanna, the loudest of the group, pegged me as Jewish immediately.

"You're a jew, aintcha?"
"Yeah, how'd you guess"
"Are you kidding me? Look at that schnoz!"

Ok, you got me. Joanna proclaimed that she "had a little jew in her" too to which her friend exclaimed, "You mean your boyfriend's here right now?". Dirty dirty women.

I got friendly with a seven foot tall black man (not an exaggeration) named Hawk who's something of a local legend in those parts. Aside from being friendly and gregarious in his own way, he hailed from Bed-Stuy, so at least we had Brooklyn to talk about. Two other folks at the table hailed from Brooklyn too, including Freddy who insisted to me that there was no such thing as a Syrian Jew. He should know, he said, he's Syrian! I think the large Syrian Jewish population near Avenue S and Ocean Parkway would disagree with Freddy but he was drunk and loud so I declined to argue. Freddy and I had a bit of a smackdown comparing girlfriends. Ali is 12.5 years younger than me and beautiful beyond compare, which usually wins these arguments but poker players don't measure along that yardstick. Instead, it seems to go with who's girlfriend is skankiest. Freddy pulled out a picture of himself with a girl who was maybe 30 (to his 50+), dressed in a halter top that completely exposed her side boob and a tatoo running along the side of her body. Ok, Freddy you win.

I played until 2:45a when I couldn't take it any longer and cashed out with +$150 in profit, bidding everyone a good night. It had been the most fun I'd had playing $3-$6 ever in my life.

More to come...

Arizona trip report - Part 3 of 8

2009-12-22T00:33:00.006-05:00

Arizona Trip - Day 3

I woke up at 9:00a on Monday morning, December 7, 2009, intending to go to Sedona and see the sights. Perhaps take a few pictures of chasms or gorges or whatever else they have that's pretty. Maybe buy some things for Ali or my family as holiday gifts. Whatever I thought about doing, it wasn't what actually happened, which was:

The single strangest day of my life.

I stepped outside of the casino and found it to be cold and drizzling. My flight took off from Prescott airport to Farmington, NM at around 2:00p. Given the weather reports coming in, I decided it was prudent to go to the airport first to make sure everything was OK rather than go to Sedona. Besides, seeing Sedona in the rain wasn't what I had in mind. So I drove the 35 minutes to the airport and got out to investigate. A word here about Prescott regional airport. It's small. Super small. Think the show 'Wings'. There's a little airstrip there with planes parked just beyond the fence of the small parking lot that look like toys. The 'terminal', if you want to call it that, is a building about 150 feet long that you drive right up to and go inside like you're visiting a tiny strip mall shop. Inside is two small counters, a tiny booth for a rental car agency, and the entrance to a greasy spoon diner populated by Chuck Yeagers long lost cousins. Craggy faced old men with leather bomber jackets sipping black coffee out of ceramic mugs. I didn't catch their conversation but I'm sure there was talk of the weather coming in. It was very dark and overcast and the rain was light but cold and steady. There was no one at the Great Lakes Aviation counter (my airline carrier) when I got there and I found out from the girl manning the rental car kiosk that the desks don't have people there until an hour before the flight, to take care of passenger loading. I called the number for Great Lakes and told the woman my dilemma. I was worried the flight would be cancelled because of weather and could they give me a refund. They informed me that the flight was still showing on time departure so a refund wasn't necessary. I called the Ute Mountain casino and asked how much snow they were expecting. They told me 6-8 inches. Now I might have been able to brave flying in a clap trap airplane, through rough weather, over mountains, and drive through six inches of snow to get there. What I was worried about was reutrning! If I get snowed in in Colorado, my entire itinerary would be thrown off. So I did the prudent thing and decided to ditch. Yeah, I'd lose the price of my flight and the rental car, but at least I would be able to complete my trip in relative safety. I called back Great Lakes one more time to see what could be done. The only thing they could do, they told me, was give me credit towards a future flight and waive the change fee because of the weather. I told them that I wouldn't be able to take a future flight within the year's time span as I lived in New York and they don't serve that area. So all was lost.

I drove back to the town of Prescott for breakfast, intending to go to my Tuesday night destination, Parker, Arizona, a full day and a half earlier than I expected. When in town, I noticed the rain had turned to sleet and snow, which means the temperature was dropping. Not a good sign. I asked a local shop keeper on Whiskey Row where I could eat breakfast and she pointed me in the right direction. I bought a half pound of butterscotch flavored coffee beans from her as a token of my gratitude. Whiskey Row, incidentally, is in the center of town and used to be a row of bars and brothels in the old west. The town has maintained a good deal of that charm, even though it's perfectly gentrified now.

I ate a HUGE breakfast at a western place. So big, in fact, that I apologized in advance to the waiter on how much food I was going to be wasting. I had scrambled eggs with toast and potatoes, which in normal environments is a smallish meal. This monstrosity used 4 eggs, mixed with about a pound of seasoned beef and vegetables, a good pound and a half of seasoned potato hash and 4 pieces of thick Texas Toast. I ate about a quarter of it, maybe, and I was completely stuffed. Into the car I went and off I drove.

As I was driving out of town, the snow was getting thicker. It was no longer slushy now and the roads were starting to get icy. I passed a Days Inn and briefly thought about spending the night here and continuing on tomorrow after the storm had passed. But I pressed on. I saw a woman in a small truck, with her baby daughter strapped in the car seat next to her, stop on the side of the road to make a phone call. From the look of it, she lived beyond the mountain pass outside of town, a twenty mile drive. But she had stopped and called her husband to tell him she wasn't going through there. And still I pressed on.

You see, dear readers, I am an idiot. There's a joke my mother (Rest in Peace) once told me that goes something like this:

A devoutly religious man was sitting in his house when a flash flood hit the town. As the waters rose to his doorstep, his neighbors rowed by in a boat and offered him a ride to safety. "No thanks," said the man, "God will provide". As the water rose into his house, covering his couch and TV and he had to flee to the second floor, a canoe passed by his window, paddled by a man and his wife. They offered him a ride to safety and he waved them off. "Thank you, but God will provide." As the waters rose further and the only refuge was the very top of his roof, a helicopter swung by. A policeman with a bullhorn lowered a rope and pleaded with the man to grab on but he stood his ground. "God will provide!," he shouted. Finally, the man drowned. When he got up to heaven, he came face to face with God himself and asked, "Why didn't you provide? Why didn't you save me?". God replied, "What do you want? I sent a boat, a canoe and a helicopter!"

My friends, I am that man. I am an idiot. After multiple opportunities to stop my trip as the snow was getting thicker and the roads were starting to get covered, I kept driving. I kept driving even as I had to slow my speed to keep from fishtailing. I kept driving even as other drivers turned back. I kept driving even as the wind whipped up whiteout conditions, leaving my visibility under 60 feet. I kept driving. I saw a sign for the local National Forest and understood, with a sense of dread, that the next town I could stop at would not be for twenty miles. I was hoping desperately that the road I was on would go down the mountain, lower in elevation where the rain was. But the road kept going up at a steady pace. I was heading into a mountain pass in a National Forest with nothing around me for miles.

There were cars on the road, thankfully, so if I got stuck I could at least signal for help. But I was frightened. As I entered the mountain pass, the roads starting curving dangerously. My speed was already down to 15 MPH at the most. I was mostly riding on first gear trying to negotiate tricky turns. You see, my good friends, I was about 6200 feet in the air, the road was about 20 feet wide and there were NO GUARDRAILS! To my right was the mountainside, with a ditch in the road that if I fell into I would not be able to drive out of. Not a steep ditch, but a ditch of about 3 feet none the less. To my left, across one short lane of traffic, was the edge of a clif that fell into a ravine hundreds of feet deep. Over there was certain death. My car was already slipping on occasion and I pumped the brake, rather than slam on it, every time I needed some traction. At the speed I was going, the turns weren't too bad, but the incline and slope of the road was all over the place. When I saw the road take a sharp drop or rise, I had to brake or speed up accordingly, lest my car go sliding in the wrong direction. It got so bad at one point that I unbuckled my seat belt and unlocked the driver side door for fear that I would need to jump out of my car if it started sliding slowly and uncontrollably for the cliff.

