Monthly Archives: November 2016

Horrific Losing Streak

I neglected to post about the poker game I went to at Roger’s two Fridays ago, or was it a Thursday, I forget. Roger’s game has been pretty good lately. Lots of players, people waiting on the rail. You know when his game is going well when you don’t get texts from him. When he’s got a ton of people there, there’s no need for him to fire out a “CRAZY STOOPID ACTION!!!!” On the other hand, when he’s been having trouble getting players, that’s when you get the texts. So, yeah, lately, no texts. Something’s up, and it’s not me. The last time I was there, which like I said was something like ten days ago, the table was full, people were pretty deep. I took some hits early and was down like $280, but then rallied and was four or five bucks from being even for the night, and then this hand happened…

So there’s this kid called Ziggy. He’s youngish, I’d guess mid-twenties, although I am a horrible judge of such things. He’s got a lot of chips, definitely up, and he’s in a pretty good mood. As oftentimes happens with poker players when they are up, Ziggy’s range opens up too and so does his mouth. He’s been in a lot of the hands, loads of commentary, it’s pretty much Ziggy’s game.

Somebody opens, maybe it’s me. I was late, maybe in the cutoff. It’s around 1am. There’s maybe eight of us left. I have King 5, diamonds I think. I know, I know. Ziggy and another guy are in the hand when the flop comes down KKJ. Check check, and I bet like 20 into 32. The player who is not Ziggy folds. Maybe there wasn’t even another player in the hand, I forget. Ziggy snap calls. Of course I don’t think he has a king because he was happy and goofing around. Does that make sense? No.

I fire at the turn, which was a brick, another call, this one with some acting. He’s hamming it up now, “what do you have?” Pure theatrics from this guy, but of course, I can’t see it as anything other than a bluff, or not even so much as a bluff, but as make believe, as though when somebody puts on a performance, it can’t possibly mean they’re good, can it. They’re simply pretending.

Here’s the thing though. He had a boat and got like 70 bucks out of me in that hand, maybe 80, but in all honesty, what sunk me was the performance. It was almost intentionally bad, but intentionally bad on purpose. By that I mean, he was over the top, but in a way that was confusing for me to read. He must have repeated that “what do you have?” line like five times, and it echoed in my head for about three days.

So that was that game. I ended up out eighty bucks. I told Rog I would show up around nine tonight, but there were more texts than usual which gave me a feeling that it might be a slow night over there. So I sent out a “I’m coming” text just to make sure the game was on. I was half out the door when he called and told me to meet him some place in Revere.

Revere?! For Christ’s sake that’s way too far. At moments like this you wish you had a backbone. I was crossing the Charles fifteen-twenty minutes later. I was too busy fiddling with Waze to set up some music, so the iPod just played up the first thing in my library, Adrenaline Night Shift. Normally this might be just the thing to fire you up as you sneak out of the house at 9:30pm on a Tuesday night, but the prospect of the relatively long drive had my mood soured. I got to the place and was directed to a dimly lit building. When I say dimly lit, I mean, it was dark. Very dark, as though the building hadn’t had its door opened in over five years. As I approached that door, one of the guys who directed me over there asked me what I was there for. Cards, I replied. This prompted him to direct me into another building.

I go down some steps and who is the first person I see? A cop!

There was a tourney going on that I guess qualified the gathering as some kind of charity affair, which meant it was quasi-legal. I waited for about five minute before a second table opened. The game was pretty good, but I couldn’t get any traction cardswise. There was a kid there with slicked back hair and a voice pulled out of a 1930s gangster movie. He was the life of the table, and like Ziggy above, was loose and gabby about it too. He must have been up two or three hundred. For the most part, the rest of the table was fairly passive and calling stationy, including myself to some extent. I never claimed I was a good player.

The place was kind of depressing. Maybe on another night I would have really dug this scene. It was a kind of basement gymnasium type deal with a small bar in the corner. A bartender/waitress would swing by and you could buy drinks for $2 and $3. The table I played at was pretty beat up and the chips were doled out in odd combos. I bought in for $250 and was given 8 greens, 9 reds, and 4 ones. This was pretty standard across the table. Also, and this will sound super nitpicky, but the $25 chips were clay, while the $1 and $5s were ceramic. Completely different sets. I dunno, for the cost of raking a 1/2 game for an hour, you could buy yourself a nice set of 1000 Pioneers.

And don’t call me a snob until you’ve played in my basement.

Anyhow, I didn’t do so great. I played B- poker for me. The game broke at 12, “by law” I guess, although the cop was long gone. Call me down $115 for the night, which means for both of the games in this post I am down a whopping $195. When you factor in that I spent $20 of my roll on beers Sunday night, you’ll understand what a dire predicament I am in.

