Seattle Has Lucky Internets, and GAMBOOOOL!
While I was in Seattle we got a lot accomplished for DeucesCracked, the fruits of which you’ll be able to see over the next 9 weeks or so. I also was able to play a fair bit of cards on the side, too, and ended up doing quite well. On Tuesday we all got up super early to try and get a lot done, but I ended up just playing a little session of my own in the morning before any real “work” happened. I got lucky in a few pots and played a few others quite well, and ended up booking a 20k win before noon (in only 250 hands!), which given my normal sleep schedule is completely ridiculous. It also happened to be my biggest winning day thus far, which is a nice milestone. I hope to surpass it soon of course, but that’ll happen when it will. I won some more money while filming videos that day, but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep the details about that a secret for the time being since the series 3 schedule hasn’t been released yet.
However, the day was not all luck. I ran pretty bad at flipping with Jonas (riverboatking) during lunch, which included the following formats, primarily because we forgot to bring a deck of cards:
- Flipping coasters off the lip of the table and trying to catch them with the same hand before they hit the table (a fun game to play at a restaurant before your food gets to you, even if you aren’t gambling on it)
- Picking a name out of the phone book (we had some phone books lying around because Jonas tried to rip one in half, but failed) and then each picking a digit 0-9, and if our number was the second to last number in the phone number of the first person with that name, the person who picked it won. Once we realized that it was taking too long to hit one with that method, we decided to just go down the list from the first name until one of them hit one of our numbers. I guess choosing odd and even would have worked too, but its nice to have just one number to root for.
I also learned to play Gin and lost some more doing that, but quit before I got too stuck because it was clearly rigged against me. In any case, the big win was booked.
Wednesday was a relatively slow day, although it was also my birthday. Big number 2-4. I bought myself an iPhone as a little present to myself, and so far it has proved to be as cool as advertised. Its amazing the number of things that you can do with it that you probably wouldn’t even have thought of until you were capable of doing them. Plus the chicks dig it. Wednesday evening we discovered a juicy 500/1000 HORSE game running on Full Tilt, and Jonas and I split the action and put Joe Tall, our resident HORSE master, in the game. He ran pretty bad but still booked a win for us, and had a great time doing it too from what I gather. I had a hell of a lot of fun sweating it, thats for sure. That night we went out for drinks and actually brought the cards with us, so flipping was afoot!
The primary mechanism for flipping was 7 card stud: Each flipper would be dealt 7 cards down, and then the deck would be cut and placed in the plastic box (mostly for dramatic effect, as you’ll see later). The player to the left of the dealer would turn over one card, and then the next player would have to beat it, turning cards over until he could do so. It would continue around the table, each player flipping cards one by one until he was able to beat the previous hand, and once all cards were up (or at least all cards except the remaining cards of the player with the best hand) the box would be flipped to reveal the “spit” card, which indicated that any cards of its rank were wild. The player with the best hand after all that won the round, and $100 from each other player. Naturally we began to implement more rules and stipulations to make things more interesting, so the full version of the betting was as follows: The winner would receive $100 from each other player, and sometimes some bonuses. If any player was able to make a natural full house or better (using no wild cards), each other player owed him $100. If one of the losers had a wild card but was still unable to beat the winner (regardless of whether the winner used a wild or not) that player had to pay an extra $100 to the winner. The worst hand of all had to pay an extra $100 to the winner, and if anybody was unable to make a pair or better, even with wild cards, then they too had to pay an extra $100. So the biggest single-hand wins were on the order of $800-$1000, and the worst losses were $400. Over the course of a few hours flipping in this rather exciting method, I lost a little bit, DeathDonkey lost a lot, and Jonas won a shit-ton.
Thursday I played another short session of actual poker and booked a nice 15k win in 500 hands. In the evening I went to the Mariners game with Joe, my lady friend whose house I was staying at, and some friends of hers. It was pretty cold and I was woefully underprepared, but fortunately there wasn’t too much wind and they had some pretty good hot chocolate. The game ended up being quite exciting (ended up as an 8-7 loss for the home team), but none of us were particularly big fans of either the Mariners or the Orioles, so it was mostly enjoyable due to the general “take-me-out-to-the-ballpark” experience. That, and the ridiculous things they put on the big screen between innings and after home runs. I lost $20 to Joe during the such-and-such hydroboat race, which is completely rigged (and not in the joking way. At Jaguars games the same thing happens on-screen during the game, but its the mascot and a giant red checkmark and some other character racing shopping carts around an animated Winn-Dixie.) In any case, the red one had won 4 games, the green one had won 6, and the white one hadn’t won any yet, so I picked the white one. He was due! Joe picked red and obviously he won it in a photo finish.