I'd like to say I'm a brave guy, not given to too much fear, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't crapping my pants at this point. Not literally, but you get the idea.

At the 10 mile mark, halfway through this mountain pass, I was traveling behind a Ford 150 truck who was helping me out by cutting a path through the snow for me. At this point, the road was covered by a full 2-3 inches of snow and ice and every little bit helped. The road up ahead took a sharp incline and the Ford took it at too slow a speed and couldn’t make it up. I had to come to a full stop as I saw him desperately spin his tires trying to make traction. He finally gave up and pushed his truck to the side of the road, allowing me to pass. I had trouble making it up the hill as well, but my lighter car had an advantage and I made it without too much effort. I kept driving slowly until, finally, the elevation started dropping and the precipitation turn to rain. As soon as I had clear roads under my wheels, without a hint of snow, and the temperaure was back in the upper 30's, I increased my speed to 40 mph. I was out of the mountains and headed into the valley.

This is a picture taken from Google Maps of a section of the road I'm talking about. Try to imagine it with driving snows and covered in ice!

I had to stop on the side of the road next to a farm just to breathe a sigh of relief. It had been the scariest 2.5 hours of my life.

There was another 90 miles until I got to Parker, AZ and the Blue Water Casino, and I didn't know if I'd need to go through another mountain pass. So at the first gas station I saw, I stopped at the stop n' shop and purchased an impromptu emergency preparedness kit. Two nutri-bars, a jar of peanut butter, two big bottles of water, toilet paper and last Sunday's paper (in case I needed extended reading material). Everything I would need to survive a night long stay in my car.

As it happens, there was no more snow, but the monsoon rains and wind made it difficult to see for long stretches of time. As I sped along the road, as fast as I could, I came along a sheep farm with a hundred or so of the critters all grazing by the side of the road. I couldn't resist stopping to take a picture, rain and all.

I also went through a small mountain range afterwards which resulted not in snow but in thick shrouded fog which lowered my visibility back to about 40 feet. As I crawled at 30 MPH behind a huge semi-trailer, I thought to myself, "How did I get in this situation? I could have been in a hotel room right now!". After another hour of slow going and trying to feel my way in the fog, the air cleared and the massive storm was behind me. The desert dryness ensured smooth clean roads for the rest of the trip and I zoomed along at 75+ MPH until I reached my destination in Parker.

The Blue Water Casino is in yet another small town and the first thing I noticed when I got out of the car was the incredibly bad smell in the air. Not quite phosphorous, but something like rotting vegetables. Like the Eagles song, "the warm smell of calitas", perhaps? Who knows? All I knew is that I couldn't believe people were just walking around like there was nothing going on! I high-tailed it into the casino where the rotting smell was replaced by stale cigarette smoke. Yay me. It was about 4:30pm at this point and I was really hoping that a game was going on, but no such luck. The poker room, a small sad affair of 6 poker tables stuck in the back of the casino floor, was manned by two dealers who were just waiting around for a game to start. The tables were all covered and there wasn't a single name on the board, so they'd be waiting for a while. I had just driven for 4 hours through torrential snow, wind, rain and fog and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to play *something*! I offered the dealers to play Chinese poker for fun while they waited but they hadn't heard of the game. I wandered off onto the casino floor, looking to at least play a shoe of $5 blackjack. There were two blackjack tables open with dealers and not a single person sitting at them. Not a one. That's at least 12 open seats, got it? This is important to the story. I sidled up to a table, got a stack of red chips and placed a $5 chip on two spots, intending to play two hands at a time. I like playing double hands at blackjack because it feels like I'm smoothing out my variance, even though I know it's only an illusion. I figure, hey, if I get a natural 16 on the first hand, I could always come back with a blackjack on the second hand! As I put down my two red chips, the dealer pointed at the bets and said, "Sir, you have to play double the minimum if you want to play two hands." I was incredulous. I looked around the casino floor and maybe 50 people were milling around the slots. Nary a single person was playing table games. Not one. Now I realize why casinos wouldn't want you to play minimum bets on two hands; it keeps higher rollers from playing the game if you're taking up a seat playing minimums. But there was no one playing! No one waiting. Not a single person interested, not to mention there were 10 other seats available. I pointed this out to the dealer by saying, "Really? There's no one playing!". He re-iterated his ruling and it pissed me off so much that I immediately asked for a color-up and cashed out. I wanted to play, but now the dealer's stupidity cost the casino money and he cost himself possible tips. The right thing to do in this scenario would be to call the pit boss, three feet behind him, and ask him to waive the requirement. I'm sure he would have agreed. As I passed by the blackjack table on the way to the door, I couldn't help putting in a little dig to the dealer. "Sorry guy, but you just lost business." Sure, he's not going to lose sleep over it, but the pit boss who was chatting with him about the situation might feel otherwise.

I made my way over to Blythe, CA to go to a small poker room called Bruce's Bar and Casino but before I did I stopped into a local Wal-Mart to get an iPhone Charger for the car. I forgot to bring the one I already owned and I needed it badly. I ended up spending $50 bucks on one but it had the added feature of simultaneously charging the phone and also providing the cable to play the iPhone through the car's AUX port. Still a rip-off.

It was another 90 minutes to get to Blythe and by that time the sun had dropped and it was night-time. As I pulled up to the bar at around 6PM, I was surprised to see that it was closed! I looked at my iPhone and discovered that it was actually 5PM. In the middle of my drive, having gone about 40 miles west, I had changed time zones! The iPhone has the wonderful feature of automatically showing the correct time for the time zone depending on your physical location. The posted time for the poker room was 6PM, which was confirmed when I called the bar a few weeks ago in preparation for this trip. So I figured I'd wait an hour in town. No biggie. Blythe is a bit skeevy, especially in this location. I had dinner at a local Mexican place (it sucked, surprisingly) and went back. At 6PM, still closed. Hmmm... I walked over to the entrance to the "poker room", a small back room affair with two tables as far as I could see through the window. The sign posted said 7PM. Damn. I drove into town looking for something to do and stumbled on a movie theater. Nothing playing that I wanted to see but they did have a sizeable video arcade. I cashed $10 of quarters and re-lived happy memories playing Star Wars, Time Crisis 2, Ms. Pacman and Galaga. Oh, Galaga...

I returned at about 7PM local time and it was still closed! What kind of bar doesn't open at 7PM?!?! Even if it is a Monday. Don't people drink on Mondays? There was a help wanted sign for waitresses needed and I called the number hoping to speak to the manager to find out what was going on. A guy answered and when I asked why the place was closed he said, "Uh, my dad's not home now but the bar should be open in about 45 minutes." Yeah, I wasn't waiting in this skeevy hell-hole for another 45 minutes. It was getting late and I needed to be heading on down the road. I was supposed to stay in Blythe that night but I ditched the hotel room and ran down to El Centro, about an hour south on the Mexican border. I needed to hit another bar game down there called Tommy's Saloon and Casino and I figured by the time I got there, the game should be in full swing.

For the record, I'm recording Bruce's Bar as an official visit. I did everything I could. 'Nuff Said. However, I couldn't get a chip and there doesn't seem to be one online that I can easily buy. So if there's anyone out there with a $1 Bruce's Bar and Casino chip from Blythe, CA, please contact me for a quick and easy sale. Thank you for listening. We now return you to your regular story.

I got into El Centro, CA at about 9pm. El Centro is a border town on the Mexican border and it's as rough looking as it sounds. A small strip of stores and lots of tough looking locals hanging around. I parked in front of the bar and went through the double doors. It was a complete dive. A creaky wooden floor with a worn wooden bar on one side and a beaten up pool table on the other. The three patrons drinking at the bar were, surprising to me, white, as were the couple playing pool. But they all looked like they were mean and ready for trouble. I walked to the back room which had a low wall making it visible from the bar area. There was a table cramped in the space with a "cage", consisting of a spanish speaking woman named Maria making change for players and two Mexican dudes dealing the game. The game had 7 players at the moment and they were playing $1-$3 nlhe. I bought in for two and followed the pace of play for 30 minutes. It was an aggressive game, with $17 PF raises the norm and 4 or 5 callers each time. Pots swung wildly back and forth and the hands being shown down were, not surprisingly, crap. Every so often, I'd be able to limp cheaply into a pot, so I took chances on hands that would enable me to double through. I had some luck on suited connectors and gap cards and built my stack steadily to $320, not showing down even once. By this time, I'd been there about an hour and was chatting amiably with the locals who, while very tough looking, opened up easily enough. I asked how long it was to Yuma, my next destination, and that got the table talking about what I was doing there and why I was traveling. Everything seemed fine.

