Poker basement was hopping last night. Sadly, due to limited space, poker basement can only handle one table. I had to tell a few people that we were booked, but I was still worried that somebody might randomly show up. Initially we were supposed to play 11 handed, which is too much, so one more person would have been trouble. Just in case, I set up my octagon table outside. It would have been pretty nuts to have a game outside, and fortunately it didn’t come to that. The octagon is still out there because I am lazy.

Luckily one person didn’t make it, so we played ten handed, which is still a little cramped, but the game was good. Everybody bought in deep for a .25/.25 game. Well, almost everyone. I’d say the average buy in was over 60 bucks. The one guy dragging down the average was James, who only bought in for $20. I think the last time James came to a game was over five years ago. I remember he was down for that night. James is a friend of mine through work, so we usually talk about a whole lot of different things besides cards. My impression was, since the time he played here, that he really wasn’t too into playing poker, but the idea of hanging out seemed fun. I knew he had experience playing, but when it was his turn to deal, he was definitely foggy on the details of where to start, and the burn cards, et cetera. I was a little worried to be honest. I thought, oh man, James is going to come in here, lose a small buy in or two in like 15 minutes, and then trudge home in misery, and I am going to feel like crap about it because we haven’t hung out in forever.

I hadn’t even finished this little self imposed guilt trip when James doubled up his buy in. Some jokes went around about how his rustiness was really a level, but before the jokes were finished, he doubled up again. Suddenly, he had over $80 in front of him. I don’t think this took more than fifteen minutes to happen.

With all of the deep stacks, there were some big pots. Chips were being pushed around the table, people were emptying their pockets to rebuy, like I said, it was a good game.

Speaking of chips, Josh brought me a gift of old casino chips. Most of them were Paulsons. Not only were the chips cool, but the rack I noticed was really nice too. I recently bought some new racks online, so I definitely noticed there was something different about the rack Josh delivered the chips in. Turns out, it’s a Paulson rack, the best there is. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. The chips are really cool, though. My favorite are these all pink $5 blackjack chips from some place in the Bahamas. They feel amazing, especially if your thing is feeling poker chips. You know, you acquire an appreciation for such things after a while. Josh also had a three page write up on all of the chips. I will post highlights of it soon, I promise.

Back to the game. James is still running super hot. He ends the night cashing out for $405. Remember, he bought in for $20. I think that has to be some kind of Sherwood Street Casino record. I will say that he seemed very happy with the events of the evening and we will most likely be seeing more of him. Andy put him on the Crescent Lounge invite list. Mike A. also had a decent night. I think he was up $200 or so, but you know, what’s $200 when James is taking double that and only buying in for $20. Still not quite sure how that happened. James was the first person in the history of poker basement to have a $100 chip in his stack. I think there are pics on Twitter.

Anyhow, that is a wrap of last night’s action. See you at the table.

Well, Tuesday fell through. No big deal. I had minimal interest from players until I decided to cancel and that opened a floodgate of maybes. Such is the life of trying to get a game together.

Yesterday I took my kid to the swimming pool. One of the guy’s that works at the pool, Al, is a poker player, so I shot the shit with him for a while. It turns Al is tight with the kid who was dealing at Roger’s the other night. So we talked about that, underground games in general, et cetera. Then Al tells me he’s been playing on Bovada. A lot of people have been telling me they’ve been playing on Bovada lately, and they’ve all assured me they’ve been able to cash out when they wanted to, which to me is the biggest thing when it comes to playing online.

I gave it some thought, and temptation got the best of me last night. I got myself a $50 roll and started playing pretty quickly. The first thing I played was something called Zone poker, I think, where you see a hand, and if you fold it, you are whooshed away to another table for a new hand. I played this for about 5 minutes, but didn’t like it because it was impossible get a read on anybody.

Then I signed up for a $5 + .50 Pot Limit Omaha Hi Lo Sit-n-Go. I’m used to playing SNGs on Zynga poker, where the longest a game can last is about twenty minutes. This game was interminable. First complaint I have may be more with my computer which got hung up after the first hand in the SNG. I closed the program and relogged in. Then had to do that again, before I finally got seated again. Again, most likely my computer’s fault, but something to consider if you have a crappy computer and a gambling addiction. Complaint number two: some of the players take forever to make a decision. The game gives you 30 seconds I think. I can see 30 seconds for a big decision on the river, but these players were just maxing out preflop constantly. I get it, they probably think they are Randy Lew, and can play 16 tables at once, but the game was painfully slow. Anyhow, I don’t have a lot of experience playing PLO8, but I ran decent enough, and after like an hour and a half or so, was way in front and heads up. I think I had a 12 to 1 chip advantage. This is when I hear the dog jump off of the bed upstairs, followed by my wife. They are both on me in a minute. What are you doing, it’s late, hurry, I need to go to the bathroom. I just start blowing up every pot, I have no choice at this point. And wouldn’t you know, I blow it and end up in second place.

I fired it up again this morning before leaving for work and hopped on a .02/.05 PLO table for a twenty minute session. That was a little better, but still slow. I was definitely surfing the web while playing. Maybe I should start multitabling too. Well, what I should do is cash out my $9 of winnings so far and call it a day, but most likely this will be a new bad habit of mine.

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.