I hit up the Crescent Lounge in Waltham this past Friday night. Always a good spot. If there’s one thing that differentiates Crescent Lounge from all of the other places I play it has to be the amount of effort the proprietor, Andy, puts into making the room an overall home game experience. There is a giant taxidermied fish on the wall, a camera above the table in case you want to see hands play out on “the big screen,” walls filled with poker paraphernalia, and trophies for high hands, low hands, best bluffs, etc.

Probably the signature aspect of this game is Andy’s insistence, and the players’ appetite for, the 27 hand rule. At Crescent Lounge, 27 suited doesn’t play, but 27 offsuit, is played religiously. The rate of people showing this hand seems to suggest that nobody ever folds it. Winning with it nets you $2 from everybody at the table, and on Friday I think I dumped out around $12 thanks to the deuce seven.

The game was good and swingy. In the beginning, some of the people who normally aren’t big winners were up big, which is always good for a game. Around midnight things started to change though. This is when the stakes jump up. At certain points in this game, much like a tournament, the blinds double even though it is a cash game. So, around 10:30 we jumped from playing .25/.5 to .5/1, and around midnight it went to 1/2. Obviously there are strategic adjustments you need to make here. That and you need to get a little lucky.

My last three sessions at the Lounge have been losing, including Friday’s, however, I don’t feel too bad about it. I was down $140 at around 1am, but ran good at the bigger stakes and ended the evening down $20 total at 2am, which for an evening out, is a steal of a deal. Of course, I would have liked to have been Mike A. who won a few hundred, much of which came from two consecutive  heads up hands with me in which I thought “there’s no way he has trips here” and he did. Even so, good times, and my urge to play more cards remains as strong as ever. I am trying to get some people over the the basement for some Tuesday night action. Hopefully it’ll be good.

I’ve decided that every time I play poker anywhere I am going to do a short write up. Deal with it.

Another trip to Roger’s last night. Got there and it was just four guys without a dealer playing short stacked 1/1. The game didn’t get too much bigger player-wise, and the action when we switched to 1/2 was fairly anemic for most of the night. Can’t recall any monster pots like there were last Thursday.

Best part of the evening was probably the goat Roger cooked up. The stove was simmering for a while during the evening, but to be honest, I didn’t really pay any attention to it. I’d already eaten, and figured I was done for the evening. Around 12:30 I got a text from Jeanne asking when I was getting home, and I fired back I was leaving in 15 minutes. I had been planning on getting out soon, since the game was pretty slow and everybody there has a decent read on me, but then, about two minutes before I was about to scoot, out came the goat of the pot, and man did it look good. Ok, I can stay another half hour I guess.

All I can say is, if you are ever at Roger’s and he starts making some food, stick around.

This kid Hollywood was at the game and Rog has been trying to get me and him to team up and get a charity tourney going for his youth basketball league or something like that. So, stay tuned. I have enough chips for about a twenty person tourney, and have toyed with the idea of holding a bi-weekly with Rog, but it’s hard to find the time for that type of thing.

Next Game I am playing will be Friday night at the Crescent Lounge in lovely Waltham. I won a whole $60 last night so I am on a roll…

Roger hadn’t hosted a game for a while and was a little desperate to get things rolling again so I did what I could and headed over there a little after nine last night. I was antsy to make back some of the money I lost in Sunday, and things started off good, with me being up $200ish early.

It was a fun game too. A lot of people were drinking and joking around. Roger takes a lot of ribbing at his game, and since he was a little wasted, guys were taking their shots left and right. Seemed like everybody was having a good time, even the guys that were stuck.

I was sitting to the left of Doughboy who had a massive stack. He normally plays tight, but he’d had a few, and was definitely looser than usual. About two and a half hours into the game my fortunes changed really quickly. I woke up with Kings UTG+1. Doughboy had raised to $12, I made it $30 I think, then he makes it something like $80. I hadn’t seen a four-bet all night, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one from him. I know this is stupid, but I was pretty sure he had Aces, and even so I re-raised him. Here are my dumb reasons for not folding:

1. He seemed a little tipsy.
2. The first hand I sat down to at the table was a KK v AA, so how likely would it be that THAT would happen twice in two and a half hours.
2b. Kings also won that hand, so…
3. I folded Kings pre a couple of months ago to Mike A. when we were playing that win with deuce seven and get paid by everybody at the table. Of course Mike turned over 27 after I folded and I’d been plagued with feelings of not being macho enough to get it all in with Kings ever since.

Anyhow, I re-raised him for some ungodly amount and then he smooth calls me. An ace comes down on the flop. Now I am more worried about him having Ace King to be honest, but between the smooth call, the ace on the flop, and him checking to me, I think maybe I am good here.

This is becoming a major theme lately: Mistakes I Make!

