2/20/05 Oaks Club $3-6 Hold’em

2:00-5:00 PM

In $80 Out $67 -$13

2/22/05 Oaks Club $2-4 Hold’em

12:00-3:00 PM

In $60 Out $50 -$10

4:30-6:00 PM

In $40 Out $0 -$40

Hours Played 2005 54.25 YTD -$370

Got in around 2 on Sunday, after lingering over fried chicken and waffles at the House of Chicken and waffles discussing George Romero’s zombie trilogy. The place was full. The World Series qualifying tournaments have started up. Limit and No-Limit on alternating Sundays, this particular Sunday was No-Limit, and had gotten underway about 1:15. Every table in the place was being used. The pan (pan, panguingue, is a game played with about a half dozen decks by a lot of old school players) table had been take up and replaced with tournament tables and there were two temporary tables set up behind the sign-up board.

Bobbye was running the board and in an unusually good mood. I signed up for the $3-6 as well as the $2-4. I had been planning to play $2-4 as I am tending to do better at that level, but did not want to wait an hour for a seat and with the crowd, I wanted more options. I got a seat in the bigger game in about ten minutes.

Played ok. Still need to play more aggressively. There is a player named Frank, a retired stage hand, possibly Italian-American, salty salt-n-pepper hair and peppery salt-n-pepper mustache, wears a big diamond or diamondoid in his ear. Has absolutely no respect for me. He was grumbling to his neighbor every time he was in a hand with me and refuses to believe I have the hand I represent. I have not made him properly pay for this sleight, but that day is on its way. He himself lost the +/-$40 he had in front of him when I sat down, and $40 more buying in $20 at a time.

Left at 5 to rejoin my chicken & waffles companion for an evening of THE SIMPSONS and KILL BILL. The bridge was empty and the integrity of my oil pan had been restored to the level of Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra movie. I sailed across the bridge’s flat asphalt somewhat pleased with the day’s small loss.

!

Got over early, relatively, especially in card room terms, but not early enough to get a space in the lot. Ate a delicious corn-raspberry muffin from the lovely little hippy bakers and took an open seat in the $2-4 game. Things started out well enough. I played pretty well, good and aggressive, with some subtlety, making some good raises, confusing other players and picking up some pots with semi-bluffs or positional raises.

At some early point I made a monster hand. I held a king and a queen and there was a pair of kings on the board, and a queen, giving me kings full of queens. One of the kings was a diamond, as ws the queen on the board and one of the other cards was too, making a flush for anyone holding two diamonds. It became clear that my opponent was in exactly that position when he raised me. I immediately reraised, which he then reraised, making it 4 bets to me. In this position, heads up like this, there is no limit to the raises. Usually, making it 4 bets to go is called “capping it”, but heads up we could have kept raising each other until one of us was out of chips. This is what I should have done, as I had the best possible hand, what is called the stone cold nuts, that could be made with the cards in play. He would have needed a four-of-a-kind to win, and the only one possible for the board was kings, and I held one of the kings, so I knew he could not possibly have it. I should have raised and raised. He would have gotten wise some time, but he had the ace and another diamond, giving him the highest flush, so likely he would have come along for a few more bets. Still, this was a pretty nice pot.

This was the first of my big mistakes for the day. A little later I made a rookie move by trying to fold cards when I had a blind in the pot so had already paid to see the flop. Not such a bad mistake in itself, just makes me look like a farmer, but it flustered me and made me play the hand wrong, not betting when I flopped a strong hand, giving my opponent a free card to beat me.

I took a lunch break around 3. I should have just come home. It took nearly an hour to get back intothe same game I left. I got a run of shitty cards that I played in an uninspired fashion. Finally, down to my last ten chips, I made a terrible mistake that many gamblers make, but which is egregious, and next to not getting full value on the monster full house discussed earlier, was my worst of the day. Down to my last ten chips, I followed the fallacious thinking that after losing $30 in short order that the $10 had left had no value away from the table, so with a queen-6 I raised and raised the lackluster flop so that I could put all my remaining chips in on this aggressively shitty hand. Ten dollars is not really much money in 2005, but it is a couple of plates of carnitas, or a few bets I could have made on decent cards at some future date.

Anyway, Sunday is another day.