Let Slip the Dogs of War: The March Poker Report
(Editor’s Note: The title of the March poker report is said in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
by Antony after Caesar’s body is taken away. It’s got nothing at all to
do with poker or what went down in March, but I had gotten it into my
head to use the ides of March line from the aforementioned
play, but it made even less sense as a title. Also it’s just kind of
cool to say “let slip the dogs of war.” I guarantee that you will feel
all badass if you say it.)
3 March 2006
I Still Had a Good Time: I missed the game because I was in NYC, getting my ass handed to me by Jack Gilbert and his lovely book. It’s okay, though.
I read my poems in the literary center of the world, and I think that I did okay. I got to fly into and out of NYC, and the city is beautiful to behold from an airplane, much more beautiful than when you're actually walking around. Also, I took cabs everywhere that I went, and doing that always makes me feel worldly and cool, though it would have been better if it had been raining because there’s just something about being a passenger in a cab when it’s raining. Very Wong Kar-Wai.
10 March 2006
(Editor’s Note: Okay, I’m going to go off-topic for a little. I wasn’t even supposed to play poker on the 10th [I was supposed to be dropping the hot, hot {hot} poetic fire in Austin], but because of the below-described circumstances, I made it to the game.)
(An Additional Editor’s Note: Also, a longer version of the following section can be read at Fun at the AWP Conference. And if you read it there, you can skip the next section entirely.)
America West Airlines Can Bite Me: If you're one of the few readers of my little website, you’ll know that I was supposed to be in Austin for an AWP reading on 10 March 2006, which meant that I was going to miss the regular Friday-night poker game, but it, AWP I mean, didn’t go down.
What went down instead was this: I’m at the airport with plenty of time to spare. I check my bag (more on that later), go to my gate to listen to my iPod and read a New Yorker (I’ve finally gotten through the summer of 2004; I can’t wait to see how the presidential election turns out) while I wait for my 9:15 p.m. departure. Soon enough, and on time, we’re on the plane and rolling to the runway. Then the pilot comes on and tells us that there’s “severe wind” at Las Vegas’s McCarran International and we’re going to stay on the ground for a short delay.
Cool. At least we’re on the runway, so when the conditions get better we should be the first ones up and out. Not so much because soon the pilot comes back on the intercom to tell us that we’re headed back to the gate in order to refuel. Still cool. Then it’s the pilot again, telling those of us who are connecting out of Las Vegas to get off of the plane and go back to the counter to see about what’s happening with our connections.
Yeah, now I’m starting to get worried. I’d had an hour in between landing in Las Vegas and flying out again, and that was more than enough time, or so I had thought. But now I’m leaking minutes, and if I miss my connection it’s going to turn into a real hassle.
Originally it was supposed to be like this: Leave Fresno at 9:15 p.m., land in Las Vegas at 10:00 p.m., fly out at 11:00 p.m., land in Austin at 3:35 a.m., and get to the hotel and sleep for about four hours (not a problem because I’ve got these dynamite caffeine pills on which I rely to get me through my busy life) before meeting with my fellow readers for an 11:00 a.m. lunch so that we can prep for the 3:30 p.m. reading. A doable plan.
Now, however, it’s starting to come apart. We connectors are lined up at the gate, waiting to talk to the America West employees who are going to tell us whether we are screwed, and how badly. By the time I get to the front of the line, I've got my little speech prepared. I tell him that, at the latest, I need to get to Austin by 2:00 p.m. so that I can make my reading, even if I have to skip the lunch. The dude at the counter tells me that I can catch a 7:00 a.m. that goes to Phoenix and then onto Austin, with a 1:43 p.m. arrival time. Before I commit to this new plan, I ask him if it’s certain that I’m going to miss my current Las Vegas connection, because, if we get up in the air in the next few minutes, I’ve still got a shot. He says that if we can’t fly in, then there’s a chance that they can’t fly out, which makes sense to me. This is when I asked him what, in his professional opinion, was the best thing for me to do. He said to stick with my current flights because I could always switch to the 7:00 a.m. flight out of Las Vegas when I touched down in Las Vegas. I say “okay,” and, shortly, we’re back on the plane.
By the time we’re in the air, though, it’s clear that I will have to catch the 7:00 a.m. flight. When we land at about 11:45 p.m., however, I see that the flight to Austin is still listed on the board as “currently boarding.” Sweet. I’m in Concourse C and I have to haul ass to Concourse B, but I don’t care, because it’s all going to work out as originally planned. Even as I’m running, though, I know that my checked bag will never get onto the goddamn plane with me and that I’ll have to do the reading in the clothes that I’m wearing, and not in my lovely navy three-button suit that looks killer with a ark gray shirt and navy tie. Not that big a deal; I did that big-deal NBCC reading in alternative clothes and in my street shoes, so doing this reading in a sweater is not going to break me.
When I get to Concourse B, though, I see that the plane isn’t there but that it’s still listed as “currently boarding.” I say to the counter person that I’m there for the midnight flight to Austin, and she tells me semi-discourteously that it has already left. She’s already turning away before I can even say another word, but I have to ask her where I go to make alternate arrangements. Without even looking at me, she tells me to go to America West customer service, and, because I don’t have the magical ability to read her mind, I have to ask her where that is.
Shortly, I’m in the customer service line, which has already snaked far down a corridor, ready to switch to the 7:00 a.m. flight. I’m about twelfth in line, when some middle manager jerk comes and tells us that we need to go to the main check-in counter to make our new arrangements, and that it will be faster if we do. I look at the number of people in front of me and quickly decide that I’m better off if I just stay where I am. Nobody in front of me moves, and a few people immediately behind me don’t, either. Then the middle manager says that he’s cutting off the line with those who are in customer service proper, and not in the corridor. What a bastard.
There’s a mad dash to the check-in counter, but I’m naturally a fast walker, so I don’t lose any places in line. That’s a good thing because the line at the check-in counter is incredibly long and I know that that middle manager guy has just jobbed me and everybody else who had been standing in the line at customer service.
I’m in that line until 2:00 a.m., but I do get a seat on the 7:00 a.m. flight. I don’t, however, get tickets. The guy at check-in gave me an itinerary for the new flight, but he told me that I’d have to come back at 5:00 a.m. to get the actual tickets. Whatever; I’m going to be up all night anyway, so coming back will just entail walking over from wherever in the terminal I’ve found a place to sit.
I grab some snacks and water at one of those little overpriced convenience stores that you find in airports, then find a bar where I can open up my laptop and work on whatever it is that I think I can work on at 2:15 in the morning with a not-exactly clear head.
It turns out that McCarran has free wifi, so I get online and send an e-mail to most of the people with whom I’ll be reading later on that day so that I can let them know that I’ll be missing lunch but that I’ll be there in time for the reading. I write a few more e-mails, read the NY Times online, but, because I’m tired and a little freaked out (I need everything to be perfect all of the time and I’m not good at not having things go exactly like they should), I don’t get any real work done.
