Sometimes after a bad run out I’ll head to the poker odds web page and plug in the cards to see what the odds were, to figure out what I deserved to win.  Of course this is a foolish exercise, and I’d be better off foregoing it entirely. There’s this huge temptation to succumb to having a chip on my shoulder, to thinking that I am unlucky, when in reality, it was just one occurrence among hundreds of the evening. Obviously, losing a giant pot or two is what makes for a bad evening overall, but there’ll be other nights. Chances are it may take a few sessions, but I’ll probably win the money back. It’s still a setback, though, that’s not wanted. However, it should be, because it is, expected. There will be joy and suffering, it is inevitable, but if you don’t play suited one gappers, you can push your meter more towards the former.

So, I take this bad beat, I lose a bunch of money, and my little win streak. I get home, trying not to feel too bad about it. It’s almost 3am and I am in the backyard waiting for the dogs to piss, when I feel this splash of liquid on the back of my calf. Dogs were in front of me, so it threw me for a loop. I turn the flashlight on my phone and look at where I stepped. There, in the spotlight, cast about pebbles and twigs, lay the smashed remains of a giant slug. Poor bastard, of all the times to slither around, 3am must have seemed like a safe bet.

I played again two nights later and had another losing session. This one wasn’t so bad, in fact, I got a little lucky, it could have been far worse, so there’s that. My big accomplishment of that evening was that I tried and succeeded in playing poker without drinking. This is part of my training for Vegas, where I want to play a lot of poker, but I don’t want to be buzzed or drunk for five straight days. Yes, I am making a concerted effort to enjoy poker sober. I feel like I have to. If I can accomplish this on a regular basis, maybe I can pull it off watching baseball games, during family outings, who knows, the sky is the limit.

I was having a great year for poker because of Global Poker. Great for me at least. I was playing 50nl and beating it. Not crushing it, but doing ok enough to pick up a couple grand. It felt really cool, playing poker whenever I wanted, and having a nice little stash of cash on PayPal that I used to buy things I didn’t really need on eBay. I probably spent as much time fantasizing about how much money I’d make for the year off of it as I did playing. I was pretty sure I’d make at least six grand. To say I was flying high is putting it mildly.

Then the games started getting a little tougher. I had my first losing month, followed by a month in which I was barely making anything.  Adding to the frustration was the fact that Global ditched PayPal. I pulled all of my remaining money out to see how things would go with the new payment processor. It doesn’t look like things are going to well over there, but after a few drinks the other night I was desperate for some action and attempted to put some money back on the site.

And this caused my bank card to get suspended.

Back to home games, I guess. The problem with that is that unlike Global Poker, or any online game for that matter, is timing. It’s just too hard to get out to poker games regularly. I can do it maybe once a week tops, and even then I am running late, etc.

This is probably why when my buddy Gags suggested we head to Vegas in the fall I jumped on the opportunity. I probably even got a little pushy about it, immediately asking what dates would work. In retrospect I think Gags was just throwing up a wistful “wouldn’t it be nice to go to Vegas” that he phrased as “we should go to Vegas.” People have said things like this for years to me, and I’ve always been a very good bet to be too much of a stick in the mud to go. Not this time. I think it caught Gags off guard. I bought my tickets like a month ago, I still don’t think he’s booked his flight.

Gags is pretty much the reason I picked up poker as a hobby. Back in the early 00s Gags and his wife Jen started playing cards. I even got invited to a poker tournament somebody held for them one time. Gags paid my $25 buy in. I had no clue how to play, and the confusing rules just made me uncomfortable. I remember winning a hand and having somebody try to explain to me why I won. I think I picked up the blinds and a limper’s chips. This game was held right after my son was born, maybe a week or two after. A few hands later I got a call from my wife, The Genome, asking when I’d be home. Gotta go I told the table.

I was home a lot because the kids were so much work when they were little. It put a real dent in my social life, and as a consequence I spent a lot of time online. One day on Facebook Gags posted something about an upcoming trip to Hawaii he and Jen were taking. The end of the post said “Thanks, poker.”

