Labor Day Weekend, The Sequel

Hey everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend, and took a moment to remember those of us who had to 'labor' all weekend.

I'm pretty sure that I've got the day off tomorrow, so I'm sitting down with a tot of rum and a glass of Coke, getting ready to enjoy the Tennessee/UCLA game. But I thought that I could go ahead and throw something up on the ol' website to satisfy all you re-clickers out there, so I'm multitasking.

My weekend, besides having to work, was rather uneventful. I had Friday off, so I went out on Thursday night, hoping to watch the kickoff of the college football season at the sportsbook. Unfortunately, I was sitting in front of the most obnoxious person in the entire book, and could only take about a half-hour of listening to him before I got up and left.

Realizing that there were plenty of TVs in the poker room, I went over there instead, and put my name on the interest list for the No-Limit cash game. While waiting for that, I sat down at a 4/8 game to try my luck.

Unfortunately, I spent an hour being reminded of just how much I hate limit poker now. After playing no-limit almost exclusively for the past four or five months, putting the brakes on and hoping my big hands held up against five or six callers was just an exercise in futility. I lost about a hundred bucks in that hour, mostly because of everyone calling all the way down to the river and catching their miracle card.

That wasn't much fun.

Luckily, the no-limit game got started, so I was much happier once I got to move to a different, and better, game.

I thought I'd just run over the no-limit game, but there were two factors working against me. First of all, the room I work in has some *excellent* players--it's an extremely tough game to beat, and second of all, I was experiencing a run of dead cards like I'd never before seen in my entire poker-playing life.

I bought in to the game for $200, but at one point, I played over three hours straight without ever seeing a flop. Yep, I folded every hand for at least 20 orbits around the table. How do I know this? Because without playing a single hand, in three hours I was down $60 in blinds (it was a $1/$2 no-limit game). It cost me three bucks in blinds every ten hands, so I went 200+ hands straight without ever seeing a flop. Talk about a shiatty run of cards.

Adding insult to injury, when I eventually won my first pot, it was a split one. But since I had no place to be the next morning, I was content to hang out and have a cocktail or two and laugh it up with a few of the other players for several hours. The guy who was on the short side (the $30,000 winner) of the bad-bead jackpot was sitting next to me, and we were having a great time there at the table. He got me started drinking that Tuaca stuff, which I thought was some sort of Mexican liqueur, but I soon found out was Italian brandy. It was damn good, though, and I think it would make a fine companion to a good cigar (much easier to drink than Grand Marnier).

Anyhow, as much fun as I was having playing at the poker table, I finally called it a night around 2:00 am. I played fairly tight, but after nine hours, I'd nursed my $260 as far as I could take it. And in the final tally, I went the entire nine hours getting nothing better than two pair. That's right--I never once got three of a kind or made a straight. One hand I was lucky enough to be holding the Ace of Clubs and it was checked all the way to the river when four clubs were on the board, so I got a small pot on that flush, but otherwise, I didn't make a hand all night long. Completely blowing the law of averages, I only got six pocket pairs the entire night, the highest of which were Jacks, and they went into the muck after the flop when an Ace and King showed up and two people ahead of me couldn't wait to get money into the pot.

I swear, I've never been so card dead--it was awful. Before I headed home, I stopped to get a Fatburger and some onion rings, which was about the high point of the night, as not only did I just donate to the poker economy, but I'd also made a decent bet on the Oregon State Beavers, who not only didn't cover the three points they were laying against Stanford, but they lost the game outright!

Driving home, I figured that Thursday was an aberration, and that the cards eventually had to come my way. But I wasn't going to risk it, and I spent Friday doing absolutely nothing but sleeping and reading. I didn't even go out that night except to fetch some groceries.

Of course, I went to bed early, figuring that I'd get called in to work early, too. It was a holiday weekend, and even though I was scheduled to work at 6:00 am on Saturday morning, I was fairly certain that there would be a little carry-over from Friday night and my phone would be ringing.

I was right, and had to go in at 4:00 am. But my bad luck continued, as just after I got to work, the overnight games started breaking up and I ended up dealing a short-handed game that wasn't very juicy anyways.

