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.