I haven’t gotten around to writing up my last trip to The Crescent Lounge, which happened last Friday night. So, to anybody who has been waiting patiently, please forgive me.

Carpooled with Dan R. formerly of West Roxbury, now of Brooklyn, but potentially now of West Roxbury again. On the way Dan and I got into it over whether or not Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State was successful or not. I’ll spare you the details of the argument, heck, I’ll even spare you who took which side, I just mention this to give you a mental image of two guys in a Prius flying along 95 north yelling at each other over something neither one of them knows much about.

Getting inside The Lounge, the basement glowing in neon hues, would have to wait for a bit as the players were out on the sidewalk smoking. It used to be that the players smoked in the lounge itself, then the smoking was pushed outside, so the players were smoking in the yard. Now the yard is off limits, and smoking is done on the sidewalk. A lot of this has to do with the proprietor of the lounge, Andrew T, having a new baby in the house. Probably the last thing you need as a young dad is having a bunch of degenerates skulking around your yard all night. I think about that at times when I am at the lounge and I say to myself, enjoy this little scene because it is not going to last.

Unless of course, Andrew’s kid grows up to be a card shark.

If there is one drawback to the lounge as a player it’s that the ride back from Waltham to Roslindale can be tricky, at least as Waze navigates me. You’re the only car on the road for almost the whole route, and this makes me worried that I’m going to be in the crosshairs of every Newton cop. So, aside from a couple Golden Halftime Hand Goldschlager shots, I didn’t drink at all.

I like to drink playing poker although I’ve read that I shouldn’t be. Most of the live poker I’ve played has been while drinking. I think it’s safe to say that my “winrate” for drinking versus not drinking poker is roughly the same. And, no, a feel player like me is not going to have stats to back that up.

Anyhow, the game was pretty lively and fun, as per usual there. I noticed that Jeremy was losing a bit and getting agitated. At one point, after rebuying, he was handing the chiprack back to Andy R, and as Andy tried to take it back, Jeremy wouldn’t let go. Later, Jeremy was taunting Mike A. over something or other as well.

A while back when I was there Jeremy told some story about falling off a scaffolding or something. I forget what the hell it was that he fell off of, I just remember the detail about him falling from a height of twenty feet or so and walking away from the incident barely hurt. Jeremy’s a tough guy, he told me he does 400 pushups a day along with a host of other exercises a wimpo like me couldn’t possibly imagine even the names of.

As he continued playfully taunting everybody else at the table I began to consider not the odds of the hand I was dealt but the odds on IF Jeremy decided to fight everybody else in the room at this given moment, how big of a favorite would he be?

Probably something like 4:5.

Joe B was there. I always consider Joe to be the most addicted of all the players I know. Around 1:45am, we were four handed and I said I’d stick around for another half an hour. Five minutes later Joe says he’s only in for the next orbit. I guess I am the one with the real problem now.

I hadn’t played any poker in almost two weeks going into last night. I wanted to play at the Crescent Lounge tonight, but it turns out that wasn’t doable, which bummed me out because I haven’t been able to make it over there for over a month now. So, with no Lounge this week, no cards for almost two weeks, and the Red Sox down 4-0 to the Yankees, I figured I’d sneak out of the house to Roger’s Thursday night game after I did my chores.

Jeanne was upstairs, so I texted her that after I was done with taking out the dogs and doing the dishes I was heading out. Or at least, I thought I texted Jeanne that. A minute later I got a text from Rog saying “ok.” Whoops, texted the wrong person. Man, will I look bad if she ends up having some valid reason why I shouldn’t go. She had some reasons why I shouldn’t go, but none of them quite valid enough, so I was out the door after making the assurance I wouldn’t be coming home at 2.

I got there at nine and the game was just getting off the ground. I bought in for $250 but then Rog wanted to settle up with some money he owed me from before, so I ended up starting the night with $350. I never really chased that money. In fact, in a way I kind of liked having a little credit there. Since I don’t pull money from ATMs to play cards with, the idea of being able to ask for a $100 instead of running home to my roll was kind of nice. But, whatever, those days are gone now, I guess. Also, and maybe this plays into it, but historically, when paid back debts before or during a poker game, I end up down for the night. I try not to be superstitious about things like that, but in an illogical way, I thought that getting the $100 would mean losing it and more.

It’s harder to think superstitions are stupid when you get screwed by going against them. The $350 I started the game with was down to $180 in half an hour. I put another $100 on my stack, but things weren’t going so well. I tried to console my self by considering that with the $100 from Rog to start the night, my roll wouldn’t be as adversely affected, so no big deal. A couple of hours later I was hoovering around $300 and dishonestly thought “$50 down, no big deal, I’m having fun.”