And looking at the daily schedule, I knew I was in for a crummy day money-wise. The bosses had completely overstaffed for the weekend, and there were 10 dealers slated to come in before 11:00 am.

I managed to make a few bucks before my game broke, but then I sat on my ass doing nothing until 8:00 am when the next dealer came in. By then, a few of the old guys came in, but their game was short-handed. Since there were a couple more dealers coming in at 9:00, meaning that we'd have more dealers than players, I took myself out of the rotation and volunteered to prop the game with my own bankroll.

Unfortunately, my card-deadness continued, and I played for an hour before giving up in disgust, burning through $80 without winning a single pot. Again, I got a few pairs, but nothing better than two pair the whole time. I finally clocked out and went home, figuring that the poker gods had forsaken me this week.

Since I have a whole new stack of books from Amazon sitting on my desk, and it was opening weekend for college football, well, the rest of my day was pretty much taken care of. But when I got home, I walked in the front door and immediately got that Han Solo what-an-interesting-smell-you've-discovered look on my face. The house just reeked!

I came upstairs to the loft and discovered the reason for the stench--there were piles of dog shit everywhere on the carpet!

Now, that caught me completely off-guard because the dogs are extremely well trained. But my roommate had told me when I first moved in that Charlie, the mama-dog, would get upset with him when he left and go upstairs and pee in the loft when he didn't come home at night. So we blocked the stairs. But then once I moved in, having somebody around kind of set her at ease, and she was cool, and after a few weeks, the dogs were free to come up here whenever they wanted. Nobody treated the floor like a litter box.

Anyhow, since it was a holiday weekend, my roommate and his girlfriend took off for California to spend the weekend on the boat. And since I was working all weekend, there was nobody here at the house for hours and hours on end. So Charlie got mad at us and shit all over the floor!

So I spent about a half hour or so picking up the dog turds (luckily they weren't runny and too nasty) and doing what I could to clean the carpet. And when I left the next day, I set a couple of cocktail chairs at the top of the stairs blocking access to the loft.

Sunday was another lame, slow, and overstaffed day at work, but I refused to prop the game that day. I wasn't about to throw any more money down the poker hole. Again, it was so slow that I got sent home after just three hours, and I was kinda curious as to what condition I'd find the house in.

Well, the dogs were still pissed off--when I got home, one of the cocktail chairs was halfway down the stairs on the landing, and there was a nice chunk of drywall taken out of the wall. One of the dogs hand managed to defeat the roadblock, and I found two fresh puddles of piss on the carpet. Again, the spray bottle and towels made an appearance, and I blocked both the top and the bottom of the stairs, basically putting the dogs in time-out, refusing to play with them like I normally do when I get home. They knew they were in trouble after that.

There was another T2V poker tourney that night, and I really didn't wanna play, but I saw that one of my favorite lurkers, Krista, had signed up, so I bit the bullet and registered.

It was an extremely lame tournament--it had been accidentally set up as a limit tourney, so it took twice as long to finish, and not only that, but a couple of PokerStars trolls had managed to get into our private tourney by just asking for the password in the chatbox, and one of the players, being friendly, gave it to them. That kinda irritated me, and coupled with the dog piss, the crappy money at work, and the limit format, well, I was in a foul mood. And even though I made it to the cash and got third place, I really didn't have much fun.

After the tournament, I spent some time updating my iPod, which is always kinda interesting, and I managed to get my entire collection of Jimmy Buffett loaded and organized. Well, all except one album. For whatever reason, I cannot find my Beach House On The Moon CD anywhere, so that one is conspicuously absent. But once that was done, I spent the rest of the night listening to Brother Jimmy sing while I drank a rum and coke and read The Sailing Life.

I went to sleep in a much better mood.

It wasn't much of a sleep, however. I was scheduled to go to work at 6:00 am, but I was still half-awake at midnight, dozing through DeNiro and Pacino in Heat on TNT.

While I was lying there in bed around 1:00, I remember thinking Why is my phone lighting up? A split second later the music started playing and that could mean only one thing--work was calling. The voice on the other end asked if I could come in by 3:00 am, and of course I said that I'd be there.

I reset my alarm for 2:00 am, and tried to doze for another hour.

