I Paid $200 For This Blog Post (part 1)

Now that I'm home and can get back to some serious blogging, I want to tell the full version of what happened on the night of "Blogger's Poker" last week.  But despite my best intentions, I will have to do this in two parts because what I've already written is long enough and I believe what I have left to cover from this day is probably of equal size to this post.  I should warn you that in the two lengthy posts, I will cover a variety of incidents that took place on one day--all somehow (or somewhat) related to poker.  Also I will be discussing two women with large bosoms.  I just want to mention that up front (so-to-speak) since no one would come to my blog expecting a discussion of breasts.  So those of you who would never be caught dead reading a blog post discussing this robust topic have been cautioned.

Anyway folks, here I am finally getting a chance to blog the full details of the night we played “Blogger’s Poker” about a week back.  Who’s we?  Well, there was grrouchie  and Poker Grump and of course yours truly.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, a brand new blogger, Stump,was also in the poker room that night, but he apparently was too upset over a bad beat to introduce himself to us.  I can relate to that.  He had never met any of us before but he recognized Grump from his twitter pic.  He probably overheard us too (I’m sure we were loud) and could have easily figured out who we were from that.  He doesn’t really fit into this story but he will fit in a story to be told some time in the near future, but I am mentioning him because he’s a nice guy and why not give him a little plug?  Especially since he admitted (confessed is more like it) to reading my blog for some time now, as well as those of grrouchie and Grump and probably most of the other blogs to your right on the blog roll.

And of course, also at the table was the truly delightful Prudence, who doesn’t blog about poker (yet) but has been responsible for quite a few of my most popular and outrageous blog posts with her uninhibited and extremely witty table talk.  Needless to say, she was the best-looking (and best smelling) character in this little tale, and which is pretty much the leading contender for “understatement of the year.”

For those trying to keep up with all this at home, many of these anecdotes I am about to reveal have been covered previously, but what I present now will be the honest truth.  My own first “quick and dirty” take on the evening, can be found here. Poker Grump told his version of the night’s events here. Grrouchie had two posts about this night, which can be found here and here.

Before having dinner on this Sunday, and thus before the poker game that will take up the bulk of the post, I played in another poker room in Vegas.  I have played in this room before but in keeping with my own mysterious ways, I will not identify the room now, nor will I even give it a phony name.  The reason for this will be explained shortly.

At this room I saw a very attractive female dealer that I don’t remember seeing before, which I found surprising because I am no stranger to this room and I find it hard to believe a woman this attention-getting would escape my notice.  But she didn’t seem like she was new to the room.  How was it I could not have noticed this lady before?  I don’t know.  Perhaps she never worked on the days I come into this room, though it was not unusual for me to be there on this particular day of the week.

You see in addition to her just being generally attractive, what I couldn’t help noticing about her was her chest.  It was impressive, to say the least.  She had the largest breasts of any poker dealer I can remember seeing, with the possible exception of the woman I described here as “a very heavy set female poker dealer” in the third paragraph of the post (and not my buddies at BSC).  But that woman was, as I said, heavy….she was large in every sense.  The poker dealer I am now talking about had a very nice figure, she could have been a model.  Actually, she could have been a Playboy model, at least on the basis of how she looked with her clothes on.

And her clothes are really the reason I’m even mentioning her.  For some reason, in this room on this day, the dealers were allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to not wear their regular, boring, dealing uniforms.  They were allowed to wear “Western” wear.  So they had jeans and cowboy type shirts, perhaps cowboy boots but I didn’t notice.  But instead of wearing a “western” shirt, said dealer had just a white, long-sleeved shirt that was open to the waist.

Ok, it wasn’t quite as shocking as that makes it sound.  She was wearing something underneath the white shirt (in addition to a bra, I’m mean).  It was a pink top, that appeared to be strapless,but that was both extremely tight and extremely low cut.  And I do mean extreme in both cases. I don’t recall ever seeing a cleavage-revealing poker dealer before, I mean while dealing.  And this was a rather abundant amount of cleavage being revealed, to be sure.  It was quite attention getting, to say the least.  And for those who have an interest in this type of thing, I would say there was enough cleavage exposed to make me fairly certain that her assets were factory-installed, not after market.  Since this was Vegas, I would give 4-1 odds that she her chest was entirely organic.

