3 February 2006

The Soul Destroyer: It’s hold ‘em and I look down at my cards. A-A. American Airlines. The best starter hand. It’s been weeks since I’ve hit pocket aces, and I’m not going to slow-play them. My big bro is to my left and he raises after a bet in front of him. up. I re-raise and all I get are two calls.

The flop brings a pair of fives and a medium card, which means that the only hand that could realistically be leading me is a set. Somebody could have made two pair, but the pre-flop betting should have knocked them out of the hand already.

A third 5 hits on the turn, so now I’ve made a monster hand, fives full of aces, the second-best possible hand. The only thing that beats me is if somebody had gone in holding a 5, but that’s unlikely because that kind of hand wouldn’t have made it out of the pre-flop betting.

Still, my big bro’s betting out. Usually, with my soul-destroyer hand, I’d be raising, but my big bro takes money from me like I’m, well, like I’m his little brother. I just call his bets. A junk card lands on fifth, and I’ve still got the second-best possible hand. My big bro bets, and this time, summoning forth energy and bravery from every part of my body, I raise. My big bro calls, so I’m first to turnover my cards, showing my 5-5-5-A-A boat. My big bro shakes his head and turns over his pocket kings. Cowboys. He had made the 5-5-5-K-K boat, the third-best possible hand, and he really paid out.

I had gotten exactly what one would want in a heads-up battle. To have the other player hold a great hand while the one that you hold is slightly better. There was no way that he’d come off of his hand.

It’s Not Sibling Rivalry If You're Always Getting Your Ass Kicked: It’s one of the few times that I’ve gotten the better of my big bro, and all the little brothers will understand just how cool it was.

My Low Self-esteem: I’d taken two pretty bad beatdowns at the last two games. They were so bad (-$150.75 and -$75.25) that I ended up with a triple-digit deficit for the year.

It’s just money. I’ve never given a goddamn about money; who cares? Mostly, all of this losing made me feel bad about myself. Yes, that’s right; my self-esteem is tied to a number that is only ever partially under my control. The higher the number, the less that I hate myself. The lower the number, the more that I want to stay in bed all day, waiting for the darkness’s sweet and final embrace.

With my delicate psyche on the line tonight, I managed to win $60.75, which means that the deficit for the year is down to only-$52.50, which means that I don’t have to step into traffic just yet.


12 February 2006

No Clue: I don’t remember one goddamned thing from this game. I had just gotten back from dropping the hot poetic fire in Madison, Wisconsin, and I had had such a good time that I was maybe too happy to write my post-game draft. More likely, I was probably too bummed that I was about to go back to the real life, and real life, as we all know, sucks.

The Game Plan: What I need to do, I think, is win the lotto. That way, I can quit the real world and devote all of my time to the sweet life of low-level sin. It’s going to have to be low-level because I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs (unless you consider caffeine a drug; I think of it as being more like a cross between a vitamin [a nice supplement] and oxygen [without it, I would die]).

Step one in my plan to win the lotto is to start buying lotto tickets, but I’m pretty sure that I’d be mortally mortified with mortification to actually go up to the 7-Eleven clerk and ask for a “quick-pick.” And if I did win the thing, I’d probably be too embarrassed to actually claim the money.

Maybe what I need is a new plan.

Return of the Automator: That’s right. Five weeks after his first time at our game, the Automator’s come back for another taste. The Automator’s cool, and, since he’s sitting to my immediate right, we have a good discussion about politics and science, though it turns out that he and I agree on exactly nothing.

Why’d we have so much time to talk? Because he dropped all of his green in about an hour. Whenever a new player comes in and gets tapped out, one of us will helpfully suggest that he try to make their money back by going to town on the plentiful snacks and drinks. Occasionally, I’ll say to grab a couple of DVDs on the way out, or maybe a nice chair.

It’s Extra Sinful: If you have a calendar handy, you can tell by the above date that we played on a Sunday, which some people might find terribly irreligious and offensive, but since I had been in Madison on Friday, the usual night for our game, my buddies in the poker crew decided to wait for me and play on Sunday instead. So, it was all my fault, God.

But playing on a Sunday isn’t all that bad compared to the time that we played on Christmas. Some of us are probably going to burn for that one.

My Low Self-esteem, Part II: My deficit was down to $52.50, which didn’t seem insurmountable. One decent night, and I’d be back to being in the black. Instead, I won only $42.25, which isn’t bad, considering the guys that I play with are all good poker players, but I’m still $10.25 short of being even, which means that I’m down to only hating myself a little bit.


17 February 2006

Back in the Day: Where the hell is everybody? Back in the day, the game started at around 7:30 p.m., give or take. The "give or take" was in how long it took us to get to four players because then the pots could get to a decent size.


Ivan's Late Arrival: Bert calls Ivan, poker player deluxe and designer/programmer of this here website. Ozzy calls Ivan, but nobody's getting a return call. What's up with Ivan?