So far, except for the middle manager jerk and the rude lady at the gate, there’s not much about which to be upset. If there are severe winds, there are severe winds. Force majeure. That’s how it goes.
At 4:00 a.m. I get back in the check-in line, and by the time I get to the front, it is almost exactly 5:00 a.m., so I think that everything’s working out now. A woman calls out for “next, please,” so I walk over and show her my printed itinerary and tell her that I just need to get my tickets printed. The woman is named Liz, and Liz starts keying something into her computer, and I’m waiting for my tickets to print shortly. Then she keys in some more stuff. Then she keys in some more stuff. I am starting to suspect that there’s a problem.
Finally, Liz looks up at me and says that I’m not on the flight. I ask what she means, and she says that the flight’s booked solid and that I don’t have a seat. I say that I do, in fact, have a seat, that I had been told that all I needed to do was come back for tickets. She says that the flight’s “locked,” but that she can put me on the standby list, where I would be the ninth person down the standby list.
I wonder how many people would fall for that “I can put you on stand-by” line because, with all of the people that America West has screwed tonight, all of their remaining flights are packed and only a mass suicide, involving at least nine people, could ever get me on a plane.
I tell her that I don’t need to be on stand-by, that I need to be on the 7:00 a.m. flight just like I was told that I would be.
We’re at an impasse, because it’s pretty clear that I’m screwed, even though I’ve done nothing wrong, and that she can’t un-screw me.
What probably happened: America West is a horrible airline (I only found this out after my NYC flight and the failed Austin Trip seven days later) and they had many upset customers that night, all of them frantic to get to their destinations at a reasonable time. Some of them, I guess, fought vigorously to get onto an airplane, any airplane, mine included, and, since I didn’t already have tickets in my hand and wasn’t around to defend my seat, it was easy to take my seat away from me. They probably just figured that I would just have to take whatever flight it was that they finally assigned to me. I wouldn’t have a choice, really.
It was at this point that I retraced for Liz how I had had a flight at 11:00 p.m., how I was then supposed to be on the 7:00 a.m., and how I was now a man without a flight. This was when Liz said to me, “We can’t do anything about the weather.”
What am I, a schmuck? (Forming that sentence in my mind and then typing it is, by the way, the closest that I will ever get to living in NYC.) I know that she’s just mouthing what she’s been told to say—blame the entire thing on something for which they, themselves, can’t possibly be blamed—when a customer has gotten screwed and is demanding satisfaction, in the hopes that I’m not smart enough to figure out that weather only screwed up my original plans, not the ones that I spent over two late-night/early-morning hours standing in line for and/or putting together with one of their counter persons.
Then, after more keyboarding, and without letting me know what she’s doing, Liz prints out my tickets. I think that she’s taken care of everything and that things, thankfully, will now proceed smoothly. She tells me that I fly out of Las Vegas at 10:35 a.m.
10:35 a.m.? The math’s not hard. If my lost 7:00 a.m. flight got me to Austin at 1:43 p.m., then a flight leaving three-and-a-half hours later will never get me to my panel anywhere near its 3:30 p.m. start time.
I ask her what time a 10:35 a.m. departure gets me to Austin. She says that I land in Phoenix at 11:40 and fly out at 12:11 p.m., but she hasn’t really answered my question. I can tell, in fact, that she’s gone out of her way to not answer my question. I can tell that this dodge is related to the one that she had tried earlier about the weather. She’s not going to be honest if she thinks that she can get by with a lie or an evasion.
Because I still don’t know what time I get to Austin, I have to ask again. She looks at the screen, almost as if she’s not sure. “You arrive in Austin at 4:29 p.m.,” Liz says.
I couldn’t believe it. Liz had just printed tickets that were useless to me. She had just printed tickets that she knew were useless to me. I had told her repeatedly that I needed to be in Austin by 2:00 p.m. for a 3:30 p.m. panel, but she hadn’t seemed to care.
Why’d she do it? To get rid of me. To have me walk away while she hoped that I didn't figure out what time I was landing in Austin until it was too late. It’s one of the most fucked up things that I've ever seen. She knew that my panel was at 3:30 p.m. and she was just going to let me get on a plane that would arrive after my panel was over. She was going to let me fly there and back and ruin any chance that I’d get a refund for my $500+ flight. I was stunned, that anybody could do that to a fellow human being. I wondered if she had been trained to do what she had done to me, or if it was something of her own invention. I wondered what part of her had died that had allowed her to do what she was trying to do to me.
I had already decided that if there was no was for me to arrive in Austin on time that I would just request the earliest return flight back to Fresno. I told her, “Forget it. Just get me on the next plane back to Fresno.” Liz looked utterly surprised, like she thought that I was just going to let myself be loaded onto a flight like a piece of luggage. I told her that there was no reason for me to go to Austin if I were going to arrive too late for my panel, and, get this, she seemed to get upset with me, to get a little frustrated and/or exasperated. I was the one who had just had his plans wrecked, by her, and she was making a face at me and shaking her head in anger. At least she didn’t roll her eyes, though she probably wanted to.
I told her that there wasn’t any reason for me to go, and that was when she said that I “was choosing not to fly.” Jesus, man, it’s so transparent what’s now going on. If I choose not to complete my flight, then America West is off the hook for all that has happened, and it’s all my fault if I don’t complete my trip. More importantly, America West will get me to eat the ticket, to pay for a trip to Austin that got as far as Las Vegas through their ineptitude and dishonesty.
I tell her that I’ve already missed my lunch meeting, that I’ll arrive after my panel is over, that it would make no sense to fly to Austin just so that I can stay the night in a hotel room and then fly out sixteen hours later without having accomplished anything, that I, in fact, have had very little choice in what has transpired over the last nine hours.
At this point, Liz has been keyboarding and lying to me for almost exactly an hour. A supervisor walks over to see what’s going on with Liz, and Liz explains her version of what’s going on. The supervisor didn’t, by the way, ask me a goddamned thing; it was as if I were invisible.
The supervisor then said reassuringly to Liz that it was “all right” that she was taking so long, which was when I understood that part of the way that these ticket agents are evaluated is in how long they take with each individual customer, and Liz having spent an hour utterly lying and evading and mistreating me was not cool, but it was not cool only because the lying and the evading and the mistreating had taken far too long. It had been inefficient lying and the evading and the mistreating.
Liz prints my tickets for my 11:00 a.m. flight back to Fresno. It’s roughly 6:00 a.m. at this point. In the span of about six hours, my plans have disintegrated. In a daze, I grab my tickets, ask Liz for every single scrap of paper related to my trip. Not once does she utter a word of understanding or commiseration or apology. Nothing.