This was definitely a dealer I would love to be facing pitching me cards, you can be sure of that.  But my luck was bad both in poker and in dealers.  The lady never made it to my table to deal.  Oh well, I was able to enjoy the view from afar.  And it would have been a bit of a test of my powers of concentration (more on that topic to come) to be able to concentrate the poker when facing those ta-ta’s in all (well, most) of their glory.

Oh, and a quick story about her...before sitting down at a table, she somehow noticed that the zipper on her jeans was undone.  She somehow blamed the dealer at the next table (another attractive female, tho not as provocatively dressed) for not noticing this.  “Thanks for telling me my zipper was open!”  The dealer she was speaking to just shrugged, but a middle aged woman at the table, probably a regular who knows the busty dealer, said, “What’s the big deal?  What’s gonna fall out?” Busty dealer didn’t seem to appreciate that comment but said nothing.  Middle-aged woman added, “Unless there’s something about you we don’t know.”

Now the reason I don’t want to say anything at all about where this was is this.  As I have explained in several posts, most recently here (and implied in many others), the poker community is a very small world and the Vegas poker community even more so.  I keep running into characters I’ve blogged about and who I have no idea are reading my blog.  I don’t want to make it too obvious who this lovely lady dealer is.  I’ve probably already said too much.

I know I have said nothing to insult her, quite the contrary.  And I’m sure this lady knows she has large breasts.  And I also realize that she chose that outfit that morning knowing she would be showing anyone who got in front of her (or to the side of her, for that matter) that she is the opposite of flat-chested.  But all that said, she might be embarrassed; she might not appreciate finding out that some blogger was blogging about how big her tits are. 

So why am I doing exactly that, you ask?  If you are asking that, I have to assume it is a rhetorical question.  How could I not?

Which brings us to the blogger’s poker game.  Prudence was already there when I arrived, and I had to kill some time at another table before being allowed to move to Prudence’s table where I was able to sit directly to her left, because the very nice gentleman who was sitting there voluntarily moved over one seat so I could “sit with my friend.”  Grrouchie showed up then and took my seat at the table I was leaving but soon was able to move across from me at our table.  Grump was last to show up, introducing himself to me and taking a seat one away from my left, but moved directly next to me soon thereafter.

Now I have to confess something about myself as a poker player.  I am too easily distracted.  When I play with friends and am talking and having a good time, I sometimes don’t notice everything that is going on poker wise that I need to keep track of in order to be a winning player.  So on this nite, what with Prudence and grrouchie and Poker Grump--all of us having a great time chatting, I was somewhat distracted. Plus I was also chatting with many of the dealers about the NBA playoffs.  So, I wasn’t paying as much attention to as I needed to get a read on the other players.  Even grrouchie.  Especially grrouchie. I’ve played with him before and know he has a rather wide range for open-raising and starting hands.  The phrase “any two cards” comes to mind.  But I should have really noticed from the get-go exactly how hot he was this nite and how he was taking down pot after pot.

Grrouchie in this post described the hand where he took all of Prudence’s money with set of 8’s.  Even though I was in that hand with AJ and thus had flopped top pair/top kicker, I soon forgot the sordid details.  I got out cheaply when Prudence either bet or shoved, knowing for sure that my TPTK was no good.  But grrouchie beat her top two with his set.  She was unhappy to be sure, but that’s poker, right?  Prudence and grrouchie had met before and she often asked me if he was going to be joining us on nights when he wasn’t there.  And she does read his blog.  So I don’t think this unfortunate (for Prudence) hand changed her opinion of him—yet. 

This led to the hand from where I get the title of this blog post.    In the Big Blind I was dealt 6-4 offsuit, not a hand I would normally play.  There were a bunch of limpers, including grrouchie (he says he was the BB but I don’t think so.  With his wide range, he would have called with all those limpers),  The flop was 8-4-4 and from that moment on, I lost all reason and just assumed that trip 4’s were gonna win the pot.

I bet out and grrouchie raised me.  That should have worried me but I was unconcerned.  At this point Prudence started acting uncomfortable which also should have concerned me, but I just called, sure this pot was going to be mine.

I checked the turn, whatever the heck it was, and grrouchie put out a hefty bet.  I started wondering if maybe I was beat, but I didn’t wonder nearly hard enough.  Meanwhile, Prudence started squirming in her chair and basically telling me to look at the cards and remember what he had played when he stacked her.  Frankly, I had been having too much fun up to that point to remember.  But she was making it pretty clear that she thought I should fold.