And then I was dealt A♣8♣ on the button. It limped to me, I called and 6 players saw a flop. 2 ♥4 ♣5 ♣. I had two overs, the nut flush draw and a wheel gutshot draw. An early position player, a white guy around 30 with a yellow hoodie and a tatoo near his neck that was partially concealed, bet out $15. Three people called and it was an easy call for me. The turn was the 7♣. Yellow Hoodie bet out $25 and it folded to a Mexican kid in seat 3. He called and I raised to $100. My feeling was that Yellow Hoodie might have bet the flop on the King Flush draw and made it, meaning he might be willing to pay me off on my raise. My feelings, I thought, were confirmed when he agonized over the call but finally made it. Once he made the call, I figure I'm getting totally pizzaid. Mexican kid wisely retreated. I have about $215 left in my stack and the river comes, the 6 ♣! I almost had to look twice but I really did have the straight flush. The unbeatable hand. Yellow Hoodie checks and I try to figure out how much a King Flush would call. The pot is about $280 or so, so I figure $100 oughta do it. I slide out a silo of red chips and announce a $100 bet. Yellow Hoodie instantly goes all-in. Wow! I instantly call and he tables 3 ♣6 ♥ with a flourish. I quietly table A ♣8 ♣ and the table goes nuts! Yellow Hoodie looks like he got kicked in the gut and all the color drains from his face, only to be replaced by the flush of red. Flushed Face = Angry. I stack my chips for the dealer and he matches them up and I drag the biggest pot of the trip with straight flush over straight flush. Looking back, I really can't believe he called my re-raise on the turn. He had flopped the joint straight but got married to it. He put me on a flush draw on the turn (blocking raise on the button? Really?) and must have thought that he was with the angels when he spiked the 6 ♣ on the river. Whoops!

Yellow Hoodie angrily went to the ATM in the bar and got $100 and cashed it for 5 stacks of white. On the first hand, and with steam pouring out of his ears, he went all-in on the flop with a pair of 5's and a 3 kicker. He was outdone by pocket Jacks. He went back to the ATM, this time with $200. By that point I had seen enough. This guy was going to get his money back one way or another and I didn't want that to by from a knife in my back. I had $630 in front of me, that they knew of, and $2000 in my wallet that they didn't. It was time to take the high road. Without saying a word, I cashed out and walked to the front door, looking over my shoulder as I did. Yellow Hoodie was still spewing chips and I jumped in my car and locked the door quickly. I started her up, backed out into the street and quickly came to the corner and turned right.

Then I saw it. Flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. It was like in the movie "The Cooler" (Great freakin' movie, btw) where Bernie and Natalie get away from the casino with a boatload of money only to be stopped by a cop who works for the casino trying to get the money back. Yeah, it was a cop who stopped me. I pulled over and put both hands on the steering wheel. He ambled up and I lowered my window.

"How are you tonight?," he asked.
"Not too bad, how are you?"
"Ok. Looks like you made one of them Florida stops at that stop sign. You didn't even slow the car down" (For the record, my rental car had Florida plates).
"I did. Oh, sorry, I didn't notice."
"You from around here?"
"No, just visiting. I'm from New York actually. The car's a rental"
"Lemme see your driver's license"

I handed it over and once he determined that I hadn't been drinking and I really wasn't local, he let me go. I was grateful he wasn't trying to rob me and I made it back onto the highway and went straight to Yuma. Do not pass go. Do collect your winnings. And for god's sake, make a complete stop at stop signs!

As I was driving along the highway, the wind started to pick up and dust swirls were dancing along the highway. Every so often, I big gust would blow so much dust on the road that the lane markers became invisible and visibility briefly dropped to zero. And I mean, nothing. As a result, we all slowed down (again!). After a few minutes of this, the dust become more frequent and I was driving through a full fledged dust storm. What the hell?!? The weather in Arizona is W-E-I-R-D. I looked up ahead and noticed a car in the smack middle of the road with flashing lights out his back window and two yellow arrows pointing to either side of him. I didn't understand why he'd be driving in the middle of the road when I realized it was a government vehicle who purpose is to mark the middle of the road for drivers along this stretch of road where dust storms are frequent. It was a helpful safety gauge. After 5 miles of guiding us, the dust storms faded and the government pacer car drove across the median to the other side of the road to help a new group of cars going in the opposite direction. I guess you learn something new every day.

I pulled into the Quechan Casino parking lot in Yuma (actually Winterhaven, CA but close enough), got a room for the night and crashed, hard. The hotel was actually quite beautiful but I had absolutely zero interest in checking it out. I was too tired and exhausted from the days's hellish activities. I had been through fog, blizzard, monsoon rain, a dust storm thought I was going to drop off a cliff, got stopped by a cop, saw frightening lightning displays in a farmer's field and had to run out of a wild west saloon for fear of being stabbed in the neck for my poker winnings. I deserved my rest.

More to come...

Arizona trip report - Part 2 of 8

2009-12-21T23:31:00.005-05:00

Arizona trip report - Day 2

I woke up in Show Low and hit the road for Camp Verde, AZ. There's a casino there named Cliff Castle and I had booked a room to spend the night there. Along the way was the most scenic drive I took the entire trip. I went through a National Forest and mountain gorges which took my breath away. Every few hundred feet, I'd let out a "damn, that's nice" and continue driving. As I wound my way into a particularly beautiful passage of windy mountain road, I stopped at every opportunity for pictures. The great state of Arizona had thoughtfully provided many such opportunities for photographers like myself, and I took full advantage. What should have been a 2.5 hour ride turned into something closer to 4.

I arrived at Cliff Castle, which is in a really amazing spot, high on a plateau surrounded by fantastic views of mountains and buttes (pronounced beauts, like the word beautiful). Inside was a homey looking poker room with a bunch of locals mixing it up playing $3-$6 Omaha hi-lo. I joined, and donated $160 over the course of two hours. I had a great time, but I wasn't hitting my draws and I didn't scoop a single pot the whole session. I moved over to a $3-$6 lhe game going on and found my rhythm, crushing it for $174. The only noteworthy hand was when I decided to use my new card spinner, gifted to me by the wonderful Dawn Summers over at I Had Outs, and the very first hand I used it for, I flopped quad Jacks. Clearly this is an impressive spinner!

At this point in my trip, I was way ahead in my itinerary, by about 10 hours or so. This gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, being high in the mountains, there wasn't a whole lot. I was only about 45 minutes from Sedona, which I heard has amazing scenery and a cool vibe. I debated doing that but I already had it in my schedule to do that the following morning, so I decided to see another casino, also ahead of schedule, about 30 minutes away in Prescott.

Bucky's Casino, in Prescott, AZ, is another small casino with a small poker room. Nothing noteworthy here except that there is a rodeo ring across the street, which I found interesting. Rodeo sports is a big attraction in Arizona, as you'd expect in the southwest. I played 2-8 spread limit hold'em for about two hours, taking $88 in profit for my troubles.

Going back to Cliff Castle, where I stayed for the night, I joined a 3-6 lhe game in progress. It was 11:20pm when I sat down, a big mistake. I donked of $200 in short order before figuring out that playing tired in a limit game is no way to play at all.

One more thing about Cliff Castle. The rooms that you book at the casino aren't even in the casino. Hell, they're not even on the property. You have to drive around the corner to a motel that serves as the casino's "hotel". Bleccch.

As I was getting ready to go to bed, I turned on the TV and listened alarmingly at the weather report. Snow was due for northern Arizona, and in large quantities. A rare winter storm was blowing in and Flagstaff, just over an hour north of where I was, was expecting 2 feet!!!! Holy crap, I thought, I hope I don't get caught in that! I wasn't worried at the time since I was supposed to be taking an airplane tomorrow afternoon to Farmington, New Mexico where I would then rent a car and drive to Ute Mountain Casino in Towoac, Colorado. I fell asleep without any worries.