I think this was the first time I ever thought there was anything positive associated with poker. Another friend of mine, Jay, had been an online poker pro as well. I began asking him a little more about how he pulled that off.  We didn’t discuss strategy so much as what it was like to be a great poker player. I remember him telling me about how he’d made $70,000 in less than a year sitting in an internet cafe for 25 hours a week playing a game. I definitely found this intriguing, and contrasted his life to mine, where I spent 40 hours a week helping make knock off women’s shoes. I mean, it wasn’t the most unrewarding job in the world, I did learn what an espadrille was when I was there, but Jay’s life seemed like a fantasy in comparison to mine.

Eventually I got curious enough on one of those bored at home evenings that I clicked on a link to play Zynga Poker. I didn’t expect I’d ever have any success at playing cards. Gags, Jen, and Jay are all a lot smarter than me, but my curiosity was piqued enough that I wanted to learn a little more. Within a week I was playing a lot. Once I ran my Zynga Poker roll up to 1,000,000 chips I called Gags to brag.

It’s a lot different when you play for real money, he told me.

Maybe half a year later I played in my first “real” game. My downstairs neighbor Jason and his buddies got together for a $20 sit-n-go every once in a while. He promised to invite me to the next game. Before I left The Genome asked me how much money I was bringing to the game. Twenty bucks, I said. She didn’t like the idea of my gambling, and told me that it was the last $20 I’d be spending on poker. I think she thought that would be the end of my little addiction, and had I lost that $20, it may have been. At the very least it would have made poker something I’d have to sneak around to do, kind of like having an affair without the sex. I would have probably been better off just having an affair when you come to think about it. Jeez, I guess poker saved my marriage.

I was super nervous when I got to the basement the game was held in. When the chips were being doled out I remember being a mix of terrified and extremely excited. It was a lovely feeling, really. Lord knows how much I’d have to buy into a game with now to get that back.

Midway through the sit-n-go, everybody was roughly even when I flopped trips with QTs. I checked, and then bet the turn. The guy I was heads up with said there was no way I had a queen. All the chips went in, and after that I just kind of cruised to the finish, winning with a hand in which the same guy jammed with top and bottom pair when I’d flopped a set. Luckbox City.

And that’s how I started my little poker roll, which has provided me with hours of fun and a lot of friends, and is sending me to Vegas in December.

Thanks, poker.

…

It looks like I’ll have four and a half days to play cards in Vegas. My goal is to make $300 while I am there. I know there are going to be people who will be like that’s too small, and other people who would point out that it’s silly to set a goal like that with a limited number of hours and variance, that I should just focus on doing well. All of those people can go screw, though. I am a man on a mission. Heading across the continent to make $300.

In the meantime I am heading to my buddy Roger’s tonight. I showed up at his place for a game on Sunday and he had forgotten about the texts he’d sent out earlier “GAME TONIGHT AT MY PLACE.” He told me he’d hook me up with $50 for my troubles. I was supposed to play another game with a $40 (plus $5 to the house) max buy in, but you know, you do the math.

I found a mandatory minimum $100 buy in 1/2 game in West Roxbury.  This guy Mike runs it out of the bar he owns. The game’s action starts up right at closing time. This brings in people who don’t want to stop drinking at the bar. You’d be surprised how many people will fork over $100 to play a game whose rules they don’t know if it means they can have another drink.  Yes, sometimes patrons have been known to try and nit it up, but when that happens Mike amps up the volume to 1/2/5 and so on. The only thing that sucks about the game is the late starting time. Jeanne thought I was having an affair because of the overnights, which kind of forced me to show her how much money I’ve made there. That got me the green light. The game runs twice a week, and I’ve been playing since the middle of January. I’ve probably been there half a dozen times and haven’t left down once. Winning sessions have ranged from a high of $2400 to a mere $270. And in that up only $270 session you should have seen some of the bad beats I took.

I sometimes feel guilty. Especially when, as happens often there, guys are too drunk to move their chips into the pot. After winning a hand, you have to get up, walk over to their seat, and push the chips away for them. Right out under their donkey noses. They’ll give me these confused drunken looks, not understanding the chips, the cards, or anything. These strange things are put in front of them and then moved away from them. For the vast majority of them, that’s the extent of their understanding of what’s going on.