Did I mention I got a new job two and a half weeks ago? And oddly enough, ever since landing it, I have not had one single winning session!!!

Hopefully that changes on Friday in what very well may be my last trip to the Crescent Lounge. More on that later.

The 11/11 game in my basement

As I surveyed the list of people reserving seats for last night’s game it dawned on me that this might be the toughest lineup of players I have ever played against. Which, fine, it’s low-stakes, so if you are going to be challenged, at least have it be at a level in which it won’t kill you financially. That was my attitude, although I am aware that there is a feeling among some that the less money involved in a game the easier it is. Maybe so, but people weren’t really throwing money away last night. There weren’t too many spots were I felt myself put to the test, where I had a decent but not a nutty hand and running up against pressure from a better player and having to decide whether they were playing the cards or me. It happened twice actually, and when it did the money involved was $8 and $12, which sure you can sneeze at, but it meant a lot to me to not be shown up as a fool or a fish or whatever. It turns out I folded one when I shouldn’t have and called one when I should have, netting me a cool $4. Laugh all you want. Other than those two hands though, the deck hit me like Trevor Berbick hit Mitch Green in the epic USBA Heavyweight title fight at the Riviera in 1985. I reeled in a flopped flush against a flopped top set, a rivered boat which got a call on the river, a flopped straight flush against a flopped flush (the flopped flush actually had an out to beat me on that one), turned quads when all in, and a few others here or there. In short, the poker gods were really good to me, to the point where, I really didn’t have to do much calculating and thinking.

But, anyhow, if I could just return briefly to that the less money the easier the game idea, while yes I agree with it to an extent, let’s not forget that the more money on the table the worse people play as well. What I mean by that is, if you are playing with more money than you are comfortable with losing, then you won’t play as well as you would when you are playing within your roll. There is a sweet spot of meaningful play in there somewhere, but it’s complicated by the fact that at any given table all of the players will find themselves affected by this by their own personal comfort zones.

Speaking of how tough this table was though, I gave my son $10 worth of chips to play with. He lasted two hands, the second one he got all in with Corey on the turn. The board was 8h Ts 4d 6h. Corey turned over the straight, but Jonah flipped over Kh 4h for a halfway decent, and not dead yet one pair with a flush draw. Corey faded a heart on the turn to felt the nine year old.

The game ended pretty early. We were done before midnight. Corey stayed after where we talked about this crazy coincidence of him possibly going on a date with somebody who took me to her prom in 1990, and while this was going on Bruno showed up. He stayed later than Corey but had to exit after I started going on my why I love Gertrude Stein spiel at 1:30AM.

Take me to the River

I’ve been jonesing for some poker action, but one thing that happens when you are out of work is your sole focus becomes getting a job, not playing cards all night with your friends. Sure, you can try and convince yourself that you’re a winning player, that when you play cards you have an expected hourly rate of return that converts a leisure activity into actual work, but at the end of the day if you pull your unemployed self into a Wendy’s parking lot right after dropping your kids off at school at 8am, excitedly type “Twin Rivers Casino” into Waze, and then fist pump and yell “Yeah Motherfucker!” when the computer lady spits out her first direction, you have got yourself a problem that probably needs clinical attention.

Fortunately for myself, I am not THAT bad. However, I feel like I’ve played enough poker that I now know the scene, the people as well as the cards, enough to envision what such a scenario would be like, right up to the adrenaline rush a theoretical gambling addict would get firing up the old Prius engine as he merges onto I-95, sucks in all of that glorious fall foliage with his eyeballs as, I dunno, let’s say Talking Heads Fear of Music gets fired up on the stereo.

It being a real stunner of a November morning, with an immaculately sunny blue sky and temps in the mid fifties, there may have been a bit of regret somewhere just past Attleboro. I could be in these trees, taking it all in, laying back and just enjoying the natural order of things rather than grinding it out in a Rhode Island casino. I mean, just those three words strung together, “Rhode Island casino,” while they describe a place and not a medical condition, sort of, for a brief moment weigh down your gut in the same way as the phrase “I’m sorry, but it’s inoperable.” Rhode Island, of course, somewhat pales in elegance compared to a place like Vegas. Nobody anywhere else in the country counters a suggested trip to Vegas with the line, “well what about Rhode Island? They have gambling there too now.” You think about that as the trees, the splendid trees, one after another in quick succession fly by on the highway, and just at the moment when you think, man, I am such an idiot, such an addict with no will power at all, there by the side of the road you see a coyote!

