Excessive Variance

Since the NFL schedule had been announced earlier this year I have been considering going to see my favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, play the Chiefs in Kansas City.  With it only being a 3 hour drive, it’s an easy weekend trip for me.  At work we were even offered discount tickets to Chiefs home games, however the one for the Cowboys involved buying a ticket to a preseason game also.  Since I have no interest in buying preseason Chiefs tickets I skipped out on that deal.  Originally Travis and I were going to make this trip, but since he was obligated to accompany his girlfriend to a track meet in Peoria, IL he couldn’t make it so I was left to roll solo.

Waking up Saturday morning and looking outside to see that we were getting the first snow of the year wasn’t very encouraging.  I got up and ran a few errands before leaving town.  The only thing I knew for sure was that I was going to the Ameristar to play poker for a while, anything else that happened after that was going to be a spur of the moment decision.  The drive down wasn’t bad, it was nice to actually get away from the snow and back into the sunlight for the day after crossing into Missouri.  I spent most the drive listening to Kid Cudi’s album Man on the Moon: The End of Day which its pretty close to breaking into my favorite 10 albums ever.  It’s that fucking good, if you like hip-hop at all you should go buy it right now.  I’m serious… now.

You can tell when you crossed into Missouri because there are fireworks stores all around, usually next to a fantastic high end dining establishment like Denny’s.  Stopping for explosives sounded like fun, but I was anxious to find a poker room so I kept on heading further south.  I arrived to the Ameristar without any issues and head inside.

I’ve never been more disappointed with a poker room than I was with Ameristar’s.  The room was nice, but the spread of games was pathetic.  There was a couple of 1/2 games, and 3/6 with a full kill, but nothing higher.  I asked to be put on an interest list for 2/5 while I took a seat at 1/2 and waited.  This was the worst 1/2 game ever, it had no action but on the bright side there were no good players either.  I was the only player driving action preflop with anything other than AA or KK, so for the most part I could run the table over.  Guys at this table were so timid I got one guy to lay down QQ when I raised preflop with 88, got 4 callers, flop was T33 and it checked around and on a turn 4 I bet and he folded QQ and I called down by a girl who hit a 4 on the turn.  He was so shocked I won with a pair of 8’s, but after watching this guy play for 30 minutes it was clear he had no business ever at a table.  He nearly folded AK to me on a KKxxx board when I check raised him with KJ.  Anyway I was tired of the gameand these annoyingly bad players when Ren & Oz finally showed up.  I take the first oppurtunity to make fun of Oz wearing a Chiefs shirt, so he decides he would rub his arm on me and asked if I liked it.  The reaction of the people at the table was pretty priceless.

I played until my big blind, and then we took off and went to Arthur Bryant’s for some BBQ.  Ren hyped the place up a lot, but I was a little disappointed.  I had a burnt end sandwich with a metric fuckton of fries.  The bread was really generic and not good for BBQ, but the meat was decent and the extra BBQ sauce choices were alright.   I can think of a couple local places in Des Moines I prefer, but it wasn’t bad by any means.

After that we were debating playing poker or hitting table games and the decision was left up to me for some reason.  99.9 percent of the time I’m going to play poker given those choices, but considering how shitty I thought the game was earlier the thought of drinking while playing three card poker or pai gow sounded much more appealing.  It took a bit, but we found an unpopulated pai gow table that actually offered an insurance bet if you ended up with a pai gow.  Each possible pai gow paid a different amount, with the 9 high paying the most at 100-1.

Withing a few minutes, Ren hits a royal flush with a $5 out on the bonus which paid 125-1.  Because I had the bonus bet on too I got paid an envy bonus of $50.  The very next hand I hit the 9 high pai gow, which I’ve never done before.  Unfortunately I was betting on the other side and didn’t get the 100-1 bonus.  A bit later, Ozzy hits a straight flush for another 100-1 bet, and I again got an envy bonus of $25 this time.  So I’m the only one that didn’t hit a bonus bet of at least 100-1 in the group, which sucked but I was breaking even and drinking plenty.

While we were there we got to watch the Florida/LSU game.  Shitty part of that was I had a bunch of money riding on the Michigan/Iowa game and wanted to watch it.  My bets were Michigan +7.5, Michigan +8, and Michigan +10, and prop bets on numbers of points Iowa would give up (over 21) and if Michigan would score 2 rushing TD’s.  Michigan lost by 2 in a close game 30-28, but I won all my bets.