The players are so dumb and drunk that sometimes they are tough to deal with. Slurring their words to the point where you can’t understand them, or passing out. The other day that happened to this guy Tim,  and Mike responded by announcing that house rules stipulated that unless you were “officially going the bathroom,” ie in the bathroom or en route to it, you had to pay the blinds. It was three-handed at that point, Me, Mike, and Tim, so Mike and I just stole the blinds for 10 minutes or so and locked up the rest of his money. Mike then woke Tim up to rebuy, and he says ok. You sure you’re not going to vomit, Mike asks. He sounds kind of serious here, like he’s a doctor or something. Tim says no, he can play, just deal the cards. Three hands later Mike flops top set against him and bets five times the pot all in. Tim snap calls with an inside straight draw and rivers it. Two hands after that I move all in pre with pocket kings and he calls me with 96 of clubs. He wins with two pair, and now he’s sitting there with $400 and wants to go home. I’m too tired to play he keeps saying, but Mike keeps dealing the cards as fast as he can, saying no, no, you can’t hit and run, that’s against the rules. They go back and forth fighting about it and in the meantime, Mike wins back $200 off Tim.

Tim doesn’t seem to care about the money, and he tries making for the door. Mike tells him he can crash on the couch in the basement, but he just has to play for a half hour more.  There’s more bickering about this between the two of them, but they’re playing cards the whole time. They get into it heads up where there’s a ton of action on the flop. Mike goes all in. After tanking for a few minutes, more because he’s dozing than thinking, Tim calls. I deal the river and I’m looking close at Tim now, because I think he might be asleep. Mike tables a straight, maybe with a little too much emphasis, because it startles Tim, who suddenly half remembers where he is. As Mike rakes the chips in, Tim does a double take at the cards. Hey wait, he says, did I win? Mike stops, and takes a hard look at Tim. Since I wasn’t in the hand, and I was so fixated and whether the guy was asleep or not, I sort of didn’t pay too close attention to the board, which was T98r followed by two threes. Tim turned over an 83 of hearts to hit a boat on the river. He was right but he was still confused because he was so messed up. He continued to stare at his hand and then back to the board and back again, trying to confirm he had a full house. Then Mike quickly swept the cards into a pile saying nope, you had trips I had a straight, you lose. Tim tries to sputter out what he thought he saw, while Mike ushers him out the door to catch an uber.

I can hear them back and forth out in the cold for a few seconds beyond the frosted panes of the door’s windows. A few more refrains of I thoughts and You didn’ts.

The door swung back open and Mike hurried back in. For an instant I saw the disappointed Tim standing on the sidewalk, looking back into the bar. He seemed to be looking at me, imploring me to tell him what I saw, but I could only look away.

As I was cashing out Mike said I could crash on the couch downstairs if I wanted to and that if I told anybody about what happened he would fucking kill me.

John B is the best player in Roslindale. Or at least I think he is, and since this is my platform… But no, the guy is really good. He’s been hosting games at his house on Thursday nights. It’s few blocks away, but I almost always have to work that night. That plus the fact that he’s better than me, left me neglecting his game for a while. It’s a .25/.5 no limit game with a $100 max buy in.  Two weeks ago though, he had a Sunday game when my wife was out of town. I bought the kids a couple of Little Ceasars Pizzas and told them to get their homework done while daddy was away for a few hours playing cards. Of course, they eventually ratted me out to mom, but that’s a whole other story. The game was pretty decent. Lots more action than your average 50NL game. I am not going to say it plays like a 1/2 game. More like a .82/1.64 game. There are pre-flop raises as high as $12. If you can manage to just avoid getting in monster hands with John, you can have a pretty good run.  So, since that Sunday game, I’ve been texting to see if there’s an available seat after I get done with work around 9 pm on Thursdays.

Last night I was shut out initially, the table at John’s was full, so I logged into Global Poker where I now spend way too much of my time and psychic energy at that 20NL tables. I’ve been playing there so much that I’ve become friends with some of the other regulars. The thing about Global that I really like is that it caters more to recreational players. HUDs aren’t allowed, or even available, I don’t think. There’s no rake back where break-even players can make money playing 20 tables at a time. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely a lot of people, myself included, multi-tabling, but unlike other places I’ve played online in the past, you can generally find somebody to shoot the shit with in the chatbox.