I don't want to get into his thing (or “thang” for those of you from the ‘hood), but let's just say that relationships can be a real pain, and sometimes they want to “get to know you” or “talk” or, and I’m not kidding, “go to the opera.” (And no, “going to the opera” isn’t a euphemism for some truly deviant act between consenting and adventurous adults, though it probably should be. “We got really liquored up and then we "went to the opera," and now we can’t look each other in the eye.)

The Chair’s Not Even Cold: I work a Saturday gig, which means that I have to cash out at about 1:35 a.m. in order to get my 3.5 hours of sleep before I have to wake up.

As soon as I leave, somebody usually takes my seat. Why? Because, bitches, my seat is a super-comfortable office chair. It’s nicely padded, has armrests, and swivels and tilts. My big bro’s chair is also nice, but it’s not as cool as mine, and, anyway, he doesn’t ever leave early, so his seat never goes up for grabs.

1:35 comes around, I sort my chips, and cash out. I stand up to get my stuff together so that I can hit the road, and I’m not up for more than a second before Jesse jumps right into my chair.

It’s just like breaking up with a girl. You know that she’s going to move on, and by “move on” I mean get down with various random dudes. It’s okay with you (it’s not like you have any say in the matter), but you still don’t want to have to see it, and especially not too soon after the breakup.

He could have used the time-honored technique of calling “dibs” on my chair, and that would have secured his seat until I actually left the premises.

Back in Business: I had had a negative number in the YTD Column for four weeks, sinking into the triple digits, but I’d won for the last three games and gotten the deficit down to a mere $10.25 (which, when you do the math [-$1.70 a five-to-six-hour game] is kind of funny). Tonight, I won $53 (bringing my record to 5-2) and got the overall total up to $42.75.


24 February 2006

The Merry Widow: Is the name of a show that I went to tonight, before I could get to the weekly poker game. I had been led to believe (incorrectly, it turns out) that the musical wouldn’t take that long, so I didn’t really worry too much about the thing cutting into poker time, but take long is exactly what it did. Not only that, but it was a complete snooze.

I'm not saying that the performers didn't bring it; on musicals, I'm completely out of my depth, so how the hell could I really know, you know? I will say this: I doubt that you're the most badass performer if you're performing in Fresno. If you end up performing in Fresno, it's not like you were debating, "Fresno...New York...Fresno...New York." More likely, it was , "Fresno...Des Moines...Fresno...Des Moines," and Fresno won only because you're allergic to alfalfa, or whatever the hell it is that one grows in Iowa. I'm not trying to hate on Fresno (it's where most of the important stuff in my life took place), I'm just saying.

I Can’t Get Down With Gyros: Also, maybe I just don't like this kind of stuff. For example, when I lived in Madison, I was once walking around State Street with some of my people, looking for something to eat, and one of my buddies said, "maybe gyros at Parthenon's" but I said that their gyros were gross. Then he mentioned the other gyro place on State Street, and I was of the opinion that their gyros were “nasty.”. This was when my buddy rocked my world by saying that maybe I just didn't like gyros. That was a life-changing insight, my friends, because it had never occurred to me that I could be automatically dead inside to anything, anywhere, ever.

Things to Which I’m Dead: This here’s gonna be a list of things to which, after much soul-searching/painful introspection, I know that I am dead inside.

orange (the color, not the fruit; nothing looks good in orange [except oranges])
Texas (it’s too “Texasy”)
Franz Ferdinand (face it, dude, they’re just not that good)
happiness (highly overrated)
bright light (it makes me squinty)

I'm No Good with Directions: After the performance is over, I get in my ride and get on the 41, going south, thinking that the 180 to which I need to connect is south of the theater. I'm not on the 41 for very long before the highway just stops. How did I know it stops? Because there's a sign that says that I'm at the end of the highway. Next thing I know, I'm heading toward a stoplight. Lovely.

I call Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and the witty rejoinder, and ask him how the fuck I get to his house from where I currently am. It turns out that I needed to get on the 41 going north. I've just lost ten minutes, which bothers me to no end because that's ten minutes that I could have been doing something else and that I don't get back. So now, I've really got time to make up.

Luckily, there were no cops.

Strictly for the Math Geeks: We play much Omaha, classic style or high-low, so we're all pretty good at figuring out what the possible hands are that we can make with our four cards. Sometimes the possible hands are many, but sometimes they are not. For example if you get dealt a set (three cards of the same rank), then the number of hands that you can make decreases quite a bit. If you do the math the odds of drawing a set are pretty slim. It's 52 times 51 times 50, which equals one in 132,600. What I dealt myself was even more unlikely: four eights. The odds of that? One in 6,497,400. Wow, you think, that sounds great, like that hand will make a lot of money, but in Omaha you can only play two of your cards, so it's better to have two eights than four because that way you can make a set and whatever cards replace the two eights that you don't want open up many other possible hands for you. What I'm holding, then, is a folding hand. It sure did look pretty, though.

I’ve Been Here for Years: January had turned into a disaster. I had finished 2-2, with a triple-digit loss for the month. February, however, turned out pretty well. I went 4-0, won $196.75, and am now up $83.50 for the year.