Usually when I am visiting my parents there isn’t a whole lot of time for doing something like playing poker, but that doesn’t stop me from looking at the nearest casinos on my phone and figuring out how long it would take me to get to one. Unlike Boston, where you have to travel an hour to the nearest casino, Philadelphia has a few casinos in it. The nearest on to where my parents live, Parx Casino, is only a few miles away.

So, on Saturday night, when things seemed pretty mellow, I said, I think I’m going to check out the casino, hopped in the car and drove over.

I should preface this by saying I didn’t really do much research before venturing out there. I figured that with a bunch of other options for poker in town, the room would be small, but when I got there I was blown away by how big it is. There were eighty filled tables and the wait for getting in a 1/2 game was probably around forty minutes. I honestly was expecting like four tables tops.

While waiting for a seat I talked to a guy who plays there and at SugarHouse Casino downtown like once or twice a week. He told me that he liked SugarHouse a little better, and that part of the reason it was so packed at Parx was due to a big tourney happening. Eventually I got a seat. I was listed 33rd for 1/2, but a lot of people ahead of me either took off, or played 1/3 or PLO or whatever.

Since most of the games I play are home or underground games, I generally know who I am up against. It took me a while to adjust to playing with strangers. Like I said, I am rarely in situations like this, but my general presumption here is that everybody else at the table is a casino regular, who is better than me. After forty-five minutes, I saw some mistakes made. As far as the people playing tight, I couldn’t tell you how good they were, some of the loose people though were making some pretty nice mistakes.

There was one guy who was kind of the table loudmouth. To be honest, I got a kick out of him, but I guess that feeling wasn’t really shared with the rest of the group. I started talking to the loudmouth guy when the kid sitting between us mentioned he was from Maine. “Oh, so you’re from New England,” I said. “Wow, how’d you figure that one out, genius?” the loudmouth guy interrupted. I cracked up, mentioned I was from Boston and then loudmouth guy was telling me that even though he grew up in Philly, he loved the Red Sox from “around 1976 until 1993. Then I met some actual Red Sox fans, and I never could like that team again.”

As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I could have been offended by that, but instead, I just threw out the standard nostalgic 1970s Sox icons “Oh yeah, Freddy Lynn, Jim Rice, Yaz… those teams were terrific.” Then he tells me that he can name any player from those teams, try him. So to be nice, I’m not going with anything tricky like who played first for them in 1990. Instead I go easy on him, and ask who played third on the 1978 team. Guy has no clue. As a hint I told him the player had like 30 home runs. “There’s no way I can’t get a guy who had thirty homers, there’s no way this guy had 30 homers.”

I guess we were both wrong as Butch Hobson only had 17 in 1978. He did however hit 30 in ’77 and 28 in ’79.

The kid in between us was an aggressive player. He was raising $15 plus almost every other hand. I guess that meant I had a good seat. Anyhow, he raises a hand pre to $35 with a stack that was around 150 to begin with and gets called by four other people, the last one being the loudmouth guy, who says he’s priced in. The flop comes down 789r. It’s checked to a mild mannered guy in his fifties, who makes it something like $100ish. The mild mannered guy and the loudmouth had been jousting with one another the whole time I was there. When the action gets to loudmouth, he raises his hands in the air and triumphantly declares “I call” with the remainder of his chips. Everybody else folds, loudmouth turns over 78 offsuit, the mild mannered guy turns over pocket 9s. I toss aside my earlier presumption that everybody else at the table is better than me. Loudmouth guy sticks around for a few minutes, getting his wife on the phone and handing it to the mild mannered guy in hopes that he’d explain to her what would happened. It was pretty comical to me, but nobody else had any issues when the dude was booted from the seat a few minutes later.

I was having a rough night when I put on my time to leave in thirty minutes timer. I lost with a full house, got counterfeited on another big hand, and had some poorly made c-bets called. I was down around $160. Not the worst night for 1/2, but I’ve been running bad lately and I can’t lie and say it doesn’t start to get to me sometimes. Then, with about ten minutes to go before I have to leave, I pick up aces when the mild mannered guy from the hand above had kings. Hey-ooo up $30 for the night. Not a big win, but I had a good time, and brought a nasty little Parx $1 chip home for my collection.