The Lucky Donut

I decided to try something different while I contemplated my retirement from Gutshot’s cash game with a perfect record.  So I went to The Vic instead.  Sitting proud on top of Argos – among all the retail space in Las Vegas, I can’t think of a one casino that is connected to a catalogue store – The Vic boasts that it is "open from 11am to play on the slots".  If you need to gamble earlier in the morning – maybe to try to win enough to buy breakfast – a motorway service station is about your only option still.

38 players. It was a quiet night with a travelling contingent of regulars apparently in Manchester for the GUKPTK.  9 spots paid. Yes, they really did pay 23% of the field.  9 get paid here whether there’s 38 or 72 players.  At least it goes some way to offsetting the variance in this crapshoot of a tournament that you get for £50. 

The blinds double every 20 minutes right up to 200/400, before finally slowing down a little but by the time it’s at 300/600 it doesn’t really matter.  The average stack for this level was only about 4000.

So I had to get lucky, and the way I got lucky was to somehow survive to the final two tables without really seeing any cards worth noting, having much of the garbage I threw away making monsters and dumping marginal hands that appeared to be way behind but in fact were winners.

6 limp, and only I fold with my 23o.  Of course it would have made a full house on a 3342 board, with plenty of action from pocket tens and a J7 who hung around long enough to catch top pair on the river.  Later, my 88 looked like nothing on a K9x board with a bet and a call ahead of me, but not only was I in front (against ace-high and a flush draw) but the turn brought another 8 and the river gave me what would have been quads.  You would think the crappy hands in that pot would never pay me off, but I just can’t be sure.

Down to two tables with still not many more chips than I started with, I picked up two decent pots by moving all in against a raiser and apparently having just enough to take it down uncontested both times.  Then I just blinked a couple of times while nine other players busted very quickly.  I’d only showed one hand (AK all in against another AK) the whole game right up to when I went out – obviously I didn’t win, or I’d have said by now!

At the final table, three big stacks almost had enough to see flops and stuff.  Nobody managed to catch up, so these are the prizes I was actually playing for.

9th £60
8th £80
7th £100
6th £110
5th £150
4th £190

Only £10 more for 6th place than 7th, even though the bottom three prizes go up by £20 a time?  Obviously, once I’d spotted that 6th place was getting stiffed, my fate was sealed.

The perceived greatness of king-jack offsuit was all I needed to see to take a gamble after being whittled down to my last 2000.  I ended up in about as good shape as I could hope for, drawing live against A2 and AQ with an added bonus of 1200 in dead money from the big blind.

I’d not helped myself by making a super-weak fold with A8s when I should have pushed with 9 players left, simply because one of the short stacks would be forced all in next hand.  In fact he doubled up, and the ghost of Dan Harrington lingered as I walked home.  He was waving a little flag that said "first in vigorish" and kept asking what my M was.  I wanted to punch him, but he was a ghost.  Also a ghost of somebody who isn’t actually dead.

£110 wasn’t all I won tonight though… must be on a roll.

Not yet anyway 🙂

I played a satellite last night at Gutshot for the Party Poker World Open, one of those six handed made-for-TV efforts that wishes it was Late Night Poker.  I lost one race out of one, my AK not getting there against 77 and that was that.  9th out of 20.

The signs weren’t good for this one anyway.  It was Friday the 13th and I was 13th to sign up.  Yes, there was a player called Jason.  No, he didn’t have a mask.  (Edit: Jason came 2nd; it was Saturday 14th by then though).  It started at 11pm, and the fact that these numbers even got me thinking about that awful Jim Carrey movie is a very bad thing: 11pm is 23:00.  But wait, there’s more.  23 is 13 plus 10, and ten is the number of players starting at each table.  The televised heat starts on the 27th of April: 27/4, and twenty seven minus four is twenty sodding three.  We started with 3000 chips, the levels were 25 minutes long and my coffee cost £1.50 and tasted like bleach.  What was my point?

As it was a late start, I spent the first part of the evening playing the £25-£50 pot limit game, and I’m now eight for eight in winning sessions and, on average, up £60 per session.  I may consider retiring with my perfect record.  It’s only about a month until I’m finished working in London on a regular basis, and I’ll probably have to work in the evening the next few times I come down anyway, so I can easily walk away undefeated.

On the other hand, Vegas is T-99.  And I know nobody will get this, but what the hell…

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Double digits now, but it’s still over three months away.  What am I going to do meantime?  I’m still running hot at Gutshot.  A good chunk of my £54 profit last night came from my AK top pair not losing to a massive 62s flush draw.  I think he’d paired the 2 as well, so it’s obviously impossible to fold in that spot.  Yes, I did raise pre-flop.  How can I quit a game like that, even if I do owe it money?

Just time for a quick quiz for wannabe poker dealers:

Q: At showdown, the board reads 444Q2 and there’s no flush possibility.  Two players flip over K9 and K6 respectively.  Do you:

a) Push the pot towards K9.  The board didn’t help either hand, so the best hand pre-flop must be the winner.

b) Stare at the board until someone says either "nine plays" or "split pot".  It’s their money: they’re paying attention so you don’t have to.

c) Anticipate the possibility of a split from the texture of the board.  Read the damn hands like you’re meant to and chop up the pot before anyone gets chance to tell you how to do your job.

If you answered (c) please apply for work at Gutshot.

Seriously.  I saw split pots with three of a kind or two pair on board pushed to the wrong person by three different dealers.  Fortunately there were always plenty of nits who weren’t involved in the hand to have a contest to see who could yell "split pot" first.