We started off with mixed vodka drinks but when Ren decided it was a good time to mix in shots of Patron.  Our waitress, with her overflowing bust and crazy mascara, was shocked and wanted to come hang with us.  By the time we ordered our 4th round of shots she was getting a kick out of our drinking and making fun of Ren for being a hick.  There was an incident involving pickle juice that would take to long to explain, but trying to order weird things from her became an entertaining game.   By the end of the night she was our new friend.  The pai gow itself went good for everyone.  I was up around $50 when we called it quits and Ren and Oz had done much better than me thanks to the huge bonuses they hit.

I was in the mood to play some blind three card poker (that may have been the Patron talking) and we went hunting for a table.  Unfortunately we couldn’t find a three card table, so we ended up sitting at a blackjack table with an Asian dealer.  “I bet he wishes he was on the player side of the table” I think as I pull up a seat.   I’ve never been a huge fan of blackjack since I’ve never run particularly well playing it, and on top of that I’ve not bothered to learn basic blackjack strategy.   I’ll ignore that one may have something to do with the other for now.  My strategy was simple: bet small when I’m losing and up the bets if I start winning.  The Asian dealer apparently likes my name, and feels the need to make running commentary on every play.  “I’m surprised you would hit there Josh,” he says as I wonder if his mom was ever a escort and how much she charged for anal.  I lost $100 betting $15 a hand pretty quickly, but the deck was shuffled and the new shoe was much nicer to me.  I started betting $25-50 a hand and ran up a pretty nice win.    During that time my new Asian pal brought up the poker room and asked if I had played.  I told him the games sucked, and I didn’t like it.  He told me how he likes to play some crazy version of poker where you get 4 cards and you deal the flop, turn, and river all at once and you hit the opium pipe between bets.  Sounds very Asianish… I like my new word.  We called it a night at like 4 or 5 am and headed to get a couple hours of sleep before the Cowboys/Chiefs game.

We got up for the game and looking outside I was thinking it wasn’t very nice of the weather to follow me.  Mother nature is a dirty whore.  After hitting the McDonalds across the street and stopping for gas, we headed over to Arrowhead for the game.  When I was a kid my mom used to get free tickets to Royals’ games from her boss, so I had been to the baseball stadium here several times but this was my first trip to Arrowhead for a football game.

Traffic was worse than we expected; fortunately I’m entertained by messing with the ticket scalpers who are selling tickets roadside.  After spending a hour and a half getting there and finding parking, we were outside looking for tickets while the game was kicking off.  We found a guy with some fantastic seats, club level, 26th row, 50 yard line. We had been wondering how many Cowboys fans would be at the game since we made a game of spotting them the night before at the casino and there were a lot.  The stadium was about a 60/40 split in favor of the home team, which is pretty bad.

Some images from the game… courtesy of Renae and her camera which is superior to my iPhone’s built in camera.

The game was pretty closely contested throughout, thanks to some sloppy play by the Cowboys in the first half spotting the Chiefs a 10 point lead.  So after Romo & Austin put on a 250-yard passing display (a record for a Cowboys receiver), the Cowboys pulled out the victory in OT and much celebrating took place for 2/3rds of our group, along with the multiple Cowboys fans in our section.

After that, it was time to head back home, so we said our goodbyes and headed in different directions.  After spending a hour getting out of the parking lot and onto I35 north, I realized I needed to go to the bathroom pretty badly.  I was also exhausted so the need to tinkle was keeping me awake for the drive so I just held it.  Yes… I am a bladder abuser.  When I got home I sprinted to the bathroom and proceeded to reenact the scene from A League of Their Own, where Tom Hanks walks into the clubhouse drunk and lets the stream flow for so long they put a clock on it.  I’m pretty sure I could have beaten him.   I’m also not sure my urine smelling like tequila is a good thing, but who gives a shit.

Next week, Chicago and the WSOP.

The weekend before last so I was planning a road trip down to Nashville to hang out with some friends for the weekend.  Originally I was going to take Friday off of work and leave Thursday night so I could show up early Friday.  However once I found out my babysitting plans for Friday night had fallen through I was going to skip out on the trip.  When I told Alan I wasn’t going to make it he suggested I fly down on Saturday morning which seemed like a decent plan except all the flights were close to or above $1000.  For a two day trip a thousand dollar flight is a bit much.  Then he found me a flight for a little over $200 through a discount website so I booked it.  When I checked the website of the airline I was flying the cost on the same flight was over $1100.  Moral of the story, shopping for airfare deals is worth the time.

