Ugarte's Poker Grovel #28, or Back in the SwingsI got a question. If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?
-Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything
So I blew off last week’s game at the Blue Parrot to the derision of my benighted peers. What was I supposed to do? The table is not an attractive one and I spend most Tuesdays after a game trying to get the image out of my brain. I just historically haven’t had options. All I can say is that I have no regrets about where I was last Monday.
This week was a different story, and once again I have to tell the story. I can only hope that people are still checking in after the long hiatus. You would think that with all of this delay Rick’s would at least have been renovated, but no such luck.
I came to this game ready to play. I hadn’t played in over a week—in person or online—so I felt a little rusty, but I also felt like my mind was fresh and I was ready to abandon my mincing tight-weak style. That I would be willing to raise into a bluff when I suspected a bluff but didn’t exactly have the nuts myself. That I would lord over the table like a home game Lederer.
It lasted about two hours. And then like a rubber band released from a finger, my game inflicted minor damage on the people around me before returning to its natural limp state. The tragedy is that I know the hole in my game, have known it for a while, and still find myself spinning my wheels.
Ferrari was in the one seat, of course, since it is natural that the host would take the comfy chair and place it exactly where he wants to sit. This takes the form of a home game “rule” at the Blue Parrot, and you can’t fight City Hall. Rick was in the 2, followed around the table by Joel, Coach, yours truly, Blue Parrot rookie Dawn, Pauly, asphnxma and Sugata. Coach and Dawn left early and popular addition Christian joined the table in between Sugata and Ferrari.
(This recap not enough? Dawn has already recapped the action ... twice, as has Mr. Mxyzptlk. Once Pauly gets his recap up, it will appear here.)
[At this point we pause to scream and curse at the heavens because something in another window caused IE to crash, erasing at least 3 paragraphs of pure blogging gold. They have been replaced with what follows.]
I came late to the game because I stopped by the Parsons school to check out a friend’s thesis project. It is a very cool design for an installation-art museum that will never, ever be built. Pity that. Count it among the things that I would do if I were a multi-billionaire after I got finished cackling with delirious glee about my good fortune.
I arrived to find a game of 2/4 hold ‘em in progress (Texas, natch) and took my seat. The table voted to allow me to play without posting since the blinds hadn’t reached my seat and I wasn’t cheating anyone. (Actually, I think I was cheating myself. I paid the same in blinds as everyone else but saw fewer free hands. Shit. I have to pay attention to this stuff.) My game early was strong because I have decent reads on a few of the players at the table. They don’t work all the time, but they can pay off when they do.
First, Ferrari. He raised preflop when I was in the big blind. I was holding something like Q5o, though I only remember the 5 for sure. I called strictly to protect my blind because I don’t want a reputation as someone who can be pushed out of a pot with a small raise. I think the flop was K-5-3. Ferrari checked, so I knew he didn’t have a K. He insists that he plays tight preflop and laments that nobody respects his raises. I know that he is a pretty tight player, and I have a different theory. Ferrari’s suckout reactions make Hellmuth seem almost reasonable so it is almost worth the preflop investment solely for the opportunity to river him. Here, I suspected that my fives were good, but was willing to check down the hand. When he bet the turn 4 I knew he was bluffing. The river was a 7, I bet, he called and said “You’ve got me” as he flipped over AJ. And so I did. (There is a coda to this story, but it belongs in another section. You will see it there.)
A similar hand followed when we switched to Omaha/8 and I took down a pot with two pair that I knew - knew with metaphysical certitude - would hold up even though it wasn’t even the top two pair on the board. I had a good sense of when people were betting strength and was getting out of hands when I was weak. I even used this early strength to drag a pot against Rick when I got four to a flush and came over the top on him. He probably had the best hand, but a little respect can go a long way.
Dawn had a peculiar habit when betting. It is standard at our game to make change from the pot when betting. It isn’t that we aren’t familiar with the oversize chip rule, it is just easier to make change when the chips are right there in the pot. Despite this, Dawn would always throw out a $5 chip for every $4 bet, leading to a chorus of “take one back” every single time. It has to be because she is a she that the table was in good spirits about this; had it been Swish, someone (perhaps me) would have yelled “Is 4 too difficult a fucking concept for you?” As I read this I detect a latent sexism there, but to the extent it actually civilized us (read: me) it is probably for the best.
I’m still going to yell at Swish, though.
Dawn indicated in her recap that she isn’t coming back. I hope that isn’t the case (she did win $24). And it isn’t only because we are evil.
As Dawn recounts, the news of Christain’s impending arrival was greeted with whoops and hollers. He is a good guy with a habit of losing a lot of money at our game. His reputation cost Ferrari a lot of money last night.