With all of the evasions, half-truths, and outright lies, it was almost as if we were dating. It was as if we had condensed the whole relationship experience, from the first date to the divorce, down to just an hour. At first there was optimism and excitement that we could be good to each other, then the painful discovery that we both wanted different things from the relationship, then the misunderstandings and the lies and the hurt feelings, then the even more painful parting after the exchange of the official documents, with an obvious winner (that would be Liz) and an obvious loser (and that would be me).
I have a deeply analytical mind, and I’m pretty confident that I can reason through or make sense of anything, even this situation, so I keep running what’s happened over and over in my mind, but it doesn’t become clearer or more comprehensible. After much analysis, however, I was able to conclude that the whole situation was, to use the technical term, “fucked up.”
My Big Bro Calls and It All Starts to Come Together: I’m sitting in the bar for a long time, exhausted but unable to rest, when, around 8:00 a.m., my big bro calls me to ask how Austin is, and I tell him that I don’t know because I’m still stuck in Las Vegas, waiting to catch a flight back to Fresno. I explain the whole thing, and my big bro, like all big bros, commiserates. Big bros are great that way. Immediately, I start to feel better.
We started talking about the upcoming Saturday-evening poker game. Usually, we play on Fridays, but we had moved the game to Saturday so that I could, after flying out of Austin in the afternoon and then hauling ass from the airport, still play in the game. Now, however, there’s no reason to not play on Friday, which I point out to my brother. He agrees and says that he’ll call the poker crew and the game will be back on Friday.
Uh, Dude, That Was One Hell of a Digression: What did any of this have to do with poker? Nothing, but I needed to get it off of my chest. Thanks for listening, man, really. I feel like the healing’s begun and that we’ve grown much, much closer.
I’m Nothing If Not Considerate/The Transition Back to Poker: On the drive to my big bro’s I actually stopped at the grocery store to pick up snacks and drinks because we had been running low. Even though I was sleep-deprived, angry, frustrated, and bitterly disappointed, I still took care of my hosting business. That’s the kind of guy that I am.
There's Been an Escalation: We usually play with $2-$4 betting rounds, which means that the maximum bet after the deal is a dollar, then two dollars on the flop and on the turn, and, finally, four dollars after the river. If you do the math, that means that you can find yourself in at the showdown with $36 invested in the hand.
That seems like plenty to me, but then, while I was in NYC, Jesse introduced $1-$5, but for all betting rounds, which means that you can be in at the end for $80. See, I’m gone for a week and the shit gets crazy.
How and when’d I find out about the 1-5? Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and power steering, called me while I was at La Guardia, getting ready to fly home, in order to ask me how my trip was going, and the conversation quickly turned to the game that I had missed the previous night (only my second of the year, the first one being when I was in Vancouver, being an art-loser with one of the coolest people that I know).
Bert, inventor of the Bert Light and the metric system, tells me about the 1-5, and I know that this means that there’s a good chance that the game could have gotten really brutal and bloody. I ask who the big winner was, and Bert, inventor of the Bert Death Spiral and call waiting, says, “You're talking to him.”
Bert, it turns out, pulled $235, which is amazing and also probably means that somebody paid out. Bert says that there was one guy (who shall go nameless just in case his special lady reads this and is wondering why they have been economizing lately) who lost around $180. $180! The only person who has ever lost more than that was yours truly, but I had been sicker than hell that day.
Riding the Waves: In any poker game, there will be ups and downs in terms of your chip count. When you have big stacks, you can’t let it affect you negatively, which usually means playing too many hands because you feel like you're playing with “free money,” or becoming far too conservative in the hopes of coming out way ahead at the end of the night. When you’ve lost tons of chips, the tendency is to want to play too many hands because you need to get involved in some big pots so that you can catch up in a hurry, but the problem with that system is that most hands that are dealt are unplayable, so now one is getting into battles with cards that will only cost you more money.
What you have to do, then, is continue to play solid poker no matter how many chips are left in front of you. Throw away the cards that you shouldn’t play, and play aggressively the hands that you should.
There will be times when you play solid poker and you still lose most of your money. You didn’t catch cards, or, when you did, somebody caught better cards, or, worst of all, you caught good cards and somebody stayed in the hand with junk and got lucky. When this happens, you’ve got to ride the waves.
There Were Fluctuations: First, my big bro had all the money. He and Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and funnel cakes, were taking huge swings at each other, and my big bro was winning. Then others got involved in the confrontations.
I’ll admit that when the game started, after I had taken an hours-long nap, I was depressed and feeling sorry for myself, but my homies and the poker game made me feel better.
What made me feel best of all was that I won $157.75, my second-highest total ever. Maybe I should spend more of my nights stranded in airports before our poker games.
17 March 2006
The New Spot: This week's game was held at Shawn’s house. How to say this delicately? He’s loaded. We played in his garage, and his garage was nicer than almost every single apartment in which I've ever lived. My Madcity apartment was nicer, but just barely. You know a house is nice when it’s got a designated parking spot for the boat. I almost didn’t want to tarnish his property with my common presence.
Rod and Art: When we arrived, two of Shawn’s homies were already there, getting down on some pizza and sodas. These cats were new to our game, and I didn’t know how they played, so I was a little more serious than usual because it seemed to me that tonight’s game was mostly going to be about business. Most of the poker crew seemed to be in the same sober mood because I think that we all understood that we needed to represent.
That sober mood didn’t last too long. Rod is a cool guy, and right away we fell into calling each other "bro." My new thing is to call people "bro" because it reminds me that we are all connected to each other and our fates are intertwined, but mostly because it makes me feel really cool to go around calling people "bro." I'm a poet, so opportunities to feel cool are few and far between.
I really liked Rod (okay, that didn’t sound too “manly”); he was funny and he was a good sport. What made him especially likeable was that, in no time at all, he dropped al least $150 and he never got any of it back.
Ups to Jesse: Jesse was the big winner pulling in over $125. Second place went to my big bro, which was pretty astonishing. Wait, that came out wrongly; he had paid all night and had re-bought and then re-bought again, then one more time. He was in for $149, and most of that was gone by 11:30 p.m.; he must have had a little less than $20 by then. Then he started catching and playing his cards really well. In the last two hours, he made a comeback and ended up leaving with $105 in profit. If you do the math, that means that in the last two hours he made about $234, which is a +$117 hourly rate, which, like I said, is pretty astonishing.
Fighting Through: That's what I call the ability to deal with the big swings in your stacks that may come your way as the night progresses.
The thing is that when you're paying out, you can get discouraged, angry, or frustrated and lose faith in your game. Listen, if you're bleeding money on a consistent basis, then you probably should lose faith in your game because it probably means that there are flaws in it that require correction.
