So I start off the poker night with a couple of meager wins, but then get into a minor funk. It's a fast game of Texas Hold 'Em - the main goal is to get people out of the house by 10 with a game starting at 7, which means that blinds escalate very quickly (50, 100 after 12 minutes, 150 after 24, 200 after 36, 300 after 48, etc.). Without going into too much math, this means that it does not really pay to be overly conservative, and you are much more at the whim of luck than in a standard poker tournament. That "whim of luck" factor hit me hard - I went in with two pair a couple of times (e.g., Ks and 8s) and lost to a higher two pair (Ks and 10s). The game is a ten dollar buy-in and that gets you $3000 in chips; an hour into the game at the first break, I was down to about $550 in chips with the big blind / minimum bet at $400. Which is, as you may be able to tell, not good. I had really only goofed once - got a little overly aggressive with a pair of aces in hand and scared everyone off the hand - but otherwise felt like I had been taking all the right chances and just getting barely beaten as mentioned above.
Beck had been doing pretty well for most of the night but lost on a big hand just before the break. A couple of hands after we restarted, both of us were all-in at separate tables. Beck lost, but I pulled off a pretty solid win (good timing with my all-in shove). SO I doubled up, but still trailed most everyone by quite a bit. After enough people had been eliminated, we combined tables, and the basic story of the night was that I had a very small stack, was put all-in with multiple people in on the hand repeatedly, and won three or four times in a row. I came back from the dead! At one point I hit a set of 8s on an all-in hand, and I was so confident that I had won that I threw my car keys on the table as a joke. NICE. So I had a slow but substantial comeback, defied death repeatedly, and got respectable relative to others piles. From that point on, everything fell right, I played it well - beat a guy's straight with a flush, beat a pair of jacks with a pair of queens, etc. Lucky hands that coerced people into sticking their guns. Good times. I also took a big chance at one point and hit a pair of kings on the river to beat a pocket pair of jacks. It was a little aggressive, but that was still in the string where it was do or die time.
The mamma jamma hand occurred when it was down to four of us and I was holding 8,7. The flop came up 8,6,8. Nice. Then a 7. Nicer. I bet pretty hard on this as I was still behind a lot. The last card was a 5. Which is fantastic, because there's an open-ended straight on the board, but I am holding a full house that is the highest full house you could have. Lady across from bets big, which is hilarious to me, but I throw back with an all-in raise on myself. She calls IMMEDIATELY and flips over a pair of kings and starts to grab the pile. "Um, huh?" I ask as I show her my full house. She says, "8s over Ks beats 8s over 7s." "While that is true, you do not have 8s over Ks." Turns out she had thought there were three 8s on the board the entire time. Um, no (not to mention had three been three 8s, I would have had four 8s). YES! Big win, I grab about a third of her chips which pushes me just over half of her money. We weed out the other two people and are head to head with me having barely more in chips than she. First hand of head to head, I get A Q and go all in; she had a K 9 and goes all in. Board flops a whole lot of nothing and I take the game with A high. YES!
Back from the dead! The prize was $140 for the overall winner, huzzah! Poor Beck had to sit and watch the last hour and a half, but hopefully it was a little worth it. So $140 minus our pair of ten dollar buy-ins made for a good night. Glad I came back from Tucson.
(Oh, I would be totally remiss if I did not mention the swirling cloud of obnoxiousness that is Staci. She went to the women's poker championships at one of the local casinos before our game - something with a $300 buy-in - and came in 7th overall for a cool $3300 prize. When she arrived to our game late, we gave her a big hand; people were genuinely proud of/ happy for her. And then she spent the next hour repeatedly talking about how her wallet can't even hold that much money, about how she needed someone to walk her to her car because she has so much money on her. She absolutely would not shut up the entire evening; ten hours of poker had apparently ramped her need to be the center of attention to infinity. We also got shrill-voiced detailed descriptions of all the hands she had played that day, to be expected, but they all carried this air of how awesome she had been, and by the way she can't sit down with her wallet in her back pocket because it won't shut because IT'S SO FULL OF MONEY. I can't gripe too much; she did throw some extra cash out of her winnings into our pot. But dios mio, brggadocia in action. And all delivered in a high-pitched Louisianan accent which, let me tell you, did not exactly make things more soothing.
And THEN, we get an e-mail from her later in the week - a mass e-mail, sure, but sent to all of the people who had been at our poker game - recounting the exact same stories of too much money and how she took a photo of herself rolling in her money in bed and she won SO MUCH MONEY. I couldn't take it; I e-mailed Jason and embraced my inner football announcer when I said that she needs to act like she's been there before. Jason laughed. I followed up:
"She's the Chad Ochocinco of low stakes poker."
Which pretty much nails it.
So, to whatever degree I am coming off like a CO of even lower stakes poker, please note that I got so lucky it's crazy, just hit some good hands on big blinds and such that kept me in the game zombie-style. I will take credit for knowing when to cite Kenny Rogers tunes, but otherwise this was a big fat ball of luck. And re: the money, we ordered fancy pizza the next night in celebration and will probably go on a dinner-date movie tonight. And may use whatever's left toward renewing our home warranty. I know, it's just so glamorous. LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY).
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