More to come...

Arizona trip report - Part 1 of 8

2009-12-21T08:43:00.006-05:00

Arizona trip report - Day 1

The flight to Phoenix airport was completely uneventful. The flight took off ontime, landed 30 minutes early, and I was in my rental car and on the road within 45 minutes of landing. It was approx. 11PM local time when I landed, which means 1AM on my body clock. But I couldn't fall asleep anytime soon because it was a one hour drive to my hotel in Eloy, AZ, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. I reached Eloy, a small little desert town off the highway, with no problems and checked into my room. The nice gentleman who was manning the desk suggested I eat a late supper (I was starving) at the truck reststop diner a few hundred yards down the road. It was cold, about 40 degrees and I drove the distance. The diner was made specifically for truck drivers and I got a few uninterested looks when I walked in. The Bob Seger song, "Turn The Page", flashed through my head (~you can feel the eyes upon you, as you're shaking off the cold~). My late dinner was a few pieces of rye toast and some scrambled eggs and I went back to my room and drifted off to sleep.

My body clock woke me up, rudely, at 6:45am local time. The sun had not yet come out, but it was close, and the thought of sunrise photography flashed through my mind. Immediately, I raced to put my clothes on, grabbed my camera gear, and ran out the door. The sun was actually up, but still hidden behind the mountain range in the distance and I waited patiently in the morning cold for the moment when the sun would make it's grand entrance to the visible sky. I was in the empty and desolate parking lot of a Mexican restaurant across the street. Beyond the parking lot lay a vast emptiness of desert, shrubs and strange looking vegetation of all sorts. Finally, the sun came out and though it was shrouded in clouds and mist, it was a glorious sight and a perfect start to the trip.

My first casino stop was in Tucson at a place called Casino Del Sol. It was a very quick 45 minute trip and when I arrived, I was happy to see a local fair of some sort taking place in the parking lot. There were tamale stands set up and I found out from the locals that it was a tamale festival; sort of the general equivalent to a chili cook-off. About a dozen local restaurants had set up booths and were cooking homemade tamales for the public to try. I feasted, naturally. I had a green corn tamale stuffed with pork (outstanding and very spicy) and a yellow corn tamale stuffed with chicken. Both were excellent and made a great southwestern breakfast. The parking lot also had a stage set up where about 18 children, aged 7 to 17, all dressed in Mexican mariachi regalia, were playing mariachi music with gusto. And they were excellent musicians. When the 11 year old with the trumpet started belting out his jazz flavored solo, I was mightily impressed.

I watched for a few minutes, getting a few shots in, and then headed into the casino for my first taste of Arizona poker!

The room at Casino Del Sol is smallish, at around 8 or 9 tables, and there was a single game of 2-250 spread limit going on at the moment with 3 people on the waiting list. Some explanation is in order. Arizona, like California, doesn't have *true* No Limit poker. By state law in Arizona the maximum a person can wager in a single bet is $500. What this means is that anytime the action is to you, you can bet or raise up to $500. If you have a stack of $1000 in front of you, and you'd like to go all in, you can't. You can, however, get raised and then re-raise in $500 increments. What this means is that this is essentially a limit game. Howerver, unlike in fixed limit where the wager amounts are the same all the time, this is a *spread* limit game where the wager amounts are determined by each player within a certain range. In this case, the range was $2-250. So it acts like a limit game (3 raise maximum, etc...) but the bets are variable up to a cap. Got that?

In essence, and with only a few exceptions, the game acts like no limit poker. The 2-250 game has $1/$2 blinds and betting is similar to 1-2 NLHE in all aspects. But it occurred to me a few days later when discussing the peculiarities of spread limit poker with another player that there is one situation in which this form of poker can be gamed in such a way as to completely change how the game functions. This has to do with the cap on the number of raises. Remember, this is a limit game at the end of the day so there is a bet+3 raise limit to betting. So, let's say you're in a situation where the betting is something like this:

You hold JT suited on the button. UTG+1 raises to $6. It folds around to seat 8 who re-raises to $15. At this point, in a normal NLHE game, you might feel adverse to flat calling the re-raise to $15 because you would fear the large re-raise of UTG+1 who, after all, opened up the betting. But you can avoid that situation in this spread limit format by min-raising the re-raise! The raise from $6 to $15 constitutes a $13 raise, so by re-re-raising to $28 ($15+$13), you've capped the betting on that round. UTG+1 will be forced to either call or fold, as well as the re-raiser. What you've done, in effect, is limit the amount you have to put in to see the flop and can now snap off any AA or KK with your suited connectors for a relatively cheap price. This defeats the purpose of No Limit, where a player can make it too expensive to see a flop. Here, the implied odds of cracking a deep stacked player's large pocket pair might justify capping the betting with a min-raise to take a flop!

Luckily, this situation is pretty rare. The game acts like a normal 1-2 nlhe game in all respects when I saw it in action. So there I was, looking at this full 2-250 spread limit game and a bunch of players started congragating for what looked like a tourney about to start. I inquired and found out that a $15 Omaha Hi-Lo tourney was about to go off with 30 players. I jumped at the chance, ponied up my money and started playing. The structure of the tourney was completely awful. The 12 minute blinds actually dropped to 8 minutes after the fourth level whent he rebuy period stopped. With the 2 rebuys allowed and the add-on, a player could bust out at the end of the third level and do BOTH his rebuys and addon and have a bigger stack than someone who's been winning consistently through the tourney thus far. It was impossible to know what a *normal* chipstack should be and combined with the huge blinds, it was hard to classify this tourney as anything but bingo poker. I actually made it to the final table, but busted out 8th. Top 3 paid and cest la vie.

I collected my chip and headed over to the Desert Diamond casino, also in Tucson. The room was smaller than Casino Del Sol (and no tamales!) with a 4-8 lhe game the only action. I played for 30 minutes, collected my souvenier dollar chip and hit the road for Globe, AZ. I had plenty of time to hang out in Tucson if I'd wanted since the drive to Globe was only about 2 hours, and I should have stayed to see the city. But my poker wanderlust told me to hit the road. It was a mistake, as it turns out, since the casino in Globe, the Apache Gold, was awful. The poker room had no games going on at 4:30p on a Saturday evening! The poker officially opened at 6pm and I was supposed to stay the night there but I was so jazzed with adrenaline that the thought of staying at this dumpy casino and playing 3-6 (maybe) was depressing. The drive up to the casino was beautiful mountain scenery and the next leg of my trip would bring me through even higher mountain ranges.

I decided to ditch my pre-paid hotel room and head up to the Hon-Dah casino in Pinetop, AZ and spend the night there. It was a pleasant drive there and while the light was still out, I saw some particularly beautiful scenery. The light as it catches the redrocks of northern Arizona are a real sight to see. Hon-Dah was also a small place, with only a single 3-6 lhe game going on, but at least it was later in the day when I got there. I played 2.5 hours of limit, losing $200 in the process and finally picked up, frustrated, when I had to go eat. I ate a really good prime rib buffet dinner at the casino and drove out to find a motel for the night. Driving west of the casino, about 15 miles, I stopped in the town of Show Low, a quiet mountain town (like South Park, yes!) and bedded down for the night there at a Days Inn. On the way, I saw most of the town had lined the Main Street on either side, camped out in the darkness in winter jackets, snuggies, blankets and clutching mugs of hot cocoa. I pulled over to ask someone what was going on. I didn't want to miss a fireworks show or a meteor shower (especially in the clear star spangled mountain sky). Turns out it was just the local "lights festival parade" which they do every year leading up to the lighting of the town's Christmas tree. I debated staying to check it out but decided against it. Before I actually went to sleep, though, I did manage to get a few pictures of a house that was very prettily made up for the season. Show Low is a very cute small town.

More to come...

Worst possible hand

2009-12-21T08:18:00.003-05:00

I was dicking around on UltimateBet, waiting for a $10 HORSE tourney to start, when I succumbed to the temptations of the 'CASINO' tab. I put $10 into a PaiGow table (the poker players -EV game!) and bet $1 a hand. Four hands in, I was dealt this: The Worst Possible PaiGow Hand.

A 9-5 high with an 87 top. Pretty impressive. Online -EV blows.