Christian’s raises haven’t been respected in a long time, so Ferrari probably thought he was going to drag a big pot with AT when (1) Christian capped the betting preflop and (2) Ferrari hit top two pair on the flop. The pot got very large, particularly for heads up, and you could have knocked Ferrari over with a feather when Christian turned over Rockets. Christian burned him again later when he rivered Ferrari by having his top pair/top kicker turn into a nut flush on the river, leaving Ferrari with a king flush that he hit on the flop. (This led to a classic Ferrari lamentation, but nobody at the table could think of a single thing Christain did wrong in the hand.) These hands have been revised to comport with reality. Thanks to Ferrari for reliving his own pain to make the corrections. You can read the original slightly erroneous report of the first hand in Pauly’s recap.
I used the strength I had built up early in the night to push Ferrari and Christian out of a pot when I flopped two spades for my Q♠9♠ and three-bet the pot as if I had an A to match the one that came on the flop. Christian claims that he had KK, and the hangdog look on his face makes me think that he was telling the truth. I don’t know what Ferrari raised with in front of me. I suspect he was just not giving Christain his props again. I actually have no idea how Christian finished. He was up a lot, then down a lot, then I think he recovered some. I was too focused on my own swing to take note of the final result.
That final result wasn’t good for two reasons. (1) I let the early success go to my head and started thinking I was Kreskin; and (2) I still haven’t figured out stud, particularly the wild card games.
Reason #1 is best demonstrated by the coda I promised earlier. I ended up heads up with Ferrari holding A7o in the SB. The flop had a K and two ♦, none of which helped me. Ferrari bet, but I think there is a tell in his betting style. I can’t define it (and Ferrari is sure to accuse me of trying to put him on tilt) but I feel like I can sense when he is betting with a hand or betting because he senses weakness. In any event, I called. And I called on the turn. (A brick.) And I called on the river. (A ♦, but probably a brick all the same.) By now you should realize what I did wrong. I knew that Ferrari’s hand was weak. I even knew that he knew that I knew his hand was weak. I still don’t know why I didn’t raise on the turn. I am sure he would have tossed his cards away instead of hanging around to take the pot with pocket 2s.
As for Reason #2, I still haven’t figured out stud drawing odds, much less pot odds. Wild card games completely fuck me up because even my modest odds knowledge goes completely out the window. My relationship to stud is much like Kit’s fascination with the high hard ones: I can’t hit ‘em, but I can’t lay off ‘em. I blew through a LOT of money watching people turn over hands that I should have seen from a mile away, but didn’t. I also got married to good starting hands that never amounted to much. I really have to stay away from stud. It has been nothing but bad news for me.
I lost money for one more reason. On three hands in the space of about 6 hands, Joel misread his hand and had flushes that he didn’t even see. I was caught in one of those where I read Joel perfectly. I was winning when his mouth spoke, but lost when the cards spoke. Them’s the rules, and them’s the breaks.
All told, I parlayed my early success (a high water mark of ~+$130) into a loss of $23.50. Meanwhile, sitting to my left, Pauly staged an impressive comeback from an early hole to finish up $180. Pauly will have the full tote board, but I know for sure that Ferrari had another long night.
I was surprised to see when I left the game that the weather was perfect. It is typical of my poker experience that the weather is a metaphor for my performance. It is just that sort of thing that makes me occassionally question my committed athiesm.
But when I emerged from the subway, the Brooklyn Museum was shrouded in fog.
Around the Net
The latest addition to the blogroll is Stay Free!, a fantastic magazine about, well a lot of things, but particularly consumer culture. It is skeptical and earnest but doesn’t resort to screeching. It also still manages to be funny, which can be hard when you care about something. Go to the website, of course, but subscribe to the print version. Nobody likes a freeloader.
If you are going to just stick to the web, check out the Stay Free! project Illegal Art, an exhibition and commentary on the attempts of trademark/copyright holders to immunize themselves from comment or parody. The legal disclaimer alone is worth the visit, but the exhibit itself is great. (If you want to see more by the author of the disclaimer, check out The Van Gogh-Goghs.)
I apologize to the other poker bloggers out there. I haven’t really been keeping up with my reading, so I have nothing to link to.
LATE BREAKING AMENDMENTS
Sean from Anisotropy is back. I said that I would return him to the blogroll when he resurfaced, and so I shall. But it appears that the Grovel has disappeared from his blogroll ...
Also, Stephen Elliot has distributed a new poker report to his subscribers, so the new report of a tournament at Lucky Chances should be posted to the public soon. (Subscribe to the mailing list at pokerreport-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.)
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