The good and the bad

Quick one has I have to get up early and travel to Bally’s to see if I’m playing in the freeroll with the $5K first prize. That’s right; don’t know if I’m in it. Went down Thursday to check out how tourneys are played down there. Entered the $40-10 they had that afternoon. Man, it was straight out of the RPT bar games playbook. About 60 some players, almost every one of them a player of weak aces, any two suited or almost any face card. IOW, land mines galore. Add in a rapidly escalating blind structure and a prize structure heavily weighted towards the front end and it was being in the local bar. Wound up getting 3rd for about $330 by being a tad lucky. By that I mean that my good flops held up against the chasers, a couple of BB hands where I hit trips on the flop became river boats when someone else was playing the weak ace and had me out kicked until then and my one chase, near the end I had nut flush draw with only 3 BBs left and SB coming up so I shoved the draw, came through. Not bad for my first tourney there. I’ll take it.

To get back to the freeroll, while down there I checked the list for the freeroll and found my name missing. I inquired about that and was told it would be checked into and in the middle of the tourney was informed that I was 3 hours short. Not much I could do at the time but as soon as I cashed out of the tourney I went back and asked exactly where I was short as my calculations gave me 2-3 hours over. I was a bit hot. Again I was told that it would be looked into and taken care of and again no info on whether they fixed it or on my hours for each day. Problem for me was that the floor persons I was used to dealing with weren’t there that day. So tomorrow I’m headed down and checking once again. If it hasn’t been fixed I will be in high dudgeon. When I play I play anywhere from 8 hours on up at a time. I rarely leave the table except to whiz and as I have kidneys like an elephant not often for that. I’m generating rake when there unlike many low limit players who play for 15-20 min then go wandering for a half hour or more, rinse and repeat, basically at the table to be said to be sitting there if the bad beat is hit or to get comps without spending too much. They screw me up on this I’ll go back to the Taj, Harrah’s or Borgata where you can find 3-6 and 4-8 games and the pots are bankroll builders on most tables unlike the family games here. The rake is the same at all the venues so why pay if I’m not going to get something for it? Most of the dealers I’ve come to know have said that they would probably just put me on the list rather than fight about 3 hours, especially since they need players. We shall see.

After the tourney I played a bit of 2-4. Was going to try my hand at NL but no seats available and too many big stacks at the tables anyway. Even a full buy in was going to leave me open to some serious bullying. Since I was only planning on playing ring for a few hours I wasn’t too worried about it. In fact I was just planning on killing time as, if I had left after I got knocked out of the tourney I would have hit the rush hour traffic on either side of Philly and I hate that. So I put the tourney winnings aside to use next trip down for some NL and pulled a couple of $20s out of the pocket to play some limit. No limit tables were available either so I decided to try some stud. First time in a casino for that. Ehhh. Had a frikkin net in the form of the guy to my right. You name it, I needed it, he caught it. Usually I folded after 3rd or 4th street but one hand I hit a straight flush draw on the first 4 cards. Any heart or any 6 was good and the 6 of heart would have been fantastic. The guy then proceeded to catch a pair of 6s up, including the heart and told me he hit a heart on 7th street. They called my 2-4 seat soon after that and I was glad to go. The limit game was fun, family game and chatty. One peckerwood couldn’t seem to read the board as he was raising with 2 pair and trips on 4 card flush or 4 card OES boards but I couldn’t catch him to add some bucks.

We did have a few problems a little later. The table was pretty chatty and even the dealer was getting in to it. While a lot of chatter it wasn’t affecting play, slowing it down any, yet one guy had just sat down started bitching about being there to play poker, not chat. Have no idea what the problem was as the game was moving unless it was the subject matter as there was a lot of joking about college days and our partaking of pharmaceuticals. Maybe that threw him off but he stood up with a tirade about the chatter and stormed off. The worst part about it though was that a woman who had been there the whole time I had been, and chatting away with the best of us, all of a sudden decides that the guy is right, the table was for poker, not chatting, if we wanted to chat we should wander off and chat elsewhere. Even said something about the rules dealing with it. Well one guy said that as long as he was playing they couldn’t kick him off the table for talking and I remarked that if she wanted to talk rules she was folding and betting out of turn for the whole time I was there. Not only that but she had been preoccupied trying to watch the ball games earlier. After being told off she kept trying to move to the other limit table but as they had 9 and we only had 7 the floor kept telling her no way. After her 3rd or 4th time with this action I and the other guy decided we had enough and decided to pick up and leave. It was about time for me to head out anyway so what the hell. Hope I don’t run into the bitch for awhile.

OK, time to head out. Going to see if they got me in the tourney tomorrow and raise holy hell if they don’t. Probably stop over to the Borg to see Riggs and maybe make the acquaintance of anyone else that might be there and check on the Summer Open. Thanks for your attention.