I checked the Sox game on my phone. They were down three in the ninth, but had the tying run at the plate, so I fired up the audio and listened to them get within a run and then heard Castiglione’s call of Hanley’s three run bomb to win it. Yes! Almost right after the Sox win, my luck at the table started to change. By the time I was supposed to be leaving I was up $50 for the night. A real $50, as in $500 after the 350+100 buyin(s). Of course, it’s easier to say you are going to leave, than to actually get up and go. Rico and another guy showed up in dark suits because they’d just been to a funeral. I alway feel weird bolting right when somebody else gets there, so I said I’d play another half hour.

That half hour passes, I am counting up my chips to leave, but at Roger’s the hole cards are still coming to you until you are cashed (in hand) out. I’ve lost a lot of money because of this, but hey what’s that? Instead of two hole cards, I’m getting four.

OMAHA!

Now I have to stay another hour. I know almost everybody thinks they are better at Omaha than they actually are, but I was running good, and was only afraid of Brian at the table. Brian, who upon getting the four instead of two cards, said, “I don’t really know how to play Omaha.” I didn’t believe that for a second, but true to his word, he was cashing out ten minutes later. Better than knowing how to play Omaha, is knowing when to leave a game.

Omaha treated me well until two am, when I got the “I thought you said you’d be home by 2am” text from Jeanne. Of course Rog was slow to cash me out, which resulted in one more hand for me in which I won $125ish from him. Cashed out for $700, which is up $250 or $350 depending on how you look at it. I’ll look at it as $350. I know it’s somewhat dishonest, but at the end of the night, that’s how much more cash I have jammed under that floorboard in my bedroom.

Corey’s birthday party poker game was yesterday. It’s pretty rare that I can get out of the house on a Sunday afternoon, but since I had the heads up a few weeks in advance, I was able to work things out. It was a .05/.10 NLHE held at his friends Roslin and Matt’s place in Needham.  The place was great, they had a sunroom in the back of the house that was the perfect size for a poker table, and a hot tub a few feet out the door. The best part though was their pooch Phoebe, who I snuck half a hot dog to when nobody was looking. We were pretty tight after that.

Corey is what people call a really good poker player. He made a lot of money playing poker on the internet back in the good old days, and even took a swing playing semi-professionally in Vegas. When you play poker a lot you often run into people telling you they used to be pro, but with Corey, I’ve seen him play enough to know he’s pretty legit. I like playing him in smaller stakes because it’s a cheap way for me to brag that I’ve played somebody really good. I like Corey a lot, but there’s no way in hell I’d play 1/2 with him.

Since Corey is really good, I had a hunch that his friends would be really good to. I had played with Matt once before at my house, but I didn’t remember much about his playing style. As weird as it sounds, despite the stakes, I was a little intimidated going into this game. I figured that if I was at a table full of Corey’s, everybody would have fantastic reads on me, and I’d be sliced and diced into oblivion, put into a situation where losing $40 or something would be nothing compared to the beating my poker ego would take.

The other players turned out to be decent, but fortunately not Corey decent. The game started around 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon, almost everybody bought in for $40. I had run six miles in the morning and didn’t have breakfast, so after about half an IPA, I was happily buzzed. Little did I know at the time I was settling into what would become something of a marathon length game. We ended things a little before two a.m.. It was one of those games where my entire body is begging me to go to sleep but my gambling addiction won’t relinquish the wheel, a late night car ride where you are fighting with your eyes to keep them open, and with each passing 83 offsuit under the gun you are asking yourself, what on earth you are doing. Ah poker, I love it.

I finished up $21, which feels like breaking even after such a long game, but Is should probably count myself lucky, since I don’t know if anybody else was up besides Corey, who ran over the table. I took good chunks from me a few times too. I think he was up $130 or something, I forget, it was late.

I am not sure when I am playing again. Part of me feels like I haven’t been playing as much because I am so excited about the big tournament I’m hosting in October, but after yesterday’s crazy long game, I might just be tired.

Last Friday was a new chapter in the history of Sherwood Casino. For the first time ever, the poker players made a field trip. Mid-way through the game we got up for a brief visit to The Angry Scotsman pub down the street, the Angry Scotsman, of course being another “underground” establishment. Everything was great at the Scotsman, but after we were there for a while we realized that Harry had disappeared. So, we went back down to the poker basement, but no Harry. Oh well, he’s gotta be around here somewhere. Let’s give him another fifteen minutes and then we’ll call 911.

To usher in part two of the evening, I brought out the tourney chips and we fired up a sit-n-go with our cash game chips still on the table. Harry showed up before the end of the first blind level. His eyes were glassy and movements rigid. It turns out he was sucked into a gap in the time space continuum while we were at the Scotsman.

I had been drinking a lot, yes.

We tried out the new low hand jackpot. Andy won it with an ace high with a jack kicker. I had hoped the low hand of the night jackpot would usher in a lot of post flop bluffs, but I think because people were not used to it, it didn’t create the action I hoped it would.

