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.