Las Vegas for five days. Forty-one hours of poker. Free food. Freeway driving at two in the morning. Watching Cloutier play in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit at the World Series of Poker and win it all. What did he win? $600,000. The whole experience was great, and the homies and I are going back in about three weeks. For now, though: 

13 June 2005, the First Day:

You know how you make travel plans and those plans always begin with getting an “early start?” Has that ever really worked out? I told myself that I’d pack and Mapquest and plan by Sunday evening and then be on the road by 7:30 Monday morning. “Sunday evening” became 1:00 a.m. and 7:30 became 9:13, so that’s already ninety minutes that I’ve lost. I tell myself that I’ll make up time on the road. I’m one of those people who hates making stops and who actually times them for efficiency, but I got stuck waiting in line at the Tehachapi AM-PM and lost ten minutes there. And then there was Barstow, where the 58 connects to the 15. Road work? One lane all the way through Barstow? It took me over an hour to go a few miles, taking away sixty minutes of poker action. Screw Barstow, man, screw the hell out of it.

I got into a game at 6:00 p.m., and right away ran into some cheaters, a husband and wife team. This was their scam: they both showed up with a rack of blue (one-hundred one-dollar chips), sat next to each other across from the dealer, gave most of their racks away in about a half hour, so that we’d all think that they were dead money and bet into them, then all of a sudden started winning. They were sitting right next to each other and instead of lifting up their cards from a corner, official poker-style, they’d lift them off the table and turn them over pretty far so that they could see each other’s cards. I was two positions to the left of the dealer, and there was this cool guy from Africa with a great accent sitting to my right. After about ninety minutes, both cheaters were up pretty huge, which is never a pattern you see. Players who lose a lot early will tend to lose all night, even if they do slow their losing down. Big losers tend to be first-time players, and they play too many hands because they don’t yet have an understanding of what a really good hand looks like (it’s not a pair of 4s), or they’re hoping to catch a card to go with their J-5. The learning curve can take four or five hours, or a few days, but there’s no way it happens in an hour and especially not for two people, and especially not to the point that they both start killing. Never happens.

So, their wild fluctuation in chips made me nervous, and Guy From Africa With a Great Accent was a little suspicious too. We started talking about how there might be something going on. Finally, after the dealer told them to protect their cards, that is look at them in a way that doesn’t allow anybody else to get a peek, we knew that something was up, as they say . Our suspicions thus confirmed, Guy From Africa With a Great Accent says to the dealer, “They’re together, and they’re looking at each other’s cards.” Right away, the woman, who offers no protestations of innocence, offers to switch places with Guy From Africa With a Great Accent. (BTW, don’t think that I’m being a jerk because I didn’t get this guy’s name; I played for a little over forty-one hours, and I never heard one name being exchanged.). They switch, but it’s pretty clear to me that they’re still cheating. She’s now acting two plays ahead of him, and they keep looking at each other before either takes an action. Then I notice that whenever it’s the wife’s turn to act, the husband has a stack of chips in his hand that he either does or does not tap, sending her some kind of message. At this point, I decide to not hide my suspicions, and I look directly from him to her, back and forth, when it’s her turn to act. I also make sure that he sees that I’m looking at the chips in his hand. If they weren’t cheating, he would have kept playing with his chips, but he stopped. Then, after a few hours, they were both broke. Yeah, there was some nefarious stuff going on, but Guy From Africa With a Great Accent and I put them in check.

 How did I do? Not too badly, considering the drive and fending off the poker chicanery. I won a few hands, but not enough. My two best hands were when I caught a 4 on the river to make a straight to the 5, splitting a $95 pot with the guy to my right, who had made the same sraight on the turn. He acted like a jerk about the fact that I caught at the end, but I explained to him that it only cost me $3 to try to win a $92 pot, a 30.67-to-1 payoff, when the odds of my catching a 4 were one in 11.5, which meant that the pot odds were way in my favor, and I had to try to catch a four. He knew his poker, so he seemed to agree, but there's no way to feel okay about somebody taking $47.50 from you.

 Later, I drew American Airlines, bet it up the whole way, and caught an “A” on fifth to make a set that beat out top two pair on the flop. That was cool.

Day One Total: I played for a total of six hours and nineteen minutes and lost seven dollars.