You fool, ya damned fool

2009-12-21T01:45:00.002-05:00

Brittany Murphy, dead at 32. Drugs? Hmmmmm....Lemme think about that one for a minute. Ok, a second.

The only reason I post this is advertisement for the January 15th deadline for the Wall Street 2010 Dead Pool! Brittany Murphy would have scored 10 points for the base death, an additional 10 bonus points for being in the 25-39 age bracket, plus a possible John Belushi bonus of 5 points for dying of a self-inflicted drug overdose and a possible River Phoenix bonus for being the youngest person on anyone's list to die all year! How can resist this kind of action?! Oh, there are rumors her husband might have done the deed himself, triggering the 8 point Michael Jackson bonus!

Um...sign up soon with your list of picks for the new year (up to 25).

Dead pool update

2009-12-16T15:14:00.000-05:00

I'm working on the blog posts for my Arizona trip which I got back from this past Sunday. But in the meantime, I thought I'd mention that my Wall Street 2010 Dead Pool is still a going concern. I hadn't been pestering you guys for a while because of my mom's passing, but now that all the hubub has died down, it's time to ramp it back up. Because of the delay, I'm going to push the dates of the pool back two weeks from January 1st, 2010 through January 1st, 2011 to January 15, 2010 through January 15, 2011.

Please have your lists to me no later than midnight January 15th. The money ($30) can be sent via Paypal or any other form you'd like by January 30th.

If you have any questions, let me know at (F r i t z l e) AT (g m a i l) DOT (c o m). No parentheses in my email.

P.S. Check the link above for dead pool rules.

Rising from the ashes

2009-12-04T10:49:00.002-05:00

Tonight, I make my way to Phoenix for my Arizona poker trip. I leave tonight, Friday Dec. 4th and return Sunday, Dec. 13th. It will be a long trip, with 18 poker rooms on the agenda. There will be a lot of driving on this trip, including a few 3+ hour legs on single lane roads through mountains and deserts, but I'm leaving myself a fair amount of time to spend at each location. Contrast this with my Vegas trip from two years ago, where I darted around to nearly 40 rooms in a week, spending barely 45 minutes in each location. That was a tiring trip. This one should be a bit more rejuvenating.

I'll be doing a lot of contemplation in the stark and beautiful locales, I'm sure. I have a lot of things to work out in my mind and my life is rushing ahead at a frenetic pace at the moment. I'm making peace with my situation, as much as possible, and spending some quality time alone will be good for my head. On Thursday, I'm going to be joined in Phoenix (after I make a huge loop around the state) by Viv and Chris. I'm super-psyched to spend time with them, and anxious to see what the poker rooms in the greater Phoenix area are like. If there's anyone reading this who know what I should expect, please give me a shout.

In other news, Ali and her two girlfriends are going to Vegas for Spring Break! It's a girls-only trip and I most definitely wasn't invited. That's a shame, because seeing as I have free time, I was hoping to go to Vegas to finish up the 20+ rooms I still have to get to in that vicinity. But I was told not to be anywhere in the city during that week. So I've spent hours and hours looking over possible poker itineraries for that time period (Mar. 12th - Mar. 19th). After contemplating many choices that included Oregon, Northern Nevada, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico, I decided on California. The simple reason for that is that California, after Nevada, has the greatest concentration of legal cardrooms in the country. Washington State and Michigan, believe it or not, run a close second on the list but Michigan they're too cold for me for a March trip and their "cardrooms" are often nothing more than bars with a single table.

I'm running into a dilemma with my poker room quest in that I still haven't come up with a satisfactory definition of what a "card room" is. Casinos with poker rooms obviously qualify. California cardrooms qualify because they're main business purpose is gambling. Dog tracks and Jai-Alai Frontons and the like that have poker rooms qualify for the same reason. But what about those small bars in Montana, Washington and Michigan? Is it really a "poker room" if it's nothing more than a single table stuck in the back of a bar that happens to be legal. It's one thing if it's a real casino, with slot machines and table games, that happens to be dominated by a bar. That was the case for a card room in Laughlin that I went to once. But if the main purpose of the facility is drinking, not gambling, it seems more iffy.

I normally wouldn't care to distinguish these things, but after I run out of casinos, dog tracks and the like, do I really want to spend my precious time driving 1500 miles criss-crossing Montana to visit every dive bar in the state? For poker games that probably don't run until 6PM? If they get off at all? That would be the worst trip of my life.

{Sigh} Quests are hard.

Oh, so where was I? Oh yes, California. Yeah, after looking at the possible itineraries, I settled on hitting up the coastal region. I got a sick airfare too. $280 all in to fly into Los Angeles, drive up the coast, go east past Oakland, deep into Napa around Clear Lake and then swing back into San Francisco to fly home. This trip will be way more frantic than my Arizona trip. 34 poker rooms are on the agenda there, in 7 days! Fortunately, though there are many more rooms to see, they are spaced much closer together. I'll have one 3 hour driving leg and then my longest leg will be about 90 minutes. At this point, I can do 90 minutes standing on my head! BTW, if you haven't driven in California (outside of the cities), it really is a treat. Beautiful mountain vistas and rolling hill to the East, sweeping plains and flat deserts to the South and breathtaking Oceanic views to the West. Really something to behold.

One last thing, Ali is studying for law school finals this week (which is why I have time to travel) and her laptop has been acting badly. So as a backup, I'm leaving my own laptop with her so she can work uninterrupted. What this means, unfortunately, is I will probably not be able to post updates from the road, which blows chunks. I will try to take as many notes as possible by hand so I can reconstruct the postings when I return home.

Funeral and Shiva arrangments

2009-11-23T19:25:00.002-05:00

Mom will be interred at New Montefiore Cemetery, in West Bablyon, Long Island, on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:30am. Those wishing to attend are asked to arrive by 10:15am at the office inside the cemetery where we will gather and then proceed to the graveside for the service.

The family will be sitting shiva immediately following the service, and all day Thursday and Friday (until sundown), at my brother Eric's home. The address is 79 Prospect Avenue South, Lynbrook, NY 11563.

We will also sit shiva at my Aunt's home on Saturday (after sundown). Her address is 409 Madeira Blvd., Melville, NY 11747. She lives in a development called The Greens.

All who would like to attend are welcome. Please call me on my cell phone, day or night, if you have any questions. The number is 917 912 4452.

Thank you all, most sincerely, for the outpouring of love, support and empathy I've received in the last 48 hours. Your kindness is most welcome and a necessary part of the support mechanism keeping me and my family moving forward.

Heartache and Loss

2009-11-22T03:26:00.003-05:00

My mom passed away early this morning, just after midnight. After 2+ weeks of fighting bravely against pneumonia brought on by chemotherapy, her frail body simply gave out. My grief is tempered by the remembrance of her wonderful life and the knowledge that her legacy of loyalty, tenacity and family won't soon be forgotten. She was a special woman to the many that loved and admired her and I will cry tears in the coming weeks not just for my own loss, but for the world's.

Thanks to all of you who have sent me messages of love and compassion in the past few weeks. Your support has been invaluable to me.

This is my favorite picture of me and my mom together and captures in a single frame what I would spend a lifetime trying to put into words:

Chart of Degeneracy

2009-11-16T15:49:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking lately about how people fall into the spectrum of gambling and gaming. I've come to categorize these people in this way:

(In order of degeneracy, from least to worst)

1. The Teetotaler - These are folks who, for reasons religious or moral, absolutely refuse to participate in gambling activities of any kind. They believe that any form of gambling is sinful or leads to such moral ruin that they feel compelled to warn you against it every chance they get. They also believe that anything involving chance is 'gambling' and don't make distinctions between games of luck or games of skill. If there's money on the line, it's gambling pure and simple and in their eyes, bad. My parents, and many other people I know, fall into this category.

2. The Scientist - People who refrain from gambling because the math doesn't work out in their favor. This person knows the odds of every scenario you can face in games of chance and, almost never having an edge, will abstain. Blackjack, Craps, Roulette and such are anathema to the Scientist. But games of skill, he is more likely to partake in. Games like Chess or Backgammon, where each move is known to each player and skill is the predominant factor are his pursuits whenever he wants to risk his hard-earned paycheck. The Scientist, however, is more interested in the intellectual pursuit of these games of skill, makign the most perfect play possible, and is far less interested in the money aspect. As such, the Scientist usually wagers little or nothing and is content to play for his personal advancement.