I check as well. He checks the turn, so I dump in a bunch of chips, he goes all in and now I am pot committed. An ace on the river gives him quads. Adios $500 and I am now down 200 for the night. Doughboy’s stack was now gargantuan. By the time he cashed out he had over $1200, a bunch of which he handed off to another player.

I rebought and ended up making $150 back, but it was a grind after a while. As the evening wore on into the morning people got quiet and tilty. I was hoping for a chance to make a big score but just couldn’t get the cards I needed. One nutty hand I saw had two guys with $200 plus in preflop, and then all in after a 249r flop. First dude goes all in with 36 or something, and the other guy snap calls him with KQ.

There’s nothing like being stuck at 2am, waiting for a monster, looking across the table at a guy sleeping, and noticing the guy next to you has fired up an early episode of Different Strokes on his iphone to pass time in between hands. And no I am not making that up.

I decided I’d play until my first text from my wife. As soon as I got it I responded that I’d be home in 15 minutes. Thanks to the late hour and a lot of green lights on Columbia Road I made good on my promise.

Finally got to play some poker after a long time away from the tables. I was all set to get some cards around 3ish with just a few errands to run beforehand, or more like, one errand to be exact. Grab a lime and some sugar from the local Village Market. While there I figured I’d pick up a Chocolate Eclair Table Top Pie. On the ride over I was cut off by a couple of other drivers so I was in a surly mood. I looked forward to biting into the delicious Table Top Chocolate Eclair custard as a way to suddenly feel better about the world around me, but after opening the box I noticed the pie was covered in mold. So then I went back into the store to get my money back. I was then shuttled from one line– “I can’t do that here” –to the another where I had to compete with obnoxious scratch ticket fish in order to get my dollar back.

When it finally got to my turn in line, this octagenerian scratch ticket player jammed her walker in front of me. What am I supposed to here, tell an old lady it’s not her turn? So, I let her buy her tickets with the $16 she won from the $90 worth of tickets she bought five minutes ago, and of course this is all done with the requisite extended tanking over which type of ticket gives her the best odds of hitting it big. I swear these people. If the tickets were just black and white with the words “YOU LOSE” on them, these idiots would still be at Tedeschis at 1am scratching away.

I finally get to the front of the line and am told to go grab a replacement pie, and I’m like, yeah right, like that one won’t be covered in fungus too, just give me my buck. Then a manager is called over, and before giving me the dollar back, he repeats the get a pie line. It must be Village Market policy to jam people up with enough mold until they’re so discombobulated that they consider scratch tickets a fun past time. What a nightmare.

But things only got worse from there. Instead of getting out to the game, a series of miscommunications and an unlocked door landed me alone in my neighbor’s house waiting for my son and his friends to watch the Eurocup. Thankfully they had a copy of the Sunday Times. I read some article about Serena Williams while wondering if there was somebody upstairs watching me. Eventually the kids showed up, their interest in the game waxed and waned. It was us parents who were forced to watch the whole thing to its dull conclusion. Nobody was able to score a goal in regulation. The announcer mentioned that this was the first time this had happened in a Eurocup final and I thought, yeah right.

Thirty more minutes of soccer, good lord. Finally get rolling around 6, but by now the game has broken. No problem, my buddy Roger was having a game too, but… not enough players. Rog and I find out about a 1/2 PLO game though and after a lot of back and forth texting get ourselves invited to it. And who wouldn’t invite two fish to a game who are ready to dump a combined $800 on everybody else?

The game was in a house down in Brighton and run by a kid named Tony who seemed vaguely familiar to me. He said he recognized me. I think I might have lost a huge pot to him a few years back when he had J3 and I had AJ, but I am not sure about that. Didn’t speak to him too much, but he was a nice enough guy. From the sounds of it, they run games often, and the players, some of whom I recognized, were obviously all underground regs.

I didn’t win a hand for the first 90 minutes of a relatively shorthanded game. Later I hit some flops good, but got counterfeited by the river. In one hand, when I was already down a buy in, I flopped a king high straight on a Jd Th 9h board. I had one heart among my cards. Five of hearts on the turn. Three players, checks all around. Another heart on the river, so I am thinking, well, with my heart, the checks on the turn, nobody here probably has the flush, so I bet $40 on the river with my non-flush nut, and get reraised $125. I really didn’t think he could have the flush there. He’s thinking I don’t have the flush and will fold a non-flush hand because of the board, I thought. Overthinking on my part. Oh well. Played like a fiddle.

An hour or so later I announce it is my last hand of the night, I am the first non-straddler, I asked how much I could pot it with, since I had Ah Ad 2s 6s. I am not sure if this was the right play or not. I know it’s not a great hand, but if there is another raise down the line, do I come over the top? Anyhow, I am told by the dealer I can make it $39 total. Five callers (adios $39), one of whom is all in for less. The guy in front of me bets $100 into a Jc Tc 8s flop. Then it’s to me, I figure there’s a good chance he hit something, and if he didn’t there are two more active players behind me, so I ditch my cards. Everybody else folds, except for the all in guy. The kid who bet $100 makes a straight when a queen shows up on the turn. At least I avoided that, but I was still kind of bummed I would have been ahead if I called or raised. Oh well.