My memory of the evening is kind of fuzzy, so you’ll have to excuse my lack of clear descriptions here. I know that at one point I was up a ton, but then I took a series of three of four bad beats slash coolers over a thirty minute period. Andy R. seemed to get a real kick out of this and nicknamed me David “Downfall” Prior. The worst of the hands was when I had tens filled with queens and lost to tens filled with kings. To be honest, I didn’t feel exceptionally confident with that hand, as there was also an ace on the board too, and who plays with 10s except people with KT and AT? So, luckily, when I was raised on the river I just called. Who says I can’t play poker drunk?

After that I lost a hand where I flopped two pairs heads up with somebody, and another where I think I had a straight. Andy was loving watching me lose again and again like it was some kind of painful comedy show.

At the end of the evening after cashing everybody out I stumbled upstairs to bed without even putting my chips or the rest of the cash away. We had to hit the road early in the morning to visit some friends on Cape Cod. I didn’t think about the poker game again until Sunday morning, when it occured to me that I had no idea how much money I’d won. I started thinking about how foggy my recollection of the end of the game was, and how revealing it would be to get home and look around poker basement.

Last night I counted up the remaining stacks that I’d paid out. This person had a hundred or so, that one around forty, I had $218, which wasn’t bad for buying in for $63 for the cash game and losing $20 in the SnG.

Some poker rooms have a high hand jackpot, and some do a version of a low hand jackpot with the 27 rule. Here is a new low hand jackpot idea I am toying with for my next poker game:

Worst Hand of the Night JACKPOT

When buying in all players will contribute $3.50 to the WORST WINNING HAND OF THE NIGHT JACKPOT.

1. You have to win with it
2. You have to show it obviously
3. Game starts at 8pm and whoever has won with the worst hand at 11pm gets the JACKPOT
4. This is a little different than the 27 rule in that you have to win with a 5 card hand. The jackpot winning hand would be a lowball type hand not a Razz one, ie the worst possible hand being a 23457 without a flush.
5. If you find this confusing you will be required to donate an extra $5 to the JACKPOT!!

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.

Dunno if you remember but I mentioned a few posts back that I succumbed to internet poker again. Generally I don’t like to fire up the computer when I am home. Not that I am above that kind of stuff, but most of my browsing is done on a phone now, so why bother. So, I hadn’t really played any Bovada since the night I put the $50 on it. Yesterday I was hanging out at work thinking, man, I sure would like to play some cards tonight… Oh wait, I can gamble on the internet now!

I was all excited to get home and fire up the computer.

So, kids get home, wife goes to bed, and around 9pm I finally log in. Hmm, here’s a tourney that costs $3.30 to enter with $2000 guaranteed in winnings. Let’s give this a whirl. Three plus hours later I was…. down $3.30.

I really don’t know how fun this is.

It’s not all bad though. I logged in this morning on my phone as the kids were eating breakfast, and won back the $3.30 playing “zone poker.” That took all of 5 minutes. There’s a lesson to be learned about efficiency somewhere in here that I am struggling to decipher.

I’m really tempted to cash out of Bovada. I’m just much more into the chips, the smack talk, the joking around, and just the company of live poker.

Speaking of which, I am scheduling a game in poker basement for the 19th.

I did some open mic comedy on Sunday night. I haven’t been doing that a lot lately because if I have a choice I will generally choose to play cards instead. It might be a wise move for me to switch to open mic nights because I have been running pretty bad at the poker table lately. Anyhow, Sunday night was one of those nights where I was out and about and then decided to play some cards when it was way too late to start playing cards. Such nights involve sneaking into my house to grab some money and then getting to Roger’s when I should be in bed.

It wasn’t the first time I came from doing stand up to poker at Roger’s. When I sat down next to Brian at the table he asked straight away if I had just told some jokes. I said yeah. I actually had an ok night on stage, so I was in a decent mood. Then we started talking about different clubs around town.

All in all I had a great time at Roger’s. The mood at the table was pretty good. On Sundays Rog runs the game with this kid Claudio, who brings a lot of his own guys. The Claudio guys tend to play looser and deeper, which makes for a better game. And Claudio himself is a natural entertainer. The loosest of the loose players, a big talker, who keeps things lively.

I played until around 3am. Left down $117 for the night. I rivered a straight and lost to a better straight at one point. There was a flush on the river as well but I still bet there, and then got reraised with a bet that was small enough that I had to call. I think that was the only big hand I really played. I ended the night hitting a set in a multiway pot, so that got me some money back before heading out the door, although it would have been nice to have gotten a little more money out of that one.

Definitely would love to host again soon but I am going to be out the next two weekends in a row. I will be in the Philadelphia suburbs, and maybe, just maybe, I will get a chance to sneak off to a casino. We shall see.

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.