3. The Hobbyist - Also known as The Gamer. This person loves games of any sort and he's knowledgable enough to know when skill trumps luck. The Hobbyist tries to learn as much about a game before risking his money and tries to get it in with the best of it at all times. However, common sense dictates the this person isn't going to do this for a living and usually risks low to moderate amounts on each wager. This aversion to risk prevents the Hobbyist from losing a lot but also prevents him from winning a lot. The Hobbyist plays mostly for fun, rather than money, and doesn't harbor hopes of giving up his day job. He has the tools to be a great player but not the drive or the appetite for risk that would be required.

4. The Professional - The Professional risk taker is an expert at games of skill and will ruthlessly maximize his advantage whenever possible. Wagering large amounts of money is not out of the question for the pro, but he will only do so knowing he has the best of it. He can make a living at 'gambling' because he understands that Math never lies and he'll profit in the long run as long as there enough suckers to take the losing end of his propositions. He has the bankroll, the vision and the calm nerves to succceed. The Professional has the best mix of degeneracy and self-control in this whole group.

5. The Gambler - A Gambler is one who knows a lot about the games they're playing and even excels at games of skill. But the Gambler has an impulse that will drive him to take larger risks than is called for, albeit sometimes calculated and sometimes not. Even getting the worst of it, and knowing it, the Gambler will risk moderate to large amounts of money. The Gambler's variance is higher than the Hobbyist and it's always hard to know where his bankroll is at. He's a wild player and unpredictable which makes him a most dangerous opponent.

6. The Degenerate - This person is consistently risking large amounts on losing propositions. As such, he may have lost his relationships, his assets and his job because of his passion. The thrill of the chase is what propels him and his winning or his losing are largely irrelevant. He's not propelled by rational thought but he's predictable in the way he tosses good money after bad.

Most of the poker players I know fall between the Hobbyist and the Professional. I consider myself to be somewhere in between, probably leaning toward the Hobbyist side as my appetite for risk is rather low. The Backgammon players I play with are mostly of the Gambler type, though some are Degenerates, taking nearly any cube, no matter how dire his situation.

Somewhere in this list is a a formula that can be derived taking into account factors of skill, risk aversion, bankroll and nerves to place a person here, but I haven't quite worked it out yet.

New pursuits

2009-11-16T15:39:00.001-05:00

As my mind hasn't been on poker much, I've only been dicking around a bit online. At the moment, I'm not running particularly well and I've been card dead in my last two tournaments of Omaha. But it's only a distraction. I've tried to shift things up a bit by playing more Backgammon, which is growing more fascinating to me by the day. It helps that not 200 feet from my front door is an active community of Backgammon players that play daily, Monday through Friday, in the community lounge at 60 Wall Street. The group, comprising about 30 regulars and an odd assortment of floaters, such as myself, play money games of Backgammon and Chess. The guy who runs the games, whose name I'd rather not mention, has been really nice to me, introducing me to the players and talking strategy with me every chance we get. He's also an avid poker player, so there's lots of talk about that as well.

The players themselves are perfectly nice people, once you get to know them, though they're pretty crusty and ornery. These people are gamblers, pure and simple, but that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. Some of them are pure degenerates and others are highly intelligent people who are deeply involved in their games of choice, arguing minutatie of strategy and studying the literature.

I've been doing a little bit of studying myself to try and bone up on my Backgammon game and at least start to be competitive with these Jackals. For those of you who don't know, Backgammon is a skill game. Period. It looks like luck plays a factor, and it does, but just like Poker, it's the skilled player who wins out in the long run. After starting to play these guys for $5/point, and losing with great frequency, I now play for $3 a point. I've been memorizing the standard opening plays and trying to develop my understanding of the different types of games (running, blocking, gammon, etc...) to adapt to the different rolls of the dice. Playing speed chess with these guys is out of my league, but I believe I can improve myself enough in Backgammon to make it a worthwhile pursuit.

Already, with just a few weeks of training (concurrently with good books and with GnuBackgammon open source software), I've built up my game enough to bring my win rate up significantly. I'm still a losing player against these guys who play every single day for hours a day, but I'm winning enough to boost my confidence. The key is in the doubling cube. Knowing when to double your bet, when to take your opponent's double and when to give it up, is crucial in winning points. The other day, I had taken a double when I thought I was only moderately behind early in the game. Twelve rolls later, I had seized a significant advantage, making a five point prime with three builders on points 4 through 8 on my board and having two of his runners on my inner board. All of my runners were safe and I was threatining a six prime. Foolishly, I doubled and he immediately declined. An onlooker admonished me by saying, "bad cube", and he was right. I had such an overwhelming advantage that playing for the gammon was the proper play. These are the things I'm learning by playing more experienced players and what excites me about the game. There are lessons to be learned and, just like in poker, knowing when to cube (roughly equivalent to bet sizing in poker) is a large part of it.

If there is a poker analogy here, and there is, it's like learning how to play Limit Hold'em by playing $.25/$.50 stakes against players who normally play $25/$50 and having them critique your play as you play! Basically, I'm getting a very very cheap education in how to play the game properly. In time, I'll play as well as them and maybe even overtake them. This will allow me to be at least a break-even player against these guys, but a monstrous favorite against your average man-off-the-street.

Just gotta grind it out...

Preoccupied

2009-11-16T15:33:00.001-05:00

I haven't blogged in a while, or played much for that matter. My mind's been on other things, like my family. My mom is in the hospital in Florida, having contracted pneumonia from a compromised immune system due to chemotherapy administered for the treatment of lymphoma. Yeah, it's a mouthful, but the bottom line is she's in pretty bad shape. I'm going down to Florida tonight to be with my Father. This will be my second trip down there in less than two weeks. Thankfully, my mother is stable, but still critical and breathing with the aid of a respirator. I'm hoping the coming days will see more steady improvement on her antibiotic treatment regimen. All I can do now is pray and help my brothers hold us together during this trying time.

If you've got a healthy mom, now would be the time to call her up and tell her you love her. It's a gift.

Thursday morning managing

2009-11-05T16:01:00.001-05:00

The Yanks won, and I'm pretty happy about it. It's always good to see New York City up on the top of the heap where it belongs, even if it's not my beloved Mets. And let me be clear about this AGAIN, I am a fan of New York City. That means I am a fan of any of the New York Teams. My allegiance lies with the Jets, Knicks, Mets and Islanders but that doesn't mean I won't be happy for the Giants, Nets, Yankees or Rangers.

Which leads me to the reason for my post, and that's to question Joe Girardi on a small point. In the 7th inning of last night's World Series Game 6, reliever Joba Chamberlain was in a sticky spot. He had just given up two baserunners (a hit and a walk? Two walks? I don't remember), with two outs and the lefty Chase Utley was coming up to the plate. At this point, the Yankees were up 7-3, but a home run by Utley makes it a one run ball game and would have demoralized the Yanks to the point where I think they would have ended up losing. Even a long double would give the Phillies a decent shot of catching up.

So Girardi wisely chose to pull Chamberlain, who was waning and is a righty, and bring in fresh blood in the form of lefty Damaso Marte. Marte ended up making the biggest strikeout of his career by shutting down Utley who, incidentally, could very well have been voted MVP of the series even though his team didn't win.

So far, all well and good. Girardi even left Marte in to start the 8th inning and he struck out the first batter. Then, Girardi made what I believe was a mistake. Granted, it all worked out in the end, but I believe it was a mistake none-the-less. In poker terms, the mistake is on par with betting the river with bottom pair when it's been checked to you. Yes, you may win, but your opponent could raise and then you will be forced to throw away your hand (ok, that's a stretched analogy, I know).

So what was the mistake? Girardi brought in Mariano Rivera to close out the game. But you're saying to yourself, "Rivera is the best closer in baseball history! Why wouldn't Girardi want to put him in? Especially as he's a righty and the second batter was right handed."

