Thug-enomics

Well, last weekend was the NBA all-star game, Presidents day weekend, Chinese new year and a huge tourism weekend for vegas. Unfortunately the weekend seemed to attract two main types of people... those too rich to gamble who would rather party and be seen... and those too poor to gamble who would rather steal and cause trouble. The end result was a miserable weekend for the gambling based businesses and a lot of trouble for the cops.

I have been playing some poker and doing well until Thursday night at Venetian. I played pretty poorly at times and gave away several hundred dollars just being stupid. Towards the end of the 6 hour session this hand came up. I get 6-9 of hearts on the button and there is a live straddle. 5 callers to me and I call, Straddle raises it to 9, and UTG raised to 20. 2 callers back to me and I call as does the straddle and big blind. The flop is 7/8/10 2 hearts giving me a gutshot straight flush draw and a flopped straight. Straddle bets out 25 into a 100 dollar pot, UTG raises to 50. I make the decision that I am not f'ing around on this and raise to 200. Straddle folds back to UTG who thinks for a minute before pushing all-in. There are only 2 reasonable hands for him to have here... a big pair played very poorly or more like a pocket pair that hit a set. I have virtually the nuts right now and it is 240 more to me and I call making a pot of over 1000 dollars. He turns his hand up to show AK of hearts for the nut flush draw and nothing else. The river is the 2 of hearts putting him on the winning end of a 6 outer for a huge pot.

If that wasn't enough 2 hands later I flop ANOTHER straight and get top pair to put all his money in and he hits runner runner to a boat to end up setting me back 200 for the night. It could have been much worse, but it was setup so perfectly for a huge winning session and it all came crumbling down at the end. It was the largest pot I have ever been in to date... and it was painful to be on the losing end of it.

I have been offered a fulltime dual rate position at work. Dual rate means you are a dealer part of the time and a supervisor part of the time. It gives me a pretty regular schedule and a nice experience for the resume and the future in this town. Right now I will be training on graveyard and the moving over to day shift in a month or so. This will also give me more time to play poker as I will have more of a regular schedule and can actually get adjusted to it instead of jumping all over the place.

For now though... it is graveyard and it is time to go to work.

Valentines Day and Poker

This weekend Estie and I went to Ceaser's to play in a couples tournament. The structure was that we played the same chips and took turns every 20 minutes, and then when we were not playing we took turns playing at a live no-limit table with the same chips. In the end we both played very well for the first 3 hours, but as the blinds got higher and the chips got smaller I ended up making a move from under the gun with J9 suited (btw, probably not what I should have done as Estie will inform you) and got called by A10 and was knocked out.

We ended up finishing 16th out of 86 but they only paid the top 9. It was still a great time and we had a lot of fun playing together. In the cash game nothing spectacular happened as we ended up down $1 for the 4.5 hours we played. About 3 hours into the game a couple extremely drunk guys came in with their friends and played at the game with us. Well one of them was very loud and looked familiar... when someone called him Andy it clicked with Estie that this was Andy Dick sitting next to us offering her a beer... He really isn't that funny when he is completely wasted, but it was fun anyways.

Live games have gone better lately as I have adjusted my game back to a little more patience in it. I have been playing really well about 95% of the time and have had 5 straight winning sessions. However I am still making a few mistakes per day which are costing me a lot of money. It seems to happen after I start winning and relax my game and suddenly I called too many hands with nothing, and made to many reraises with mediocre hands, etc. And suddenly I was up 600 and now am up 400 or was up 400 and now up 150. It is a part of the game I have to adjust and will be working on for awhile.