And what is that coyote doing? He’s getting ready to cross the highway. Oh yeah, the woods are good, plenty of mice and squirrels to eat, coyotes are the king of the food chain in those along I-95 forests, but the coyote wants something more. Maybe he’s heard late at night, some howling at the moon, a voice on the other side of the three lanes, suggestive and foxy… ok, let’s say it’s a fox, not a coyote, but just the same, the animal, the wild beast above all else wants to gamble. I think it was Nietzsche who first said that, if not him then the Dalai Lama. Either way, you realize, it’s time to cast away the words you describe yourself with, i.e. unemployed, desperate for work, a lackluster father, etc and become what you truly were called to be. A coyote. Or a fox, I mean. Either way, just an animal about to cross a highway.

We get there at 9:30ish. Name on a list. There were four tables going. Two 1/2, one 2/5, and one 5/10. I saw Teddy from Roger’s game at the 2/5 table and said hello. Sorry, I meant to say, in this purely imagined scenario I saw Teddy. It took like fifteen or twenty minutes before I was seated. The first hand I got was Kc5c. There was a raise, I folded, and then the guy to my immediate left called. The flop was club club 5. Uggh. A raise, a call. A blank, a small, easy to call raise with a bunch of outs was made followed by another call, and then another club on the river. Big river bet, snap called. Somebody had a pair of 8s. I was already tilted and I hadn’t played a hand.

The kid on my right was young and very talkative. Lots of poker talk. He was ok enough, but definitely not as good as he thought he was. He was with a bunch of guys, his friends were for the most part milling around the room, others were still seated. It turns out that Twin Rivers allows twenty year olds to play. Twin Rivers and Turning Stone he told me. I forget where he said he was from, but I remembered him saying it was three and a half hours from Lincoln, Rhode Island. Basically what I gathered was, that him and his buddies had traveled a good distance to do a marathon session and he was one of the only guys still playing. The others would loiter around, bug him about leaving, and in turn he would bug them about buying back in, which got responses like “I can’t even take $80 out of my bank account, dude.” And here I thought being unemployed was a bad beat.

There was some action at the table. A little bit of zaniness. I didn’t want to come off as a nit, so I entered a few pots pre just for show. I took down a small three way pot with a bluff on the flop in position, which was a nice way to appear as an “action player.” Then came my big hand. AK offsuit in the big blind. A family pot type deal until the action is one me. I think I made it $27, I forget. Two callers. The flop comes down AQ4r. I bet $30 or $40. Who knows. One caller, this south Asian guy who had been making really small c-bets earlier, like $10 into a $60 pot. The turn is another ace, so I check to look vulnerable, because that is my new thing lately, looking vulnerable. He checks too, which I think ultimately induced a call on the river (10) when I bet $65ish. So that was nice.

There was definitely some action. I saw a guy sit down and a hand in call a $100 preflop jam with 66… and win. One guy opened to $31 and was called by the twenty year old kid next to me who had less than $150 behind. The kid took down a massive pot when he flopped another ace to go with his A6. The table was a din of remonstrating afterwards, but the kid insisted he was going on a good read.

I figured that in order for me to get back with enough time to meet the kids at the bus stop I would have to leave a little before 1pm. When I was about to leave the room had really filled up. There were probably three or four times as many tables at this point. I worried before getting there that arriving at 9:30am might end up with me endlessly waiting for a table or two to spit out a player. Seemed like you could get on pretty quickly arriving anytime in the morning. There was a lot of table hopping as well. I am not sure what that was all about. The talk was about how much better the 5 seat is than the 9 seat. I can kind of see that being an advantage with sight lines maybe, but I wouldn’t switch tables for it. Maybe it’s just code for “I am intimidated and don’t want to play at this table anymore.”

Wimps.

I was having a nice morning at the table until just before I was about to go. I was in a multi-way straddled pot with K9 of clubs. My mistake was playing this one. I can make excuses for what happened afterwards until the cows come home, but yes, I should have folded. Suffice to say I bluffed off one guy on the turn and was left with one of the young kids. He had $32 left so of course he called my move on the blanked turn to get the deeper stacked player out. Well, I should say, of course after tanking forever, he chose to call with his thirty-two remaining dollars into a $150 pot. The board was Qc 10c 6s 4d. He turned over 89 offsuit. I can’t fault him, he thought he had 8 outs. Anyhow, a 7 on the river and he nearly triples up. Ouch. Nice hand, good game. I had to get back up to Boston to meet my kids at the bus stop with a decent enough profit, but one I wish was $180 bigger.