Well, here's the thing. With the Yankees up by 4 runs, there was a comfortable enough lead for Marte, who was pitching spectacularly, to finish out the 8th inning. Then you can bring Rivera in to close the 9th. The danger is that if Rivera starts giving up runs in the 8th and the 9th, who do you have to go to? If you have to pull out Rivera because he blows the lead, who else is left on the bench?!? Gaudin? Or do you have C.C. Sabathia warm up and take over, in which case, who're you going to use to start Game 7 if needed? AND, if Rivers blows the save, he probably will have pitched out his arm enough to make him vulnerable for Game 7 being played the next day!

So that's my gripe. I think Girardi brought in Rivera too early with Marte pitching so nicely and introduced a risk that wasn't necessary. It turned out fine, though. I guess he won his 55/45 flip (another poker analogy, FTW!).

What do you think?

Shockingly Obvious

2009-11-02T17:11:00.002-05:00

Two posts ago, I posted an innocuous hand where I was playing in a $1.20 PL Omaha/8 tourney and got busted on a ridiculous two-outer. Nothing to write home about, normally, but I got two Anonymous comments that were troubling. At 3:24am, some tool decides to write:

"lol. you are a fucking fish"

AND

"you are -ev in any game you play--ring or tournament"

The identity of this waste of human life is irrelevant, and normally I don't respond to such inanity. But in this instance, I felt the need to retort so here goes:

1. I am not a poker pro. I do not make my living from poker. I do not choose to make my living from poker. This is why I am playing in a $1.20 buy-in tournament. I make an excellent living from my primary profession, thank you very much, and I have no desire to give that up so I can play all night, sleep all day and pretend that I'm 22 again.

2. I am an online fish. This is something I've posted about many times before. I have an online leak of massive proportions, yet another reason I don't play for higher stakes online. For this reason, I keep my online play to small stakes so I can kill time, enjoy myself, and maybe try out new strategies. I could care less what my EV is online. More importantly, I could care less what *YOU* think of my EV online, or live for that matter. I don't play to impress you.

3. Poker is a *hobby*, not my life. I do not derive my self-esteem from my poker skills. This is why you won't find me skulking around other people's poker blogs anonymously, dropping insults with no constructive feedback. People who do that are douchebags, yourself included. There are a ton of great poker bloggers I know who form a meaningful community of players and helpfully criticize each other's play in an effort to improve themselves and others. You are not one of these fine specimens. You are a dick.

I've now disallowed Anonymous commenting for this blog. I may still receive screeds from Heywood Jablome and Hugh Jazz, but that should cut down on the stupidity factor a bit.

Wall Street 2010 Dead Pool - Now taking submissions

2009-10-28T11:37:00.002-04:00

I am running a "Dead Pool" this coming year and we are now taking submissions. If you're unfamiliar, the concept of a Dead Pool is that you pick a list of famous people and track them throughout the year. Each time one of the people on the list dies, you receive points. You receive additional points if the person is in the younger age brackets. Each participant puts up $30 and the top 3 winners split the prize pool in a 65/25/15 split.

Here are the rules:

1. The Wall Street Dead Pool (WSDP) for 2010 shall run between Midnight, Dec. 31st, 2009 and Midnight Dec. 31st, 2010. Eastern Standard Time will be used as the standard of judging when the year has started and stopped and for any other timing issues.

2. Persons' deaths will be considered to have occurred on the publicized date. If there is a discrepancy between sources, Wikipedia will be the final source considered. As information becomes clearer during the year, the date may be amended. What Wikipedia reports at the end of the contest will be the final source.

3. Each person/team must forward me a list of up to 25 famous people no later than midnight on Dec. 15th, 2009. If one of your list members dies before the start of the contest, you will receive no points and have the option of forwarding me another name to replace that person BEFORE midnight of Dec. 31st, 2009.

4. "Famous" people, eligible for the list, will be defined as:

A. Human
B. Famous enough to have general name recognition
C. Famous enough to have a substantial Wikipedia entry.
D. Famous because of something they've done, not their relation to other people. For example, David Letterman is eligible but his mother, even though she's been on his show, is not. Tom Cruise is eligible. Suri Cruise, despite general name recognition, is not. Paris Hilton is eligible due to her record albums, films, TV shows, etc...
E. People who are famous simply for being old (e.g. the oldest person in the world) are not eligible.

I will be the final judge on what is defined as "Famous". If a submission isn't deemed famous enough to be eligible, the entry will be rejected and the applicant notified in time to give a new submission.

5. People who have artificial organs or have had organ transplants at the start of the contest shall not be eligible. Only the "Major" organs are in consideration here. For example, persons who have had heart transplants are not eligible. Persons who have had heart valve replacements are.

6. People who have terminal diseases at the start of the contest are not eligible.

7. People who are scheduled to be executed at the start of the contest are not eligilble.

8. People who are hostages or abductees at the start of the contest are not eligible.

9. Each person/team must forward to me, no later than midnight on January 15th, 2010, the entrance fee of $30. Acceptable forms of payment are Cash, Check, Paypal.

10. I will do my best to keep up with the news, but if you see that a person on your list has died, it would be appreciated if you could forward me the relevant information so I can update the scoreboards.

Scoring
1. Each applicant/team will receive 10 points if a person on their list dies in 2010.

2. Additional points will be awarded based on the age of the person at the time of their death as follows:
A. 0 - 9 years old will be awarded an additional 20 points
B. 10 - 24 years old will be awarded an additional 15 points
C. 25 - 39 years old will be awarded an additional 10 points
D. 40 - 54 years old will be awarded an additional 5 points
E. 55 - 64 years old will be awarded an additional 3 points
F. 65+ years old will be awarded no additional points.

3. Additional points will be awarded based on specific categories:

A. The Princess Diana Bonus - 5 additional points will be awarded for anyone who dies in a car accident.
B. The River Phoenix Bonus - 8 additional points will be awarded for the person/team who has the youngest person to die in the contest.
C. The Paul Newman Bonus - 5 additional points will be awarded for the person/team who has the oldest person to die in the contest.
C. The Notorious B.I.G. Bonus - 10 additional points will be awarded for anyone who is murdered by gunfire.
D. The Lizzie Borden Bonus - 10 additional points will be awarded for anyone who is murdered by a bladed weapon.
E. The John Belushi Bonus - 5 additional points will be awarded for anyone who dies from a self-inflicted drug overdose.
F. The Michael Jackson Bonus - 8 additional points will be awarded for anyone who is murdered by a drug overdose.
G. The Kurt Cobain Bonus - 8 additional points will be awarded for anyone who commits suicide. Suicide must be the coroner's final proclamation.
H. The JFK Bonus - 20 additional points will be awarded for anyone who is assassinated for political purposes.
I. The Jack LaLanne Bonus - 50% of the buyin will be refunded to the person/team who don't record a single death during the contest.

4. Participants in the contest who murder or otherwise arrange the death of anyone on their list (or anyone else's list), shall forfeit their buyin, be removed from the contest and be reported to the proper authorities.

Submissions, questions, payments, etc... can be sent to Fritzle *AT* Gmail *DOT* Com

Why I don't play for real stakes online

2009-10-27T20:11:00.003-04:00

A $1.20 PL O/8 tourney online. Single table. I'm barely 4th in chips with 2,435. 4 players left. Blinds at 150/300. I'm dealt 8♣ 9♣ 9♠ T♥ in the SB. UTG folds, Button calls, I limp in the SB and the BB calls. 3 players to the flop and it's 7♣ 7♦ T♠. I pot it for $900 and the BB folds. The Button, who's the big stack at the table due to his donkey-ish ways, calls my pot bet. Turn is J♠. I go all in for $1,235 and the button insta-calls. He shows:

5♥ 2♥ T♣ 5♣

WTF?!?! There's a paired board, no low draw at all, and he calls my all in with middle pair and a five kicker?!?! OMG.

River: 5♠

WOW. I'm out and shaking my head yet again.

Online sucks. Live Poker Rules! End. Of. Story.

Slowhand? Slowliver.

2009-10-27T19:02:00.002-04:00

At age 64, and after well-documented drug and alcohol addictions, Eric Clapton has canceled a concert appearance due to Gallstone surgery.

WTF? I drank a couple of beers one night and went into the hospital. This bastard destroys his liver and never gets Gallstones? The world is *not* fair.