After like an hour or so of Global poker, I was pretty beat, and signed off thinking I’d watch some TV or something. Within fifteen minutes though I got a text from John saying that a seat had opened up, and so I was out the door in a heartbeat. Like I said, it’s only a few blocks away, but with the ice and wind last night, driving someplace in a warm car wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

With the game being pretty loose, and with visions of implied odds dancing in my head, I started down after missing out on an open ender and set mining a few times without success. Then this hand happened. I get kings in middle position and make it 7.50. There are complaints about the bet sizing, and I initially worried I scared everybody away, but alas, despite the complaints I get two callers, I think I had position on both of them, but I can’t be 100% sure of that. The flop comes down ten two two. Checks to me, so I make it 15 more. I get two calls.  I feel kind of good here. Both guys are pretty loose, I don’t think loose enough to have a two, but one of them could easily have something like queen ten, which complicates things because the turn is another ten. One of the players goes all in for 34 or 38 dollars, or nearly all in, he had fifty cents left over. The pot was something like 80 bucks now, and obviously, he could be bluffing here, but I was damn near certain he wasn’t. I made what I thought was a crying call. He showed sixes, which to be honest shocked the hell out of me. I really thought I was doomed. After that, I ran about even.

I didn’t drink last night. The game seemed very quiet. I guess I tend to gab a lot at the table when I’m drinking. Sometimes even when I am drinking though I notice that at a quiet table people are very intent on the game, hunting for that lucky card that will have them piling up a massive pile of chips. My favorite gambling quote, that I haven’t really memorized, but it’s a translation anyways, so who cares, is Walter Benjamin’s “gambling converts time into a narcotic.” When it’s 1 am, and you’re sitting in your neighbor’s basement jonesing to make fifty bucks, when all of the social conventions, the flowing conversation, the interest in the life of the person next to you has been ceded to that desire, it’s not hard to recognize, even if you are a winning player, that there is a pretty profound addictive element to gambling. Pulling oneself from an active table can be very difficult, even when you don’t want to play anymore, but somehow I did it last night. Not after spilling $15 to John though on my last hand.

Picture the scene, sometime in the distant future, maybe a decade from now, in a Wynn Casino whose interior design has begun showing its first signs of age… There’s Joe B_rns buying into a 1/2 game for $60 at 3:42am on a Wednesday morning. He arranges his chips in three neat piles of four and then looks up, and there across the table from him is Andy R_odgers, behind a mountain of 32 white chips.

“Excuse me, sir,” the dealer tells R_dgers, “you may not raise with those chips,” pointing out that R_dgers, a long time suspected angle shooter, has once again tried to raise with chips from the old Crescent Lounge, which was bulldozed to the ground back in 2019 for repeatedly violating the town of Arlington’s Tom Fogerty ordinance.

“Haha, oh right,” Rodg_rs responds, feigning a passing moment of dementia. With an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders and apologetic smile, he removes the Crescent Lounge chips from the table.

“Well, I’ll be,” J_e Burns exclaims, “if it isn’t good old Andy _odgers!”

The dealer, misinterpreting Burns_ “I’ll be” for “all in,” informs the rest of the table he’s in for sixty total.

“Joe Bur_s! How the hell are you!”

They reminisce about the good old days before the opening of the giant poker room at the Wynn Casino put an end to region’s glory days of home poker.

A ninety-seven-year-old woman, who, unbeknownst to either Joe or Andy, was the nine of clubs in the deck of naked lady cards which Andy had embedded in the lucite railing of the old Crescent Lounge’s poker table, re-raises Joe’s “all in” for sixty up to two hundred.  Although she’s folded every hand for the past three hours, Joe’s already looked at his hole cards, a pair of red sevens, and giddily tells himself he’s a sure shot to at the very least, double up.

