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07.10.06

Field Journal 2: Just Suck, No Out

posted by Absinthe | 9:43 PM

I’ll be at the Rio sometime today.
- Pauly

You could offer me the chief judgeship in the Gowen-Mercier Heads-Up Blowjob Championships and unless there was some kind of airconditioned subterranean tunnel between here and there I’d have to take a pass.
- me

It’s okay, I know you like to try to be funny.
- Mrs. me, as I related this attempted waggery to Dan in as apologetic a fashion as possible

Somewhere along the line I stopped taking notes, presumably because my steel-trap mind couldn’t possibly collapse under the weight of a few hundred hands of low-limit grindery, a slow but steady stream of judiciously limed Coronas and a few cubic kilometers’ worth of secondhand smoke. Let me be the first to admit I was wrong.

Actually, let me be the last to admit I was wrong, as well. Anyone else says I’m wrong, fuck you with a sponge cake.

Yeah. Sponge cake.¹

I sat in the 4/8 game for a little while on Wednesday afternoon. Bled a few chips, played some uninteresting hands, failed to get away from an overpair against an opponent who might as well have been wearing a shirt that said HI I FLOPPED TRIPS instead of COVER YOUR NUTS or whatever the fuck. When they opened up a 6/12 table I may have actually thrown a rack of chips a good five yards in my haste to lock up a seat. Played some more uninteresting hands, treaded water, went up to the room to get ready for dinner.

Spent $300 on a 15-course dinner. Marked it down on the daily ledger. Wept openly. Tasty, though.

After dinner I went back to the 6/12 game and found about half the players were still there. The remaining seats had not been filled by poker’s finest. I lost a couple of pots early on (the good way), chipped up a bit, and was basically treading water when Dan arrived. I’d taken one look at his 2/5NL table and advised him to come over to the fishier waters.

The players in the game ranged from the remotely competent to the hysterically bad. The guy in the one seat was the ultimate calling station, and in the worst way. He check-called the river with a nut straight and a nut flush. I was in the three and spent most of the night making value bets against him any time I could beat a random hand. One time he called from the small blind when nobody else had come in, I sighed and checked, the dealer put out the flop and he asked if he could take his bet back. “Too late now,” I said, and bet the pair of tens that I’d hit. He called me down with jack high. You know, just in case it was good.

We were still playing when it got down to 5-handed, and I took quite a few bets off of mister jack-high until the older fellow from Toronto in the nine seat decided to call it a night. There was a brief lull while the four of us who remained considered our options. Then the one seat started racking up his remaining chips, and the rest of us – with what an impartial observer would have to judge an act of incredible sympathetic comic timing – simultaneously swept our chips off the table and made for the cashier’s cage. The game had left, and it was time for bed.

1. SPONGE CAKE, people. Do I have to draw you a goddamn picture? [back]

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