The State of the Quest

2009-10-27T16:23:00.001-04:00

I haven't written in a while because, frankly, I haven't been playing a lot of poker. Domestic bliss is the state of my affairs these days and poker, while still a great hobby and a wonderful distraction, is less the focus of my life. Spending time with Ali is genuinely fantastic and I get more satisfaction out of just sitting on the couch with her, watching "Say Yes to the Dress", than I do from playing a random tourney.

Ok, I'm lying just a little. What I meant to say was, I really like to play an online tourney on my laptop while I'm sitting on the couch with Ali, watching "Say Yes to the Dress".

Whatever!

Anyhow, this month almost went by before I realized that it's the two year anniversary of my poker quest! More precisely, it was two years ago this month that I started traveling to far away destinations specifically in pursuit of my stated goal of seeing all of the legal poker rooms in the Continental U.S.

After 24 months of traveling as often as I could, I have seen or played in 135 poker rooms located in 13 different states. Come December 4th, I'll be traveling to Arizona to add another 14 rooms to that total, and 3 more in California, bringing the grand total to 152 poker rooms by the end of the year.

That's 152 rooms in 26 months for an average of 5.8 unique poker rooms a month. That's a pretty nice pace, and one I wish I could keep up. Alas, the aforementioned domestic bliss is forcing me to go to places like Paris instead of Oklahoma. Poor me. :-p

After Arizona, my next weeklong poker trip will most likely be during the summer of 2010. Ali will be studying for her bar exam around that time, freeing me up to get the hell out of her hair! I anticipate Oklahoma (I wasn't kidding) or possibly California. There might also be some long weekend (3-4 days) trips. New Mexico comes to mind and maybe Reno/Tahoe. Also, Ali and I might be going to Vegas when she graduates in May 2010. She's never been and I would love to go for a week and show her around. There won't be a whole lot of poker playing if I go with her, but if I can get her some spa sessions, I might be able to visit the dozen or so poker rooms in Vegas that I missed my last trip there.

In other, slightly distressing news, my poker table (the nice one) is being sold tonight. I was going to wait until the end of the year to sell it, but I got an offer I couldn't refuse from a guy who's opening up a new room in downtown Manhattan near where I live. The combination of the excellent price he's willing to pay combined with the thought that I might still be able to play on it is too good to resist.

They come tonight to pick it up. What this means, of course, is that for the first time in nearly 5 years, I no longer have a poker table in my apartment and can't host games anymore. This is the official end of my hosting duties (Sorry Christine!).

But I'm keeping my chips! Those go with me to the grave.

One and done

2009-10-13T00:35:00.004-04:00

I was a little wired after last night's very exciting, but unfortunate, Monday Night Football game. So I decided to fire up FTP for a quick $2.25 Turbo Pot Limit O/8 tourney. My first hand is K♥ 5♣ 4♣ 2♥ in the cutoff. It limps to me and I call. Flop comes a *sick* 3♥ 5♠ 5♥. The BB pots for $150. I repot for $600. He calls. Turn is J♦ and he checks. I move all in for my remaining $870 and he calls. He shows 5♦ K♠ A♥ Q♠. By my count, I have 6 hearts to make a flush for the scoop, 3 fours for the boat and a scoop, 3 deuces for a boat and a scoop, 2 Kings for a chop, 3 sixes for a straight and a scoop, 3 sevens for the low and half the pot, 3 eights for the low and half the pot or 3 Aces for the low and half the pot.

So by my reckoning, that's 26 cards that will give me some or all of the pot, 15 for the scoop, 2 for a chop and 9 for half the pot. And that's only with one more card to come!

The river: 9♣.

One and done. Thanks for playing!

O/8 goodness and a lapse of concentration

2009-10-07T23:08:00.004-04:00

I went to Tuna tonight to play in the $5/$10 Omaha hi/lo game. My primary purpose was to pick up $255 that W owes me from selling my poker table. This was the original table that started the Wall Street Poker league, so it's a little bittersweet, but I can't let that get in the way of business! I chose to pick up the cash on Wed., so I could partake of the juicy O/8 game.

I did very well, scooping some very nice pots, including getting paid off with flopped quad Queens and not having to chop for low! I peaked at +$325, but finished shortly afterwards with +$242 due to a lapse of concentration.

Here's what happened. The game had switched to dealer's choice early on, meaning whoever was the button could choose between Omaha hi/lo or Omaha high only. But that was slowing down the game so we all agreed to make it a rotation game, one round of each. The game would change every time the button got to the 1 seat.

So far so good.

On my last hand before the dealer push, which is when I told myself I was going to leave, I picked up a so-so hand on the button. The game was Omaha high and my hand was K♣ 5♣ 7♥ 6♥. The flop was a craptacular 5♥ 9♣ 3♥. I had flopped a meh flush draw, a double gutshot straight draw, a decent backdoor flush draw and an inside straight flush draw. When it checked all the way around to me, I checked, because I only had a four card draw to the nut high. The turn was a trouble card for me, 5♠. Now I had trip 5's. It checked to the cutoff, who bet it out. I called and everyone else folded. He said, "Uh oh, how badly am I beat here?", and then bet the river blind. Unfortunately, the river was the A♥, so I was forced to call with my flush and he tabled 5-9 for the boat.

That wasn't the lapse of concentration I was talking about. I decided to leave the table because the new dealer was pushing in and the guy who had just beaten me said, "You can take a courtesy hand". And then I lost concentration. Because the dealer had pushed, I made the mental error of thinking the game was now Omaha Hi-Lo, when, in fact, it was still Omaha high! I took my courtesy hand of 2♠ 5♥ 6♥ K♠. It limped around PF and the flop saw 8 players. The flop was 2♦ 4♦ 8♠. I've got a double gutshot straight draw, and my mind is telling me that I also have a decent low draw! WTF myself?!? It's high only! To make matter worse, I had a talker in my left ear and the dealer was seriously fucking things up. It was raised on the flop and the dealer collected the whole pot and almost dealt the cards before me, and another player called the raise. Then, he dealt the turn Q♣, but never burned! So then he burned the Q♣ and dealt the real turn, the 3♦. This gives me the nut straight, but with 3 diamonds on board, isn't great in a multiway hand. However, I felt good about my 65 low! Whoops. The turn was bet and then raised and I called both bets. Both players were going high, I felt, and when I check-called the river (4♠), one player showed the Ace high flush and the other player showed 8's full. I checked for their lows and tabled 65 low, and was dismayed when I had to be told my last hand was Omaha high only!!!!

Grrrr.... #concentrationfail

Still, I left with $242 in profit and another $255 from the sale of my smaller table. So a good night altogether. Also, I laid 10-1 to a dealer in the top of the 7th that the Yankees would take the first game. He took the bet for $5 and I won that bet, but tipped him the $5 anyway. #niceguyswin

Cheerleader cash in MTT

2009-09-27T01:56:00.001-04:00

I placed 8th out of 839 runners in a $3.30 MTT tourney on FTP last night. It took 4.5 hours to get there, but I cashed with a not too shabby, but far from awesome, $54.11. The payouts are insanely top weighted, but I still managed to make 16.4 times my buy-in, an accomplishment in any measure. I really wanted to make the final table here and I got tripped up when I got raised on the button by a LAG player whom I'd seen call off a third of his large stack with KTo. He raised to $20,000 on the button, with blinds at $4,000/$8,000 and antes at $1,000. I was in the BB with KQo. This was a 6-handed tourney (something I'm even more proud of because I normally don't do well with high aggression games), so KQ is definitely something I can race with short handed. I pushed for $140,000, hoping to double through a light call or even willing to race against a small pair, but he quick-called with AK and I was toast. Other than that mistake, I played pretty well. I was frustrated when one of the weaker players at the table managed to fol PF 4 different times against me when I re-raised him with KK or AA (!). Not once did he come over the top with his original raise. All the time, he was min-raising and it was too dangerous for me to flat call, so I made a small re-raise and he folded. Every time. Four times! These hands don't come easily, so it hurts not to get paid off on them.

Towards the end, I could feel my lack of aggression starting to hurt me, as my blinds got stolen more frequently in short handed play. Most of the game towards the end was PF play, so I have to work on my aggression to finish off these deep runs I make. Otherwise, I'm never going to make the big money.