“Good luck all in,” Andy says to Joe, but Andy doesn’t even look at the flop, instead a flood of memories overtake him, memories of those glorious nights of yore enfold him, and what he sees is not an ecstatic Joe hitting a much needed seven of spades on the river, but the glorious past,  the golden age.

All I can say is that we’re living in it, and a failure to recognize it as such is cheating yourself out of a lovely sense of nostalgia down the road.

I’ve been on a super duper heater lately, the likes of which I’ve only been through once before, and that maybe that is responsible for my starry-eyed thoughts regarding playing cards around here over the past few weeks. Since I am so great at poker all of the sudden, I think I am within my rights to dispense a little poker wisdom to my massive following of just ok to slightly above average poker player readers.

Sure thing…

Poker Advice Column Section of this Blog Post

Ok, preparation. It all starts with what? Why, when you buy into the game, of course. Where do you find your edge in this cash for chips transaction? Here’s what you do. Let’s say your name is Stevie. Take a $20 bill and with a sharpie marker write on it “Happy Birthday, Stevie. Love Grandma.” Nobody who plays you will want to win that off you, it’s so pathetic and sad, and believe me, everybody will know it’s in circulation soon enough. I do this all the time. It’s the best getting felted insurance out there.

Some nights, when I can’t make it to a card game, I am still thinking about going to card games, fantasizing about it really. Once in a while, to cure the pain, I’ll fire up some poker hand videos on YouTube, and passively play along. One of the things I like to do is search for videos of places I’ve played, I think it makes it easier to imagine being at the table. The other night I was looking at some videos of people playing at Foxwoods and saw in one a guy I’ve played with a bunch at Roger’s getting angry over a hand. He was getting bent out of shape and challenging the guy who (presumably) beat him to a heads up contest. Classic Teddy, I thought with a laugh.

Through this little fixation of mine, I’ve discovered poker vloggers. For the most part, this is a hard act to pull off. Poker on tv is great because of the multiple cameras, even on the whole cards, and the drama of the flop, turn, and river. Contrast this to a guy stuck in traffic en route to some casino in New Jersey talking about how he’s going to play a little more aggressive this afternoon, and it’s easy to see why DYI poker videos are tough to pull off. I was about to just say I’ve had it with these poker vlogs until I stumbled across Andrew Neeme videos on YouTube.

I suppose there’s a chance that if you haven’t slogged through other poker vlogs to get to Neeme’s videos, you won’t have the appreciation for them that I have. In fact, you might be better off without this appreciation, but if you find yourself looking for poker videos online, check this guy out.

Neeme plays mostly 5/10 games in Vegas and California. The videos begin with the standard montage of a guy getting on the road or at home getting ready for a poker game with the difference being the quality in production. Neeme is generous with the atmospheric music, and while I am generally not a fan of that genera, it fits in perfectly with the strolls through the luxurious casino environs on way to the poker tables. You feel like you are there, ready to mix it up, and as invariably seems to happen in Neeme’s videos, win. Most of the videos make it a point to have a shot of him cashing out, which is routinely multiple racks being filled and stacked with pristinely gorgeous poker chips. I find this effect to be intensely cathartic, and I supposed that’s its intention.

The videos generally run a little under twenty minutes, and also feature hand histories. Neeme’s thoughts are coherent and well thought out, but they’re not necessarily going to provide good poker players with anything they aren’t already familiar with via poker books and web forums. I often correctly guess what he’s going to do before he reveals it during the hand history section, and I don’t think I’d stand a chance making a living at Vegas 5/10 games, even if I was rolled for it. There are a few ways to think about this, of course. One, this qualifies more as entertainment than academic. A treatise on triple range merging wouldn’t fit with the overall vibe of the show. I also don’t think it would work with Neeme, who is far more like a friendly older brother showing you around the town than a poker savant. I’m not saying he isn’t a great player, he definitely appears to be in the aforementioned cash out scenes, but having watched a number of these videos now, I have to say that it’s very difficult, if not damn near impossible, to catch even the faintest whiff of arrogance from the guy. His YouTube channel appears to be wildly successful based on the comments and letters he gets from fans, and the biggest factor in this success I would have to imagine is the fact that he’s such a nice guy. You can’t help but like him.

