Poker Weekend

I took all of last week off work and had time to play more poker than I have been of late. The most interesting bit, poker-wise, was Friday when I went with my brother to the Hard Rock Casino in Tampa. They recently began offering Vegas-style table games and my brother wanted to play some blackjack. I, of course, went straight to the poker room. After maybe a ten minute wait they seated a new table of $1/$2 NL. State law allows a maximum buy-in of $100.

I got a couple decent starters near the beginning and took down some small pots. Then came a long dry spell. Fold, fold, fold, fold...

The guys at this table didn't seem quite the mix of idiots and okay players as I saw on the casino cruise. I suppose the $100 buy-in might have something to do with that. One guy was seriously overbetting at the beginning. It may have just been nerves. He calmed down after a bit and his raises were more in line with what I consider normal play. There was only one guy of the starters who seemed out of his depth. He was playing way too many hands and staying in with very mediocre holdings. Somehow he managed to win just enough to stay afloat.

My stack, on the other hand, just kept dwindling. If I tried to play a speculative hand cheap, somebody would almost always come over the top big. If I saw a flop, I'd miss it by a mile.

Then I had the misfortune of catching a hand. I get KK in the SB. Four limpers ahead of me. I'd like one or two callers on this one, so I made it 5BB to go. The BB calls, then all of the limpers call. I couldn't believe it. We haven't even had the flop yet and this is by far the biggest pot of the day.

The flop comes Q-high with two spades. There's $60 in the pot already, so I bet $40. The BB pushes all-in. It folds around back to me. I'm looking at the stack of chips the guy has pushed in. The dealer looks at me and says, "He's all-in." It was like he expected me to either fold or push all my chips in too. I finally had to ask him, "How much is there?" Turns out to be a $4 raise. Gee, let me think about this. $144 in the pot and it's going to cost me $4 to call? I don't know, that's a toughie. (I don't mean to go on about this, but the dealer's actions at this point just struck me as odd.)

Of course, I make the call. The BB turns over Q9 of spades. Okay, I get the push on the flop. He's got top pair and a flush draw. No problem. But how the hell do you call a 5BB pre-flop raise with a crap hand like Q9s? This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. Naturally, he rivers a spade.

I got KK one other time and also managed to lose a good chunk of my stack with that one.

After the first fifteen minutes of play I don't think I won a sizable pot the whole day. I know none of them were big enough that I felt I needed to tip the dealer.

In other poker activity, I played one of the new FullTilt "matrix" tournaments. I don't know if the whole concept is flawed or if it's just the way they've implemented it, but I thought it sucked. You play four tournaments simultaneously against the same opponents. Seating on each table is different, but it's the same players on all four tables.

They split the prize money so half goes to normal payouts on each of the four tables and half goes into the matrix pot that's awarded according to points. You get one point for each person eliminated before you on each table and two points for each player you send to the rails. The quicker among you may have realized this really means you get three points for each player you send to the rails, two for knocking the player out and one because you moved up a spot from the elimination.

I didn't care for it at all. It's too difficult playing four tournaments that are all in exactly the same phase at the same time. There are lots of delays due to players being busy on other tables. I think they're awarding too many points for eliminations. From the difficulty in getting one of these started, I gather there are a lot of other players who share my opinion.

I played Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney on Saturday. Not that I made much of an impact. I never got anything going and faded out somewhere in the middle of the field.

Sometime over the weekend I played in a normal SnG. I recall knocking someone out early when I slowplayed aces and caught a huge flop. Then I slowly redistributed the chips until I was back to my starting stack. I did that a couple times. I remember being on the good side of a couple horrible suckouts. In one of those I ran KQ into AA, catching one Q on the flop and rivering a third. I got to heads up with a 5-to-1 chip lead. The other guy was clearly not used to playing heads up. In these situations I try to keep telling myself, "Be patient." I did okay in that regard this time. I had the guy on the ropes at least three times. Each time he sucked out. Given that I wouldn't have been heads up if not for a couple sick suckouts, I suppose I can't complain too much. It's still very disappointing not being able to seal the deal when you've had the guy down to just a couple big blinds.

I played some cheap NL on The Quest, but had a run of just horrible cards. Considering how bad the cards were, I was probably lucky to only drop a bit over one buy-in.

Last night "60 Minutes" did a segment on the cheating scandals at Absolute and UltimateBet. Let me sum it up for you. Online poker is illegal (or so they allege). It's unregulated. It's virtually impossible to stop. Massive cheating has occurred. Nobody is serious about going after the cheaters. The end.

If you've spent more than ten minutes reading online about these scandals, you already know more than "60 Minutes" revealed in their story. I was rather disappointed that they simply said, "Online poker is illegal," instead of taking a few more seconds to note that this is simply the position of the justice department and not a matter of settled law. A fine point, perhaps, but now there are millions of people who believe online poker is absolutely illegal and all those playing online from the US are criminals. Of course, that aspect is probably second to the implanted notion that cheating is rampant and online poker is not to be trusted. This story could go further toward killing online poker than the UIGEA.