Part of fighting through is doing a continual systems check, making sure that you're playing the hands as you should. As an example of this, I was down $30 in a relatively short time, but then I got it turned around pretty quickly and was up about $60. I was up most of the night, but I was doing the slow bleed: getting nice starter hands, paying to see the flop, but then catching nothing and mucking my cards. By about 1:00 a.m., I was down to my last few dollars in profit. Sure, there were hands that I could have played a little bit better and a few that I misplayed completely, but, for the most part, my game was sound, at least on this night.
The Total: As I stated previously, I was only up a few dollars as we neared the agreed-upon ending time, but I told the crew that I didn't want to win or lose a little, because that's just sort of embarrassing after battling all night. Pretty soon, I was down about fifteen bucks, got back close to even, and had a little bit of a rush at the end and ended up making $25.75. Not a lot, but not a little, and not a negative number. So now I've improved my record for the year to 8-2.
24 March 2006
Love: Love is tricky. There's much give and take. Progress and setbacks. Happiness and a boatload of pain. Generally, it's a bit of a drag, but it's love, so you're screwed. What are you going to do, not love? There she is and there you are, and there are all the years ahead, so you just get on with it.
But back to the giving and the setbacks and the pain. One of our regular players, as dedicated a gambling addict as you'll find, a dude who had hardly ever missed a game, missed four games in a row. Four. Why did he miss four in a row? Love. Love got him. He's engaged in love-appropriate activities now, and, unaccountably, poker isn't one of them.
Now, we're all very understanding cats. It's love, so he's stuck. It's like doing time. We know that he’ll get out when his sentence is over or when he’s lucky enough to get a one-night parole.
The Classic Six: No, I’m not talking about an apartment in New York City. That dream died when I found out that there’s not much money in poetry and that the most that I could afford was a postcard of New York City, but not one of those 4x6ers, just a 3x5.
There were rumors that our besotted player might be able to make the game, but I didn't put too much stock in them. Once your lady gets you to miss one game, she understands, rightfully, that she can make you miss two, then three, then she's got you, then you will never play poker with your boys ever again, then, next thing you know, you're eaten up by regret and praying every night to die so that the misery can finally stop, just, finally, please stop.
Sorry. I got a little carried away there. We're deep into the game, not expecting this dude to show up, when Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and scented candles, spots headlights in the driveway. There are many players with standing invitations who come in when they can—once a month, every few months, whatever—so I had thought that perhaps one of them was pulling in. Even better, my boy had somehow managed to get away. The first thing out of his mouth was that he could go until 11:30 p.m., so we got him his chips and I said, "Well, we better get this shit going." Can you tell that I trained as a poet?
For the first time in a month, we've got the classic six, the six most hardcore and badass players that ever sit at our game. In honor of this event, I did the fist tap (during which I said, “give it up,” or “give me some of that”) with everybody in the poker crew because I was so fucking happy.
What About the Money?: I was down early, about thirty, and stayed down the whole night. It got so bad, that I had to go to my man bag for a second $100, what I call "reloading," in case the first $100 ran out. I was down to thirty-five from the first buy-in, so I bought my second rack, putting me in for $200. Soon enough, I was down almost an even hundred, but I managed to battle and stay at that level for a long time. Then I went on a really bad run again and was down about $130. I thought, "here we go again," but then I fought back and was down only about $60, which sounds bad, but I thought that I was on the way to losing at least $200. Then, with about a half hour to go, I dropped $45 in about four hands, putting me down $105 when we cashed out.
Gambling Addiction?: Maybe: This is how messed up I am: by the time I got home and into bed it was 3:30 a.m., and I had to be up in only three-and-a-half hours for my Saturday gig (the poker money's got to come from somewhere).
And then I woke up dreaming about poker, where, after the turn, I had an unbeatable hand and was going to get paid, but then my alarm clock woke me up to get my ass to work. I wanted to go back to sleep to see how the hand turned out, but I needed to make up for the ass-kicking that I had taken the night before.
31 March 2006
Big Daddy: As a joke, I've been speaking about myself in the third-person at the table, and when I do, I've been referring to myself as "Big Daddy." As in, "It's Big Daddy's turn to act" or "Big Daddy raises." This is funny because I'm not one of those guys to whom people would ever give a nickname. I don't know why, but it probably has to do with the fact that I'm kind of uptight and, for the most part, just not that cool. Because, let's face it, only very cool and very easygoing people get nicknames.
If I were to have acquired a nickname, it wouldn't be anything like "Big Daddy" because it's usually reserved for the coolest and the most popular of people. I'd probably get something like "Bitch," as in "Bitch, it's your turn to deal.”
The Crustaceans: Oscar, a semi-regular at our game walks in holding a tray and a few bags, and then he announces that he's bought coctel de camarónes, that is, Mexican shrimp cocktail. That was when I said, "Oscar, did I ever say that you're my hero?" you know, to introduce Bette Midler into our game and butch it up a little bit.
Can’t a Brother Get a Cheese Puff?: After a big-ass helping of the shrimp, I decided to set me up a bowl of Cheetos brand cheese puffs. I get a bowl and fill it up with the aforementioned cheese puffs, and set it to my left. I get into a few hands, and when I finally make a reach for the snacks, most of them are gone. What the hell? Jesse, it turns out, had moved in on my undefended cheese puffs.
Shortly, they're gone, and Jesse gets up to get another bowlful. He brings it back and sets it in the same spot. He eats a few, but then he says that he's done and I should move the bowl so that it rests on my right. Again, I get into a few hands, and when I go for the cheese puffs, they're back on my left again, and Jesse's nearly finished them again. What the fuck just happened? I know he didn't reach in front of me to snag my bowl, and I know that he never left his seat, so how'd he get his hands on the cheese puffs? Using my highly developed reasoning skills, I figure that I must have moved the bowl back to my left because its being on my right side would have made it difficult to get my chips into the pot. That was the reason that I'd originally placed the bowl to my left to begin with. Still, they should have been safe since Jesse had announced that he was done.
Cheese puffs, though, as is commonly understood, are irresistible, and who can blame Jesse, really, for nearly killing the last of the cheese puffs. He said that he was done again, but I wasn't having it. I inhaled those remaining cheese puffs.
Dude, March Rules: For the entire month, I made exactly $220.
At tonight’s game, I win $141.50. It's one of my best nights ever. In fact, in March, I had two of the best nights that I have ever had at a poker table. I also had one of my worst when I lost $105. I'm counting these wild fluctuations as a good sign because that means that I'm in the battles now, swinging away with the rest of them. I still do my little nerd math and figure pot odds and outs, but I'll try to attack when I think that I may get a fold, even if I have inferior cards.