If there’s one drawback to the show, and this is not a big enough one for me to stop watching, but I would say, it does seem at times like there is more to meets the eye with this channel. By that I mean, the recurring motif of waltzing through an immaculately fancy casino, followed up by a quick hand history in which you nod your head along, yes, Andrew, I would have played that exactly the same way has a very seductive “Let’s go to Vegas” quality to it. There are instances where he heads to a bar afterward and it seems keen to let you know where it is, etc. My hunch is, he’s getting paid to promote some of these places. I don’t have any issue with this, good for him, he deserves it. My only issue with it is that it makes it seem like winning big money at poker is just an easy thing to do like being a cool guy with a nice camera, but again, whatever, it’s all about the vicarious fantasy, which this channel delivers really big on.

So, I went to the Crescent Lounge’s new location in Waltham on Friday or Saturday night. I forget. On the very first hand I got pocket tens on the button, and it’s limped to me, so I make it $3 I think. Yeah, it was $3 now that I think about it. Everybody folds except Jeremy, who was in middle position. He three bets me to $10. I start wondering, if he has such a good hand, why isn’t he raising originally? I found it hard to believe that somebody could just originally limp with a better holding than tens. I know it happens, and that people do it, and yes, I’ve been a victim of it before, but I don’t think it happens often. Plus, this kid always wants to teach me a lesson. I know he’d love to turn over a shitty hand after I folded as a way to say, gotcha. He three bet me all in with Jack 4 the first hand I ever played with him. I convinced myself he was going for the 72 offsuit $2 from everybody at the table and so I made it $30. That’s half of my stack. He goes all in, and I call figuring I am probably beat.

That was how the night started. I basically ran even from there on out. The new place is great, Andy has all of his crazy campy Vegas poker-chic on the walls. You really could not expect more from a home game in terms of style. With the neon pink glowing lucite rail glowing off the deer head wearing a green tinted dealer’s visor, on the wall, you’re almost at, not so much a poker game, but a poker carnival.

And isn’t that what you want out of poker, out of life? The chance to roam off of, out of, the quotidian grind and graze on the carnival grounds. Heck, I remember what it was like when the carnival came to my town back in the day. I won a poster of Muhammed Ali punching Ken Norton in the face, causing Norton’s spit to splatter all over the place, and another one of some bikini clad vixen, who I only remember as not being Heather Thomas. Anyhow, due to the half life of Scotch tape, or the advice of my mother, neither poster lasted very long on my bedroom wall, but my point is, that via the carnival, there was this idea that you could get something for nothing, and not only that, but you could get something for nothing while in the arena of flashing lights. Your something for nothing would be celebrated.

That’s kind of what casinos want you to believe, I guess. That the glamor and glitz are there to highlight your new found ability to make money without working for it. You sit around idling pulling a lever, and there’s this possibility, a slim one, but still, that a few thousand dollars in coins, you heard me right, coins, could come spurting out of that glimmering box. Like vomit, am I right?

But you see what I am getting at, right?

I don’t think I do either, to be honest. I think it has something to do with the glamorization of labor, and the degree to which a preoccupation with luxury thwarts or subverts the ability to become what some brave philosopher once referred to as a species being.

Obviously, to answer your question, yes, I am still unemployed! But, I had a job interview at 1pm today. And, yes, that meant that, smarting from my $55 loss from Andy’s this weekend, I went to Twin River this morning thinking, well, since the interview is a phoner, I’ll just do it in the casino parking lot, and catch up on my losses. In case you’re wondering, I won about $100, bringing me up to +$69 on the year so far.

[            ]

While I appreciate your drooling envy, please do everybody a favor and wipe your saliva from the above box.

I think the interview went ok. I left the game about 15 minutes too early, probably because I was nervous about it, so I started driving part of the way back, before finding an off the beaten path spot to talk on the phone right before it was supposed to begin. I ended up in a nice spot. There was a pasture with horses in the distance, and the sun was resplendent through the clouds and all that Spring nonsense you get out here in late March. The conversation was somewhat confusing and cut with the sound of passing cars, which took the luster a bit off my new Ben Franklin. Oh well. Maybe 7-7-7 tomorrow.