Oh crapola, I had a whole damn draft type thing here and now it looks as though I have lost it to the winds of time. Always click save, my friends. Or, figure out how to find where all of the autosaved stuff is, which I can’t seem to do.

So, anyhow, as I was saying before making the big mistake of clicking on another link without saving…

Picture a crowd of 1920’s farmer type people at a whistle stop. A horde of bowties, suspenders, overalls, wheat stalks hanging from their mouths, what’s this fancy man on the train going to tell us as he’s passing through?

I stand on a rickety platform and address these people as follows:

Ladies and gentlemen of this fair village, I am making my way across the country, for no other reason than I am compelled by definition to, for I am known far and wide as… A RAMBLIN’ GAMBLIN’ MAN!

Gasps of astonishment, a throbbing murmur of interest grips the crowd.

Yes. Yes, my friends, I have ranged near and far, have been to gambling dens in such exotic locales such as Dorchester, Somerset, Arlington, and even, on occasion to Lincoln, Rhode Island. The journey I am currently on, however, takes me further west than any wager has ever taken me. For I am on my way to none other than Commerce Casino in California!

The train whistle blows, and the conductor yells all aboard, and I race back on, but the whoops and bellows of the crowd fill the prairie sky, and I can hear them as they recede down the tracks until they are roughly 0.3 miles away. Yes, it is true, I had it in my sights to play at the legendary Commerce Casino, home, I am told, to Don Cheadle among others. Now, a lot of you will scoff at this, and still consider me nothing more than a baby stakes chump, and that’s ok. You go on thinking that. I know you think you are such hot shit, playing your big 2/5 games in podunk outposts like Foxwoods.

You know what, though, I’ve played a bigger game than that. I’ve played the 3/5– that’s right, I said 3!– game at Commerce, so consider me, from this point forward, unimpressed with your bragging.

Now some of you might be thinking, huh, Prior’s jobless, playing games with much better players well outside his bankroll, and offering us some kind of quasi-hallucinogenic imagery of him as a snake oil salesman. Is something wrong, Dave?

Well, yeah, something is wrong, and if you think it’s the constant and spiraling out of control feeling of uselessness being unemployed grants you, and the utter sense of helplessness that comes along with it, I would say, well, yeah sure, that’s a thing, but it’s not the main thing. The worst part of being unemployed is that I am slowly shrinking my bankroll for day to day expenses. Like the other day, my children needed $10 a piece, which I peeled from you guessed it, money intended for the sacred rite of gambling. As soon as they were out the door I was vomiting in the toilet, that’s how devastating this loss was to me.

But, back to Commerce, which was a fun trip. I got there early on a Tuesday morning and learned that the games are spread a little differently there. There was a 2/3 game that you could buy in for $200 max and a 3/5 game that you could buy into for $300 max. So, the 3/5 basically played like a 1/2 game with big opening raises. To be honest, the worst part about it was the rake. They take like $6 out of every pot unless it gets checked around.

I chose to go there because of the stories I’d read on 2+2 about the big games that happen there and stuff like that. This was probably the furthest thing from trying to find a beatable game or anything like that. If anything, I was expecting to get beat, and I did to the tune of $171 down. $201 if you include the Commerce Casino souvenir shirt I bought with my wilting roll. Of course, since I built the place up so much in my mind, I may have allowed my imagination to get a little out of control. Case in point, when a polished, well-dressed guy in his early to mid-sixties showed up and started chatting with some of the other players, I thought to myself, he must be somebody. And I was convinced he was, although with no evidence whatsoever. He was a smooth talker though. I think that added to the allure.

After playing for four or five hours, I walked around the place, figuring there must be a big game going on somewhere. I knew the white chips were $100s and in some of the games I saw people were playing with six plus 20 white chip stacks along with some other colors. There was one game in particular that was in its own little cordoned off section. The stacks were massive. After putzing around a little more one of the people working there asked if he could help me. I asked how big the biggest game was. He sort of nodded. I could tell he didn’t or wasn’t supposed to tell me, but since I was polite he smiled. Then, right before I shuffled off, he said the biggest game was an 800/1600 combo game.

On a Tuesday morning.

Anyhow, I have to go send out a resume. I’m up $24 for the year so far.  Well, -$6 if you count the Commerce Casino shirt.