I also got calls that I didn't think that I'd get because I knew that the other players involved in the hand had weak hands or missed draws, calls when they didn’t have much with which to call. How'd this happen? Through aggressive betting on previous hands where everybody had folded to me and I had turned over rags, showing the crew that I had been on a straight bluff or draw the whole way. Because I wasn’t being so analytical and straightforward (and obvious) in my play, I had made myself harder to read.
3 March 2006
I Still Had a Good Time: I missed the game because I was in NYC, getting my ass handed to me by Jack Gilbert and his lovely book. It’s okay, though.
I read my poems in the literary center of the world, and I think that I did okay. I got to fly into and out of NYC, and the city is beautiful to behold from an airplane, much more beautiful than when you're actually walking around. Also, I took cabs everywhere that I went, and doing that always makes me feel worldly and cool, though it would have been better if it had been raining because there’s just something about being a passenger in a cab when it’s raining. Very Wong Kar-Wai.
10 March 2006
(Editor’s Note: Okay, I’m going to go off-topic for a little. I wasn’t even supposed to play poker on the 10th [I was supposed to be dropping the hot, hot {hot} poetic fire in Austin], but because of the below-described circumstances, I made it to the game.)
(An Additional Editor’s Note: Also, a longer version of the following section can be read at Fun at the AWP Conference. And if you read it there, you can skip the next section entirely.)
America West Airlines Can Bite Me: If you're one of the few readers of my little website, you’ll know that I was supposed to be in Austin for an AWP reading on 10 March 2006, which meant that I was going to miss the regular Friday-night poker game, but it, AWP I mean, didn’t go down.
What went down instead was this: I’m at the airport with plenty of time to spare. I check my bag (more on that later), go to my gate to listen to my iPod and read a New Yorker (I’ve finally gotten through the summer of 2004; I can’t wait to see how the presidential election turns out) while I wait for my 9:15 p.m. departure. Soon enough, and on time, we’re on the plane and rolling to the runway. Then the pilot comes on and tells us that there’s “severe wind” at Las Vegas’s McCarran International and we’re going to stay on the ground for a short delay.
Cool. At least we’re on the runway, so when the conditions get better we should be the first ones up and out. Not so much because soon the pilot comes back on the intercom to tell us that we’re headed back to the gate in order to refuel. Still cool. Then it’s the pilot again, telling those of us who are connecting out of Las Vegas to get off of the plane and go back to the counter to see about what’s happening with our connections.
Yeah, now I’m starting to get worried. I’d had an hour in between landing in Las Vegas and flying out again, and that was more than enough time, or so I had thought. But now I’m leaking minutes, and if I miss my connection it’s going to turn into a real hassle.
Originally it was supposed to be like this: Leave Fresno at 9:15 p.m., land in Las Vegas at 10:00 p.m., fly out at 11:00 p.m., land in Austin at 3:35 a.m., and get to the hotel and sleep for about four hours (not a problem because I’ve got these dynamite caffeine pills on which I rely to get me through my busy life) before meeting with my fellow readers for an 11:00 a.m. lunch so that we can prep for the 3:30 p.m. reading. A doable plan.
Now, however, it’s starting to come apart. We connectors are lined up at the gate, waiting to talk to the America West employees who are going to tell us whether we are screwed, and how badly. By the time I get to the front of the line, I've got my little speech prepared. I tell him that, at the latest, I need to get to Austin by 2:00 p.m. so that I can make my reading, even if I have to skip the lunch. The dude at the counter tells me that I can catch a 7:00 a.m. that goes to Phoenix and then onto Austin, with a 1:43 p.m. arrival time. Before I commit to this new plan, I ask him if it’s certain that I’m going to miss my current Las Vegas connection, because, if we get up in the air in the next few minutes, I’ve still got a shot. He says that if we can’t fly in, then there’s a chance that they can’t fly out, which makes sense to me. This is when I asked him what, in his professional opinion, was the best thing for me to do. He said to stick with my current flights because I could always switch to the 7:00 a.m. flight out of Las Vegas when I touched down in Las Vegas. I say “okay,” and, shortly, we’re back on the plane.
By the time we’re in the air, though, it’s clear that I will have to catch the 7:00 a.m. flight. When we land at about 11:45 p.m., however, I see that the flight to Austin is still listed on the board as “currently boarding.” Sweet. I’m in Concourse C and I have to haul ass to Concourse B, but I don’t care, because it’s all going to work out as originally planned. Even as I’m running, though, I know that my checked bag will never get onto the goddamn plane with me and that I’ll have to do the reading in the clothes that I’m wearing, and not in my lovely navy three-button suit that looks killer with a ark gray shirt and navy tie. Not that big a deal; I did that big-deal NBCC reading in alternative clothes and in my street shoes, so doing this reading in a sweater is not going to break me.
When I get to Concourse B, though, I see that the plane isn’t there but that it’s still listed as “currently boarding.” I say to the counter person that I’m there for the midnight flight to Austin, and she tells me semi-discourteously that it has already left. She’s already turning away before I can even say another word, but I have to ask her where I go to make alternate arrangements. Without even looking at me, she tells me to go to America West customer service, and, because I don’t have the magical ability to read her mind, I have to ask her where that is.
Shortly, I’m in the customer service line, which has already snaked far down a corridor, ready to switch to the 7:00 a.m. flight. I’m about twelfth in line, when some middle manager jerk comes and tells us that we need to go to the main check-in counter to make our new arrangements, and that it will be faster if we do. I look at the number of people in front of me and quickly decide that I’m better off if I just stay where I am. Nobody in front of me moves, and a few people immediately behind me don’t, either. Then the middle manager says that he’s cutting off the line with those who are in customer service proper, and not in the corridor. What a bastard.
There’s a mad dash to the check-in counter, but I’m naturally a fast walker, so I don’t lose any places in line. That’s a good thing because the line at the check-in counter is incredibly long and I know that that middle manager guy has just jobbed me and everybody else who had been standing in the line at customer service.
I’m in that line until 2:00 a.m., but I do get a seat on the 7:00 a.m. flight. I don’t, however, get tickets. The guy at check-in gave me an itinerary for the new flight, but he told me that I’d have to come back at 5:00 a.m. to get the actual tickets. Whatever; I’m going to be up all night anyway, so coming back will just entail walking over from wherever in the terminal I’ve found a place to sit.
I grab some snacks and water at one of those little overpriced convenience stores that you find in airports, then find a bar where I can open up my laptop and work on whatever it is that I think I can work on at 2:15 in the morning with a not-exactly clear head.
It turns out that McCarran has free wifi, so I get online and send an e-mail to most of the people with whom I’ll be reading later on that day so that I can let them know that I’ll be missing lunch but that I’ll be there in time for the reading. I write a few more e-mails, read the NY Times online, but, because I’m tired and a little freaked out (I need everything to be perfect all of the time and I’m not good at not having things go exactly like they should), I don’t get any real work done.
