Live Poker
I play most of my poker online. Since the beginning of 2006, I have written 4 feature articles for this magazine, a dozen installments of this column, and a 438-page book, coordinating with and among 12 collaborators. When would I have time to play poker in a casino?
Because I am unofficially in training for the 2007 World Series of Poker, I am occasionally donning a shirt and pants to play in live poker tournaments. With this in mind, I came to
My initial worry that I had been left in the dust by these live-tournament veterans was dispelled when I heard one player in the registration line say to another, “You’re a lot better Badugi player than you let on.”
Meat Tenderizer
At the risk of sounding like Rip Van Winkle, when did players start getting massages at the poker table? I vaguely remember, a couple years ago, seeing highstakes pros in action for days at a time getting massages. Thanks to Phil Ivey and Chau Giang, I got to witness the beefy guy in Seat 3 begging for a woman to pound on his back while the blinds were still 25-50. Jethro had this woman tenderizing him with such intensity that his chip stack toppled. After ten minutes, the masseuse begged for mercy.
He found a substitute, who said she could give it to him rough. (If he had waited until he paired his lower kicker to beat me out of a pot on the river, I could have given it to him rough. Maybe with a barbecue fork.) This woman was spent so fast that she refused to take money from him.
Finally, the massage company sent in The Ringer. This third massage therapist was at least six feet tall and had a voice deeper than mine. Bluto was bliss personified when she went to retrieve her massage pad from the previous victim.
But then he busted and Maureen Feduniak was occupying his seat by the time Madame Sasquatch returned. Maureen got better cards than the man with the buffalo hide and eventually finished in the money, quite a feat when she also had to deal with the confusion and then disappointment of She-Hulk.
Wynn-Win Situation
I bombed out of a pair of events at the Classic but found my footing in the nightly “Second Chance” tournaments. The first night, I made the final table and finished seventh. The second night, I won the thing.
It was an exhilarating experience. I had the chip lead when we started the final table. Because only five players got paid, no one else wanted to play a hand until some players got eliminated. I never went three hands at that table without betting. The guy on my right actually told me, “There’s only one hand I’m playing against you.”
One player didn’t even wait for me to rob him. During a break, he got himself kicked off the property. (I heard they caught him smoking a joint in the parking garage. It was the first time, at least that I know of, where I actually drove an opponent to drugs.)
Night of the Jockey
When I played the Second Chance for the last time, the vibe at the table was less sanguine. Just before taking my place at Seat 1, while talking with my buddy Steve, the guy with the wispy moustache who I busted the night before pushed past me and stepped on my foot.
“That was pretty rude,” Steve said. I tried to shrug it off. “He probably just wanted to do to me what I did to him about twenty times at the final table last night.”
I don’t like sitting at Seat 1. I was pressed against the dealer and couldn’t see the players in Seats 8, 9, and 10. It didn’t help that Seats 2, 3, and 4 were re-enacting a scene from a Marx Brothers movie by sitting on each other’s (and my) lap. In the meantime, the guy in Seat 6 had so much space that he was thinking of offering dance lessons.
Consequently, I got to know Billy, the retired jockey in Seat 2, a lot better than I imagined. For the first 27 hands, Billy complained 27 times about his starting cards and folded. On the 28th hand, he looked at his cards, mumbled, “It’s about damned time,” and raised the 25-50 blinds to 1,000. Then he complained when everybody folded.
He kept complaining about getting no cards but changed up by limping into every unraised pot. Each time, he would mutter under his breath how the flop hit him. I thought, if this is all you have to do to pick up tells in live tournaments, I’ve definitely been missing out.
I bided my time playing poker in this phone booth. When one of my foils from the night before raised my blind — he had a big stack and made sure I knew it — I pushed all in.
“You’re not bullying me tonight,” he said, calling and revealing J-J.
My pocket aces looked pretty good until he caught a jack on the river. It felt like someone massaged the back of my sore neck with a piece of lumber. Without a word, I left the room and high-tailed it upstairs to see if I could make the start of the 10pm tournament on Full Tilt. To lose like that, live poker must be rigged.