Yes, this is pretty much in violation of the rules of etiquette in poker; one player to a hand.  She was getting to the line she shouldn’t have crossed, perhaps touching that line, and maybe about to fall over that line, but maybe not quite.  It was close.  She might have been warned to shut up except for two things.  One was that she was well known to the dealer, and two was that grrouchie was agreeing with her.

Yeah, he was actually warning me that if I called he was going to go all in on the river and that I should know that and I should probably lay down the hand.  I mean if he had said something about Prudence trying to get me to fold, it could have been issue and the dealer would have had to have warned her, but instead, he was trying to help me out, just like she was.

I have no idea why I didn’t pay attention to the warning from two of my friends.  I have no idea where my head was at this moment.  I can’t tell you what I was thinking.  I guess I wasn’t thinking.  I just couldn’t let go of the hand, and couldn’t turn my brain on at that moment to get it into my head that I was gonna lose.  I guess it was one of the all time most massive brain farts I ever had.  I called.

Prudence nearly died.  I swear the only way she could have made it more obvious that she was sure I was beat and that I should have laid down the hand was to have jumped up on the poker table, put on a grass skirt and danced the hula. 

The river card didn’t help me and grrouchie didn’t need any help so I checked and he shoved.  I had already committed in my mind to call it (I think I was pot committed anyway) but for a fleeting second there I had this thought, I swear I did:  If I lose this pot I’ll at least have a $200 blog post out of it!  So I called and he showed 8-4 for a flopped boat and my lousy trip 4’s weren’t worth a damn thing.  Next thing I know grrouchie is stacking my chips, adding them to his burgeoning massive collection and I was reaching into my pocket for two fresh hundred dollar bills to replace the approximately $200 I had just lost to my fellow blogger. 

Despite all the warnings, despite Prudence practically grabbing me and shaking me to get me to quit the hand, I had totally blown it.  At that point, grrouchie had now stacked Prudence and then me, not to mention probably a few others at the table.  He could do no wrong, he was hitting hands like there was no tomorrow.  Grrouchie is not a small fellow but by the end of the night I actually could no longer see him, he was completely hidden by all the chips he had won.

Meanwhile, worse than losing the money was the embarrassment over how badly I had played the hand.  I swear, it was like I had never played poker before in my life.  It was humiliating.  It was especially bad because it was just a bunch of strangers I had humiliated myself in front of, it was my friends.  And one of them has a blog that he will be able to use to tell the world, and all of my blog readers and friends, about what a donkey I am.  That’s what I was thinking.  Thankfully, he was fairly kind in his description of this hand.  Thankfully too, I’m pretty sure this hand occurred before Poker Grump arrived to witness it.

But what the hell. I’ve just outed myself, haven’t I?  Oh why not?  I do this blog to tell funny stories that are related to poker, or tangentially related to poker, so I might as well get some mileage out of coming clean and admitting that, for this hand, I was pretty much the worst poker player in the history of mankind.  As I said earlier, I paid $200 for this blog post, I damn well better post it and be as brutally honest as I possibly can, to come as close as possible to getting my moneys worth out of it.

So that was my $200 poker story.  You tell me.  Was it worth it?

Anyway, that hand took the wind out of my sails to say the least.  Oh, I was still having a great time talking to Prudence and grrouchie and meeting Grump and talking to him.  But whenever there was a quiet moment and the focus returned to the poker, all I could do was sit there like a fool and rehash what had happened and feel terrible about it.  To be clear, I was not upset with grrouchie, he did everything he could to save me.  I was just embarrassed about how badly I played the hand.  I mean, you play and play and think you’re getting better at this silly game, then you totally butcher a hand like that and realize you don’t know shit.

For a while there, I was so down and out that I needed Poker Grump to remind me of one the most basic rules of poker….protect your hand.  Yeah, I was actually so out of it that I was looking at my cards with only one hand, thinking that my chip stack (which, as I said, I replenished after losing with the trips) would keep anyone from seeing my cards.  Grump was kind enough to correct me and point out that I was flashing my cards to him.  Yikes, what an amateur move, as if my bad playing wasn’t bad enough.  And ironic too, as a post called “Protect Your Hand”, albeit using the term in a different sense, is the most popular post on this blog and the reason for that is that Grump himself gave a link directly to it on his ridiculously popular blog.

OK, folks, I'm gonna end part 1 right here.  If you're feeling sorry for me (as opposed to just laughing at me), rest assured the night got better, poker wise.

Part 2 can be found here