So far, except for the middle manager jerk and the rude lady at the gate, there’s not much about which to be upset. If there are severe winds, there are severe winds. Force majeure. That’s how it goes.
At 4:00 a.m. I get back in the check-in line, and by the time I get to the front, it is almost exactly 5:00 a.m., so I think that everything’s working out now. A woman calls out for “next, please,” so I walk over and show her my printed itinerary and tell her that I just need to get my tickets printed. The woman is named Liz, and Liz starts keying something into her computer, and I’m waiting for my tickets to print shortly. Then she keys in some more stuff. Then she keys in some more stuff. I am starting to suspect that there’s a problem.
Finally, Liz looks up at me and says that I’m not on the flight. I ask what she means, and she says that the flight’s booked solid and that I don’t have a seat. I say that I do, in fact, have a seat, that I had been told that all I needed to do was come back for tickets. She says that the flight’s “locked,” but that she can put me on the standby list, where I would be the ninth person down the standby list.
I wonder how many people would fall for that “I can put you on stand-by” line because, with all of the people that America West has screwed tonight, all of their remaining flights are packed and only a mass suicide, involving at least nine people, could ever get me on a plane.
I tell her that I don’t need to be on stand-by, that I need to be on the 7:00 a.m. flight just like I was told that I would be.
We’re at an impasse, because it’s pretty clear that I’m screwed, even though I’ve done nothing wrong, and that she can’t un-screw me.
What probably happened: America West is a horrible airline (I only found this out after my NYC flight and the failed Austin Trip seven days later) and they had many upset customers that night, all of them frantic to get to their destinations at a reasonable time. Some of them, I guess, fought vigorously to get onto an airplane, any airplane, mine included, and, since I didn’t already have tickets in my hand and wasn’t around to defend my seat, it was easy to take my seat away from me. They probably just figured that I would just have to take whatever flight it was that they finally assigned to me. I wouldn’t have a choice, really.
It was at this point that I retraced for Liz how I had had a flight at 11:00 p.m., how I was then supposed to be on the 7:00 a.m., and how I was now a man without a flight. This was when Liz said to me, “We can’t do anything about the weather.”
What am I, a schmuck? (Forming that sentence in my mind and then typing it is, by the way, the closest that I will ever get to living in NYC.) I know that she’s just mouthing what she’s been told to say—blame the entire thing on something for which they, themselves, can’t possibly be blamed—when a customer has gotten screwed and is demanding satisfaction, in the hopes that I’m not smart enough to figure out that weather only screwed up my original plans, not the ones that I spent over two late-night/early-morning hours standing in line for and/or putting together with one of their counter persons.
Then, after more keyboarding, and without letting me know what she’s doing, Liz prints out my tickets. I think that she’s taken care of everything and that things, thankfully, will now proceed smoothly. She tells me that I fly out of Las Vegas at 10:35 a.m.
10:35 a.m.? The math’s not hard. If my lost 7:00 a.m. flight got me to Austin at 1:43 p.m., then a flight leaving three-and-a-half hours later will never get me to my panel anywhere near its 3:30 p.m. start time.
I ask her what time a 10:35 a.m. departure gets me to Austin. She says that I land in Phoenix at 11:40 and fly out at 12:11 p.m., but she hasn’t really answered my question. I can tell, in fact, that she’s gone out of her way to not answer my question. I can tell that this dodge is related to the one that she had tried earlier about the weather. She’s not going to be honest if she thinks that she can get by with a lie or an evasion.
Because I still don’t know what time I get to Austin, I have to ask again. She looks at the screen, almost as if she’s not sure. “You arrive in Austin at 4:29 p.m.,” Liz says.
I couldn’t believe it. Liz had just printed tickets that were useless to me. She had just printed tickets that she knew were useless to me. I had told her repeatedly that I needed to be in Austin by 2:00 p.m. for a 3:30 p.m. panel, but she hadn’t seemed to care.
Why’d she do it? To get rid of me. To have me walk away while she hoped that I didn't figure out what time I was landing in Austin until it was too late. It’s one of the most fucked up things that I've ever seen. She knew that my panel was at 3:30 p.m. and she was just going to let me get on a plane that would arrive after my panel was over. She was going to let me fly there and back and ruin any chance that I’d get a refund for my $500+ flight. I was stunned, that anybody could do that to a fellow human being. I wondered if she had been trained to do what she had done to me, or if it was something of her own invention. I wondered what part of her had died that had allowed her to do what she was trying to do to me.
I had already decided that if there was no was for me to arrive in Austin on time that I would just request the earliest return flight back to Fresno. I told her, “Forget it. Just get me on the next plane back to Fresno.” Liz looked utterly surprised, like she thought that I was just going to let myself be loaded onto a flight like a piece of luggage. I told her that there was no reason for me to go to Austin if I were going to arrive too late for my panel, and, get this, she seemed to get upset with me, to get a little frustrated and/or exasperated. I was the one who had just had his plans wrecked, by her, and she was making a face at me and shaking her head in anger. At least she didn’t roll her eyes, though she probably wanted to.
I told her that there wasn’t any reason for me to go, and that was when she said that I “was choosing not to fly.” Jesus, man, it’s so transparent what’s now going on. If I choose not to complete my flight, then America West is off the hook for all that has happened, and it’s all my fault if I don’t complete my trip. More importantly, America West will get me to eat the ticket, to pay for a trip to Austin that got as far as Las Vegas through their ineptitude and dishonesty.
I tell her that I’ve already missed my lunch meeting, that I’ll arrive after my panel is over, that it would make no sense to fly to Austin just so that I can stay the night in a hotel room and then fly out sixteen hours later without having accomplished anything, that I, in fact, have had very little choice in what has transpired over the last nine hours.
At this point, Liz has been keyboarding and lying to me for almost exactly an hour. A supervisor walks over to see what’s going on with Liz, and Liz explains her version of what’s going on. The supervisor didn’t, by the way, ask me a goddamned thing; it was as if I were invisible.
The supervisor then said reassuringly to Liz that it was “all right” that she was taking so long, which was when I understood that part of the way that these ticket agents are evaluated is in how long they take with each individual customer, and Liz having spent an hour utterly lying and evading and mistreating me was not cool, but it was not cool only because the lying and the evading and the mistreating had taken far too long. It had been inefficient lying and the evading and the mistreating.
Liz prints my tickets for my 11:00 a.m. flight back to Fresno. It’s roughly 6:00 a.m. at this point. In the span of about six hours, my plans have disintegrated. In a daze, I grab my tickets, ask Liz for every single scrap of paper related to my trip. Not once does she utter a word of understanding or commiseration or apology. Nothing.