So I get down to Nashville Saturday morning and head out to Alan’s place to hang out and wait to meet up with everyone else.  I had been to Tennessee once before and my one distinct memory was going into a McDonald’s for breakfast and them blaring old country music which made me feel like I was walking into a scene from Deliverance.   This time however it didn’t take long to find more unusual things.  For instance I came across a stop sign that tells you not to stop of you are turning right, if you are parking in the street you have to put two wheels on the curb instead of just being next to it.  The Grocery stores sell beer but no liquor, and liquor stores don’t sell beer.  What a fucking inconvenience.  Then in the liquor store we were accosted by a rather large dog which isn’t exactly something I’m used to.  I’m just happy that the store didn’t smell like dog piss.

Despite the oddities that filled Nashville, we ended up going to meet up with everyone else at some Irish sounding restaurant called O’Charleys for lunch.  I would have been more impressed if they had leprechaun servers, but no such luck.  The only person who knew I was coming beforehand was Alan, so when we showed up for lunch I was a bit of a surprise.  So much so that I nearly got a fat lip from getting headbutted by Kristen when she gave me a hug.  So after sitting down and having a nice lunch we headed back to Alan’s for some poker, drinking, and whatever else came up.  We ended up testing out his setup for his new bar poker league which included tables, chips, computer software and anything else you might need to run a game.  There was lots of fun as we joked around and drank a good amount of beer while mixing in shots of Patron.  Eventually we headed out to dinner at Fuji’s Japanese Steakhouse & Hibachi Grille.  It was a a good time as we drank some more and were entertained by our goofy chef.  After that we left and headed to a local bar where more drinking occurred, prop betting took place (bets on number of people in bar, price of a electronic dart board,  money in my pocket, and how often the waitress had made out with locals among other things),  karaoke was preformed (though I’m sad we didn’t get to see Nuthin But a G Thing preformed), and the girls were hit on by a redneck biker guy who claimed to have beaten the world champion in darts.  After more drinking we called it a night, and headed to the suite to crash where we were even treated to an impromptu T-Pain performance.

Next morning we get around and go to Ruby Tuesday’s for sort of goodbye brunch as a lot of people were leaving.  After saying goodbyes I was off to meet up with Alan to go to a home game that was going to be a deep stack PLO tournament and cash games.  In the tournament I busted just before the final table, and waited for a seat in the cash game.

The cash game was a 5 dollar on the button dealer choice game.  When I first sat down the popular game was PLO8, though occasionally PLO,  Stud8, or Razz would be chosen.  When the game got shorthanded the triple draw games became more popular (2-7 or A-5).  The weird thing about it is these guys liked to play it with a no limit format, which in triple draw is just retarded as anyone with a made hand tended to bet everyone out of the pot.

There was a guy to my right named Ray who was quite possibly one of the three worst players I’ve ever seen.  The guy was a walking book of tells.  He reminded me a lot of Old Richard Simmons who plays in our local games.  Ray would openly call for cards and when they hit he would over shove into pots betting 10x what was there to “prevent draws”.  One hand we were playing A-5 triple draw and after the first draw I had a made 8 (8542A) and he was still peeling his cards.  He held them up to his face and started cheering when he saw one, saying loudly “Oh just one more is all I need” and he apparently was happy with the card as he shouted “YES!!!” and instantly shoved nearly $300 into a $35 dollar pot.  I laid down my hand knowing I was going to have to toss my 8 and pull for a 7, 6 or 3.  He got looked up and when the hands were shown down Ray’s 7532A beat the other guys 7543A.  Alan was the lone dealer at this point and we kept exchanging glances whenever Ray would so some randomly stupid play which was pretty much every other hand or so.

The game ended and I booked a small loss for the weekend, but it made me wish I could play in that game on a daily basis.  I flew back into town the next day after a long layover in Madison thanks to a screw up on my tickets.  With my late arrival Monday was sort of a wash so I called it a night.

Tuesday I had an outstanding invite to a local game that has probably been running longer than any other game in the area.  It’s private 15/30 mixed game that is played in a downtown hotel.  The guy who runs it rents out a suite, and each of the players pays a rake on the first buy in that covers part of the suite and dinner for the night from the hotels restaurant.  I’ve heard about the game for years (inducing some weird stories surrounding it) and I’ve known people that have been playing in it for a while, but I had never been invited before.   So this was my first time going, and I got there a bit early to check things out.  As players filtered in I was familiar with the majority of them which was nice, since I wasn’t going to be playing a ton of unknown commodities.  I ran really good the first hour and had nearly trippled my buy in and was getting a lot of comments about “welcome to the game… we are here every week” type comments since I was running the game over.  One of the rules of the game though is you can’t leave before midnight if you are winning.  Not that I was planning on hitting and running, but I switched gears and slowed down a bit to preserve my win and let someone else run hot for a while.  By the time the game was ready to break at midnight I had leaked back a little of my profit but still booked a nice win.

I liked the game so when my schedule allows it I’ll defeintely be playing it again.