On Friday Jonas and I got back into it with the flipping, since I wanted to get unstuck from the nights before. At lunch we each drafted 3 letters of the alphabet (I took A D and M, he had JST or some nonsense) and asked the waiter what his names were. His first and last weren’t in our range, but I nailed the middle name. The same wager was carried on to just about any other person’s name who we could use impartially, including the other dudes at the table’s wives’ middle names. Then we pulled out all the bills we had in our wallets and played “bill poker” which is where you make a poker hand out of the digits in the serial number (for instance, 0’s full of 8’s). We found that game pretty enjoyable too, so once all the bills in our wallets and a few others were exhausted, we made change for a $100 and got another 4 or 5 games out of it. After lunch but before heading to the airport, we ran more of those stud flips and also played War for $100 a turn, $500 a war. Also, if you won by a single notch (9 beating 8, A beating K) you won double.
Once we got to the airport, we guessed odd or even on all available numbers on our boarding passes. Once we got to the gate, we had time to squeeze in a few more hands of stud flips, now criss-crossed with a $500 scoop bonus. As people began to board my plane, I was stuck a little still so we ran some razz flips which I crushed because I’m awesome at razz, and just as the line was almost all the way onto the plane I let Jonas flip an actual coin to try and get unstuck the $1000 he owed me, but he lost and immediately picked it up to double or nothing, and of course he won that time. I managed to make it onto the plane on time.
Postscript: I played a short session after getting home Friday night and played the following 2 notable hands (out of 69 total hands):
Full Tilt Poker Game #6178517429: Table Rock Port (6 max) – $25/$50 – No Limit Hold’em – 23:27:43 ET – 2008/04/25
Seat 1: John Juanda ($5,570)
Seat 2: DJ Sensei ($5,000)
Seat 3: ericberen ($5,000)
Seat 4: QB_RonMexico ($7,293)
Seat 5: Guns of Brixton ($1,125)
Seat 6: iRockhoes ($5,150)
Guns of Brixton posts the small blind of $25
iRockhoes posts the big blind of $50
The button is in seat #4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to DJ Sensei [Ah As]
John Juanda raises to $150
DJ Sensei raises to $525
QB_RonMexico folds
Guns of Brixton folds
iRockhoes folds
John Juanda raises to $5,570, and is all in
DJ Sensei calls $4,475, and is all in
John Juanda shows [Ac Kc]
DJ Sensei shows [Ah As]
Uncalled bet of $570 returned to John Juanda
*** FLOP *** [Kh 5c 4c]
*** TURN *** [Kh 5c 4c] [4h]
*** RIVER *** [Kh 5c 4c 4h] [Qc]
John Juanda shows a flush, Ace high
DJ Sensei shows two pair, Aces and Fours
John Juanda wins the pot ($10,072) with a flush, Ace high
Full Tilt Poker Game #6179120113: Table Rock Port (6 max) – $25/$50 – No Limit Hold’em – 0:21:00 ET – 2008/04/26
Seat 2: DJ Sensei ($6,998)
Seat 3: jdb401k ($2,125)
Seat 4: INTERNET POKERS ($5,000)
Seat 5: Eric Liu ($5,075)
Seat 6: buck99 ($5,175)
jdb401k posts the small blind of $25
INTERNET POKERS posts the big blind of $50
The button is in seat #2
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to DJ Sensei [Kc 8c]
Eric Liu folds
buck99 raises to $175
DJ Sensei raises to $600
jdb401k folds
INTERNET POKERS adds $50
INTERNET POKERS folds
buck99 calls $425
*** FLOP *** [Kd 8s 6c]
buck99 checks
DJ Sensei bets $810
buck99 calls $810
*** TURN *** [Kd 8s 6c] [7d]
buck99 checks
DJ Sensei has 15 seconds left to act
DJ Sensei bets $1,350
buck99 raises to $3,765, and is all in
DJ Sensei calls $2,415
buck99 shows [8h 8d]
DJ Sensei shows [Kc 8c]
*** RIVER *** [Kd 8s 6c 7d] [3d]
buck99 shows three of a kind, Eights
DJ Sensei shows two pair, Kings and Eights
buck99 wins the pot ($10,422) with three of a kind, Eights
Maybe I should have stayed in Seattle where the internet is lucky :p
Sometimes there's a man... and I'm talking about the Dude, here. Sometimes there's a man who, well, he's the man for his time and place.