With all of the evasions, half-truths, and outright lies, it was almost as if we were dating. It was as if we had condensed the whole relationship experience, from the first date to the divorce, down to just an hour. At first there was optimism and excitement that we could be good to each other, then the painful discovery that we both wanted different things from the relationship, then the misunderstandings and the lies and the hurt feelings, then the even more painful parting after the exchange of the official documents, with an obvious winner (that would be Liz) and an obvious loser (and that would be me).
I have a deeply analytical mind, and I’m pretty confident that I can reason through or make sense of anything, even this situation, so I keep running what’s happened over and over in my mind, but it doesn’t become clearer or more comprehensible. After much analysis, however, I was able to conclude that the whole situation was, to use the technical term, “fucked up.”
My Big Bro Calls and It All Starts to Come Together: I’m sitting in the bar for a long time, exhausted but unable to rest, when, around 8:00 a.m., my big bro calls me to ask how Austin is, and I tell him that I don’t know because I’m still stuck in Las Vegas, waiting to catch a flight back to Fresno. I explain the whole thing, and my big bro, like all big bros, commiserates. Big bros are great that way. Immediately, I start to feel better.
We started talking about the upcoming Saturday-evening poker game. Usually, we play on Fridays, but we had moved the game to Saturday so that I could, after flying out of Austin in the afternoon and then hauling ass from the airport, still play in the game. Now, however, there’s no reason to not play on Friday, which I point out to my brother. He agrees and says that he’ll call the poker crew and the game will be back on Friday.
Uh, Dude, That Was One Hell of a Digression: What did any of this have to do with poker? Nothing, but I needed to get it off of my chest. Thanks for listening, man, really. I feel like the healing’s begun and that we’ve grown much, much closer.
I’m Nothing If Not Considerate/The Transition Back to Poker: On the drive to my big bro’s I actually stopped at the grocery store to pick up snacks and drinks because we had been running low. Even though I was sleep-deprived, angry, frustrated, and bitterly disappointed, I still took care of my hosting business. That’s the kind of guy that I am.
There's Been an Escalation: We usually play with $2-$4 betting rounds, which means that the maximum bet after the deal is a dollar, then two dollars on the flop and on the turn, and, finally, four dollars after the river. If you do the math, that means that you can find yourself in at the showdown with $36 invested in the hand.
That seems like plenty to me, but then, while I was in NYC, Jesse introduced $1-$5, but for all betting rounds, which means that you can be in at the end for $80. See, I’m gone for a week and the shit gets crazy.
How and when’d I find out about the 1-5? Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and power steering, called me while I was at La Guardia, getting ready to fly home, in order to ask me how my trip was going, and the conversation quickly turned to the game that I had missed the previous night (only my second of the year, the first one being when I was in Vancouver, being an art-loser with one of the coolest people that I know).
Bert, inventor of the Bert Light and the metric system, tells me about the 1-5, and I know that this means that there’s a good chance that the game could have gotten really brutal and bloody. I ask who the big winner was, and Bert, inventor of the Bert Death Spiral and call waiting, says, “You're talking to him.”
Bert, it turns out, pulled $235, which is amazing and also probably means that somebody paid out. Bert says that there was one guy (who shall go nameless just in case his special lady reads this and is wondering why they have been economizing lately) who lost around $180. $180! The only person who has ever lost more than that was yours truly, but I had been sicker than hell that day.
Riding the Waves: In any poker game, there will be ups and downs in terms of your chip count. When you have big stacks, you can’t let it affect you negatively, which usually means playing too many hands because you feel like you're playing with “free money,” or becoming far too conservative in the hopes of coming out way ahead at the end of the night. When you’ve lost tons of chips, the tendency is to want to play too many hands because you need to get involved in some big pots so that you can catch up in a hurry, but the problem with that system is that most hands that are dealt are unplayable, so now one is getting into battles with cards that will only cost you more money.
What you have to do, then, is continue to play solid poker no matter how many chips are left in front of you. Throw away the cards that you shouldn’t play, and play aggressively the hands that you should.
There will be times when you play solid poker and you still lose most of your money. You didn’t catch cards, or, when you did, somebody caught better cards, or, worst of all, you caught good cards and somebody stayed in the hand with junk and got lucky. When this happens, you’ve got to ride the waves.
There Were Fluctuations: First, my big bro had all the money. He and Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and funnel cakes, were taking huge swings at each other, and my big bro was winning. Then others got involved in the confrontations.
I’ll admit that when the game started, after I had taken an hours-long nap, I was depressed and feeling sorry for myself, but my homies and the poker game made me feel better.
What made me feel best of all was that I won $157.75, my second-highest total ever. Maybe I should spend more of my nights stranded in airports before our poker games.
17 March 2006
The New Spot: This week's game was held at Shawn’s house. How to say this delicately? He’s loaded. We played in his garage, and his garage was nicer than almost every single apartment in which I've ever lived. My Madcity apartment was nicer, but just barely. You know a house is nice when it’s got a designated parking spot for the boat. I almost didn’t want to tarnish his property with my common presence.
Rod and Art: When we arrived, two of Shawn’s homies were already there, getting down on some pizza and sodas. These cats were new to our game, and I didn’t know how they played, so I was a little more serious than usual because it seemed to me that tonight’s game was mostly going to be about business. Most of the poker crew seemed to be in the same sober mood because I think that we all understood that we needed to represent.
That sober mood didn’t last too long. Rod is a cool guy, and right away we fell into calling each other "bro." My new thing is to call people "bro" because it reminds me that we are all connected to each other and our fates are intertwined, but mostly because it makes me feel really cool to go around calling people "bro." I'm a poet, so opportunities to feel cool are few and far between.
I really liked Rod (okay, that didn’t sound too “manly”); he was funny and he was a good sport. What made him especially likeable was that, in no time at all, he dropped al least $150 and he never got any of it back.
Ups to Jesse: Jesse was the big winner pulling in over $125. Second place went to my big bro, which was pretty astonishing. Wait, that came out wrongly; he had paid all night and had re-bought and then re-bought again, then one more time. He was in for $149, and most of that was gone by 11:30 p.m.; he must have had a little less than $20 by then. Then he started catching and playing his cards really well. In the last two hours, he made a comeback and ended up leaving with $105 in profit. If you do the math, that means that in the last two hours he made about $234, which is a +$117 hourly rate, which, like I said, is pretty astonishing.
Fighting Through: That's what I call the ability to deal with the big swings in your stacks that may come your way as the night progresses.
The thing is that when you're paying out, you can get discouraged, angry, or frustrated and lose faith in your game. Listen, if you're bleeding money on a consistent basis, then you probably should lose faith in your game because it probably means that there are flaws in it that require correction.
Part of fighting through is doing a continual systems check, making sure that you're playing the hands as you should. As an example of this, I was down $30 in a relatively short time, but then I got it turned around pretty quickly and was up about $60. I was up most of the night, but I was doing the slow bleed: getting nice starter hands, paying to see the flop, but then catching nothing and mucking my cards. By about 1:00 a.m., I was down to my last few dollars in profit. Sure, there were hands that I could have played a little bit better and a few that I misplayed completely, but, for the most part, my game was sound, at least on this night.