It was impossible, and I finally stopped fighting it, got up, and got ready for work. When I got to the poker room, there were two games going--one no-limit game and one 4/8 game. The 4/8 game looked like it was going to die at any moment, but the no-limit game was full of all my favorite players.

My spot in the rotation put me at the limit game, and I dealt about five hands before the game broke. But my shiatty luck continued, and while I was closing the game down, the asshat with $700 worth of chips sitting directly next to me in the #1 seat said "Well, I guess I'll just stay here and keep you company".

F*cking great.

This jackass had managed to turn his hundred-dollar buy-in into $700 over the course of the previous eight hours, and since nobody else would listen to how great of a player he was, he had a captive audience with me as I had to reset the decks, balance the rack, and close the table. So he droned on about what a great player he was, and since he was sitting next to me instead of across from me, he couldn't see me rolling my eyes. Finally, I locked the lid on the rack and just walked away, and he was still sitting there droning on about what a great player he was. Even the floorman was like What the hell is he doing over there?

I just shrugged...

But the guy wanted everyone to see him sitting there at the 4/8 table with a couple of racks of chips in front of him, but by then, the room was empty except for the no-limit game. But he desperately wanted the attention. He even started saying that he wanted a seat at the no-limit game because he would cut it up and bust the table.

I would've loved to have seen that, because there was one guy there who is about the best no-limit player I know, and it would've been a bloodbath.

At the bottom of the hour, I pushed in to the no-limit game and a couple of my better players asked me what was up with the guy. I told them what he had said, and one guy immediatgely offered to go and play him heads up. At that point, Mr $700 declined and cashed out and left, shrinking from the challenge. Asshat.

Once I got into the no-limit game, the floorman sent the other dealers home and I was locked down for the next three hours. I certainly didn't mind because it was one of those table you dream about--nice crowd, no obnoxious drunks, fun players, all good tippers. It truly didn't seem like work as I was laughing it up the whole time and getting a cut of each pot. It had a home game vibe and everyone was having a good time.

At some point, I reached that magical point where the shirt pocket wouldn't hold any more chips, and they were spilling out whenever I'd lean over the table to rake in the bets. I managed to rathole a bunch between hands, and when the next dealer came in at 7:00 am, I was good and ready for a break. The first stop was at the desk, and when I emptied my shirt pocket, I found that I'd made more than $200. As soon as I cashed that, I ran to the bathroom for the first time in over four hours. As soon as I unzipped, my pants went directly to my ankles. I was like, WTF?

But by then, I was committed to the task at hand and couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, the men's room was deserted, so I stood there finishing my business looking ridiculous all by myself. When I pulled my pants up I realized that I still had a pocket full of chips that I'd forgotten about. That's what gave gravity the assist, causing my pants to fall to the floor. So after leaving the restroom, I went back to the desk and colored up again for another fifty bucks. Woot!

I still had 20 minutes worth of break left, so I headed over to Starbucks and got a big hazelnut frappuccino with an extra shot of espresso, thinking that I could use a jolt--it looked like it was gonna be a long day.

But as soon as I got back to the poker room, they told me I could go home. I was thinking that another down at the no-limit game would be nice, but they were down to four players by then, and it was gonna break soon. And I'd already made almost as much in four hours as I'd made in the previous two days combined, so I was cool with taking off.

I stopped at Jack in the Box on the way home and got me a croissant sandie to nibble on, but as soon as I got home, I took a shower and went back to bed for several hours. It felt like I needed the sleep, and I took full advantage.

I woke up to the phone ringing, as usual, but this time it was my sister Sherry. She was down in Key West with her husband and called to tell me that she was sitting in the Hog's Breath Saloon drinking Mt. Gay pina coladas and toasting me and our departed brother-in-law David. (About five years ago, the three of us sat there getting absolutely smashed on pina coladas all day before going to Nancy's wedding later that afternoon across the island at the Truman Annex). So she wanted to call and let me know she was thinking about me, and it was nice because it brought back a flood of fun memories.

Anyhow, that's all the news from this end. I'm on-call tomorrow, which means that it's about a 99% certainty that I'll have the day off. I've got no plans, so that means that I'll probably do some more writing.

Mikey