Battered and beaten, Rog and I spent the long ride home trying to come up with plans to make back our money. Maybe that’s half the problem, maybe that’s half the fun. Here’s hoping my next poker adventure turns out a little better.

Sherwood Casino may see another Pot Limit Omaha game in the future, but I fear that future might be distant. With a couple of no shows, and some day of cancellations, the prospects for Saturday night’s game seemed bleak. The first hour or so was played three handed between me, John Bl, and Dan L.. There wasn’t a whole lot of action in the early going. John lost a lot of his stack early, but eventually got back to even. Overall the three of us just sort of traded chips around.

This was Dan’s first trip back to Sherwood in a while. It turns out that his extended absence was due to his getting really into ping pong. He’s traveling all over, playing in different tourneys and so forth. My favorite part of the Dan ping pong story though involved a match that pitted him against an angry Russian guy who sought to tilt him by verbally taunting him. If you’ve met Dan before you know that he is mild mannered and very polite, in short, a gentleman. However, according to Dan, the angry Russian brought out the beast in him, and after beating the guy, Dan let loose with some taunting of his own. Apparently there’s a semi-high probability of a rematch.

Eventually we scored some more poker players. Allain showed up from New Hampshire a little late and weary. He’d made the final table at some tourney up there, which meant he’d already put in a ton of poker hours for the day. Taylor and Harry also popped in to make the game six handed.

Taylor arrived in pretty high spirits and they didn’t dampen after he sat down, as he smashed flops like a jackhammer. Gone were the days of evenly tossing chips around, the Taylor show was on. I forget how much he finished up, but if you are in need of a loan, now might be a good time to hit him up, just sayin’.

There were five times during the night that people wound up with quads. I don’t know if this is standard for Omaha, but I am certain it will not happen the next time we play Hold’em. How certain you ask? Well, consider the next Sherwood Casino promotion. Hit the fifth set of quads of an evening and be the winner of a Stu Unger autographed baseball!!

Next game might be in a while as I am going to be going on vacation soon. Hope everybody runs real good in the meantime.

I’ve been trying to play poker once or twice a week. It’s definitely not easy when you have to get home and put kids to bed and stuff. By the time I can get out the door to a game, it is usually 9pm. To compensate, I was playing a lot of Zynga Poker. I know a lot of people will be angry to hear that. Zynga Poker tends to elicit a very negative response from “real” poker players. I can understand why. They would much rather have me at the table losing money to them than having me dick around on my phone.

I kind of like Zynga Poker though. Or I should say, liked. The other day after taking some beats I started playing with my entire Zynga playchip poker roll on the table. It took two very disastrous hands for me to be down to 0 chips from something like 3 billion. I honestly don’t want to think about the amount of time I would have to waste in order to get back to those high stakes, so I am kind of taking a break from Zynga, and will start focusing more on real poker.

Speaking of which, the little poker room will be open tomorrow for a Pot Limit Omaha game. I don’t think I have ever run a strictly Omaha game before. It has definitely been played at my place, but in general PLO rears its ugly head late at night when a bunch of guys are stuck and want to quickly make some of their money back. For those of you who don’t know, PLO is notoriously swingy, and can make No Limit Texas Hold’em look like a .01/.02 limit game.

To be honest, I am not super well educated when it comes to PLO strategy and so forth. I generally rely on a similar level to mine of knowledge among the other people at the table. I find that like tournaments, because of the potential windfall it affords, PLO seems to encourage people who have done well once to think that they are really good at it. But again, that is just an impression I have. Could be way off base. Either way, a little bit of experimenting with it tomorrow, and depending on how things go, maybe we’ll do it again soon.

Ok, fishies, here’s a special new feature on priorworks, one that will let you go inside the mind of a hardcore grinder, i.e. myself. So, let’s cut to the action. We’re at a 1/2 table at Roger’s place. Our hero is in the small blind with King 10 off suit. Seven handed. The game has been pretty loose, with a lot of calling station behavior, especially of preflop raises. Very difficult to manage getting headsup, but if you hit a flop, you could be good to go. Back to the action. We have one limper, and then a bunch of folds to me, so I chuck a buck in and the big blind checks.

Now, here comes the flop. KING KING 10!

Bingo!

I check, and then this happens. The big blind, smirks at the flop, and pitches his cards in the muck. The guy who limped, laughs at the big blind’s lack of interest in the hand, and says, “yeah, me too,” and chucks his cards in the muck too.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner as they say. $4 to me.

Here is the structure and payouts for the tourney:

Planning on it, so should you.