The Total: As I stated previously, I was only up a few dollars as we neared the agreed-upon ending time, but I told the crew that I didn't want to win or lose a little, because that's just sort of embarrassing after battling all night. Pretty soon, I was down about fifteen bucks, got back close to even, and had a little bit of a rush at the end and ended up making $25.75. Not a lot, but not a little, and not a negative number. So now I've improved my record for the year to 8-2.
24 March 2006
Love: Love is tricky. There's much give and take. Progress and setbacks. Happiness and a boatload of pain. Generally, it's a bit of a drag, but it's love, so you're screwed. What are you going to do, not love? There she is and there you are, and there are all the years ahead, so you just get on with it.
But back to the giving and the setbacks and the pain. One of our regular players, as dedicated a gambling addict as you'll find, a dude who had hardly ever missed a game, missed four games in a row. Four. Why did he miss four in a row? Love. Love got him. He's engaged in love-appropriate activities now, and, unaccountably, poker isn't one of them.
Now, we're all very understanding cats. It's love, so he's stuck. It's like doing time. We know that he’ll get out when his sentence is over or when he’s lucky enough to get a one-night parole.
The Classic Six: No, I’m not talking about an apartment in New York City. That dream died when I found out that there’s not much money in poetry and that the most that I could afford was a postcard of New York City, but not one of those 4x6ers, just a 3x5.
There were rumors that our besotted player might be able to make the game, but I didn't put too much stock in them. Once your lady gets you to miss one game, she understands, rightfully, that she can make you miss two, then three, then she's got you, then you will never play poker with your boys ever again, then, next thing you know, you're eaten up by regret and praying every night to die so that the misery can finally stop, just, finally, please stop.
Sorry. I got a little carried away there. We're deep into the game, not expecting this dude to show up, when Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and scented candles, spots headlights in the driveway. There are many players with standing invitations who come in when they can—once a month, every few months, whatever—so I had thought that perhaps one of them was pulling in. Even better, my boy had somehow managed to get away. The first thing out of his mouth was that he could go until 11:30 p.m., so we got him his chips and I said, "Well, we better get this shit going." Can you tell that I trained as a poet?
For the first time in a month, we've got the classic six, the six most hardcore and badass players that ever sit at our game. In honor of this event, I did the fist tap (during which I said, “give it up,” or “give me some of that”) with everybody in the poker crew because I was so fucking happy.
What About the Money?: I was down early, about thirty, and stayed down the whole night. It got so bad, that I had to go to my man bag for a second $100, what I call "reloading," in case the first $100 ran out. I was down to thirty-five from the first buy-in, so I bought my second rack, putting me in for $200. Soon enough, I was down almost an even hundred, but I managed to battle and stay at that level for a long time. Then I went on a really bad run again and was down about $130. I thought, "here we go again," but then I fought back and was down only about $60, which sounds bad, but I thought that I was on the way to losing at least $200. Then, with about a half hour to go, I dropped $45 in about four hands, putting me down $105 when we cashed out.
Gambling Addiction?: Maybe: This is how messed up I am: by the time I got home and into bed it was 3:30 a.m., and I had to be up in only three-and-a-half hours for my Saturday gig (the poker money's got to come from somewhere).
And then I woke up dreaming about poker, where, after the turn, I had an unbeatable hand and was going to get paid, but then my alarm clock woke me up to get my ass to work. I wanted to go back to sleep to see how the hand turned out, but I needed to make up for the ass-kicking that I had taken the night before.
31 March 2006
Big Daddy: As a joke, I've been speaking about myself in the third-person at the table, and when I do, I've been referring to myself as "Big Daddy." As in, "It's Big Daddy's turn to act" or "Big Daddy raises." This is funny because I'm not one of those guys to whom people would ever give a nickname. I don't know why, but it probably has to do with the fact that I'm kind of uptight and, for the most part, just not that cool. Because, let's face it, only very cool and very easygoing people get nicknames.
If I were to have acquired a nickname, it wouldn't be anything like "Big Daddy" because it's usually reserved for the coolest and the most popular of people. I'd probably get something like "Bitch," as in "Bitch, it's your turn to deal.”
The Crustaceans: Oscar, a semi-regular at our game walks in holding a tray and a few bags, and then he announces that he's bought coctel de camarónes, that is, Mexican shrimp cocktail. That was when I said, "Oscar, did I ever say that you're my hero?" you know, to introduce Bette Midler into our game and butch it up a little bit.
Can’t a Brother Get a Cheese Puff?: After a big-ass helping of the shrimp, I decided to set me up a bowl of Cheetos brand cheese puffs. I get a bowl and fill it up with the aforementioned cheese puffs, and set it to my left. I get into a few hands, and when I finally make a reach for the snacks, most of them are gone. What the hell? Jesse, it turns out, had moved in on my undefended cheese puffs.
Shortly, they're gone, and Jesse gets up to get another bowlful. He brings it back and sets it in the same spot. He eats a few, but then he says that he's done and I should move the bowl so that it rests on my right. Again, I get into a few hands, and when I go for the cheese puffs, they're back on my left again, and Jesse's nearly finished them again. What the fuck just happened? I know he didn't reach in front of me to snag my bowl, and I know that he never left his seat, so how'd he get his hands on the cheese puffs? Using my highly developed reasoning skills, I figure that I must have moved the bowl back to my left because its being on my right side would have made it difficult to get my chips into the pot. That was the reason that I'd originally placed the bowl to my left to begin with. Still, they should have been safe since Jesse had announced that he was done.
Cheese puffs, though, as is commonly understood, are irresistible, and who can blame Jesse, really, for nearly killing the last of the cheese puffs. He said that he was done again, but I wasn't having it. I inhaled those remaining cheese puffs.
Dude, March Rules: For the entire month, I made exactly $220.
At tonight’s game, I win $141.50. It's one of my best nights ever. In fact, in March, I had two of the best nights that I have ever had at a poker table. I also had one of my worst when I lost $105. I'm counting these wild fluctuations as a good sign because that means that I'm in the battles now, swinging away with the rest of them. I still do my little nerd math and figure pot odds and outs, but I'll try to attack when I think that I may get a fold, even if I have inferior cards.
I also got calls that I didn't think that I'd get because I knew that the other players involved in the hand had weak hands or missed draws, calls when they didn’t have much with which to call. How'd this happen? Through aggressive betting on previous hands where everybody had folded to me and I had turned over rags, showing the crew that I had been on a straight bluff or draw the whole way. Because I wasn’t being so analytical and straightforward (and obvious) in my play, I had made myself harder to read.
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