Let’s see if I remember how to do this.
As I was saying……
I wasn’t expecting to ever do another blog post but the poker session I had this past Saturday just seemed to have a few elements to it that reminded me of the exact things or the kind of things that I used to talk about in the glory days of this blog. Things like poker etiquette, poker room policies, dealer errors and of course, the Dreaded Pocket Kings. Also, the fact that I won and in fact had my best poker session in over a year and half gave me some enthusiasm for reporting on it. Oh, and yes, it turned out that I actually won my biggest pot with the aforementioned dreaded hand! Sorry, but there are no salacious stories, which is also something the blog was somewhat famous for way back when.
What made this session sweeter was that I came thisclose to not playing at all. The really rainy weather we’d been having for more than a week was gone, replaced by extremely high winds. It gets really windy in the area where the room I play in now is as it is in the desert, and it makes it a bit treacherous for driving. But I decided to give it a go.
In the past half year or so, I’ve been playing at a new (to me) room here in Southern California, a very small room called Diamond Jim’s, which is in Rosamund, CA but really it is in the middle of nowhere. If it helps, it’s very close to Edwards Air Force Base. It’s about an hour’s drive for me which isn’t really much different than the Ventura poker room I had been playing at, or for that matter, the Bike, which shouldn't be an hour away from me, but it is (or longer) because of downtown L.A. traffic even when I go on a Saturday. On Saturday afternoons when I go to Diamond Jim's, I’ve never seen more than two 1/2 games going plus sometimes they do get an 8/16 Omaha 8 game running. I believe it gets busier in the evenings.
I’ve known about this place for years but until recently I avoided it because their 1/2 game had a $40-$100 buy-in. That’s just not enough of a max buy-in to make a decent game. The 1/2 game in Ventura has a $50-$100 buy-in and I tried that and it was a terrible game. The buy-ins for 1/2 are even worse at Commerce and the Bike, maxing out at either $50 or $60. I think you need to buy in for at least 100 big blinds to make a game playable.
When I noticed that Diamond Jim’s had changed the buy-in max for the 1/2 to $200 (still $40 min), I decided to take a chance and drive up there one Saturday. I found the game to my liking and it’s been my “home room” pretty much ever since. It is also a more pleasant drive (less traffic) than the drive to Ventura and there are no parking issues like there are in Ventura. And 1/2 with a $200 max as opposed to 2/3 with a $300 max means I only need $400 in my pocket to walk in with two buy-ins, as opposed to $600 for Ventura.
The one negative is that for the $40-$100 they used $1 chips (the same at every Southern Cal casino I’ve played in) and they didn’t change it when they added $100 to the max buy in. They still play the game with $1 chips. In Vegas of course, you wouldn’t see a 1/2 game like that, it’s played with $5 chips everywhere I’ve played it. It is so much better that way. When you buy in for $200 they give you two racks of $1 chips. It’s a royal pain in the ass. I always ask for one stack of red with a rack of blue (the $1 chips). Yeah I could ask for all red but with everyone else using the blue chips it would be awkward to be the only one using red. So, if I still had my full buy-in in front of me, and I want to bet, say, $40, I’d push out two stacks of $1 chips instead of using eight $5 chips. And then if you are running well and you have lots of profit in front of you, you just have a ton of $1 chips which is just a mess. You can rack them but that takes up so much room. The only racks I want in front of me in a 1/2 game are ones filled with red (or dare I say, green?). Unless of course Sydney Sweeney visits the room. I am not holding my breath for that to happen.
Before I get to the three poker hands that made my day, I want to discuss a poker room policy, specifically rules for “must move” games. I never dealt much with “must move” games before. I had only seen that with games that have bigger limits than I play (like 2/5 or 5/10). As best I can tell, if they open a second 1/2 game during their first hour after they open (11am), the second game is always a “must move.” Which means that if anyone leaves the first game they started, they take a player from the second game and move them to the original game, in order to keep the "integrity" of the first game intact, so that players who get there early and start the first game always have a full game.
I suppose that makes sense but sometimes I’ve seen it where they have an open spot in the first game, they have a player on the waitlist ready to play, and they insist on taking one of the players off the must move game and putting them in the “main” game, sending the new player to the must move game. What is the point of that? As long as they have a player ready to go, why not send the new player to the main game instead of disturbing a player at the second game, making him pack up his chips (racks of $1 chips!) and move and have the new player replace them in the secondary game? It seems to me you are playing musical chairs for no reason. Of course, anyone in the secondary game could always be put on the transfer list if they wanted to move to the main game.
Can anyone out there who works in a poker room or in poker room management explain to me why they would insist on putting the new player in the secondary game when the main game would have a new player anyway? Why not just put the new player in the main game, when they would be able to keep the main game full off the waitlist?
The first big hand I had was based on dumb luck and a dealer goof, tho I didn’t really see what happened so I dunno how much the dealer was at fault. (The dealers in this room are really good, by the way.) But as I was moving my first card closer to me, my second card hit my hand and flipped over (maybe it was my fault, but I don’t think so). The flipped card was the 6 of hearts. I took a quick look at my first card and it was an Ace. So when I got the replacement card for the 6 of hearts, I was delighted to see that it was another Ace. I can only remember situations when that kind of thing hurt me, not helped me. One time a flipped card was 10, my other card was 10, I ended up with a garbage hand and the final board had two more 10’s on it. I would have had quads if not for the flipped over card! This time it was obviously to my benefit.
Sadly I didn’t take good notes because I never imagined I’d be writing a blog post again. But I did raise with my bullets and got a bunch of calls and won a nice pot on a board that had two flopped queens. That kept me from getting the most value from my hand because in this room players love to play face cards.
That was early in my session and the first pot I won. I kept most of the profit from that for a long while, winning a very small pot with something or other.
Eventually it was time for me to get the dreaded hand. If you remember the blog from the old days you remember that I have an issue with pocket Kings, having taken some of my worst beats with what is supposed to be the second best starting hand in Hold’em. Again, forgive the lack of detail but I can tell you this, I raised with them, I got a bunch of calls, and I flopped a set! I do have stories where my flopped set of Kings was taken down by a straight or a flush, so I wasn’t counting my money yet. I slow-played the flop and didn’t bet on a non-scary board, then one guy bet the turn, I raised him, he called. He bet the river, I went all in, and he tanked and called. Turned out he had King-Jack and was afraid I had Ace-King (there was no Jack on the board, he just had top pair, decent kicker). I mean, he even said, I guess you have Ace-King when he called! It’s great when you get called by players who think they are beat but call anyway!
I was paid off in all $1 chips so when all was said and done, I had three racks of blue chips, about $30 in loose $1 chips plus my original stack of red. Thus, I had more than a double up, which was very nice indeed.
I went back to being card dead and was thinking of calling it a day. It had been a long time since I had a double up and I didn’t mind having a short day if I could leave with an extra buy-in in my pocket for next time. I had stayed long enough after the big Kings hand so it wouldn’t be like a hit and run. I was dealt what I thought would be my last hand, which turned out to be pocket 8’s. I had just had that same hand about five hands ago. And I had the same thought. “I’ve already gotten a set of Kings today, no way am I flopping another set.” But….well, yes, way. My previous pocket 8's hand had crashed and burned, but this time the flop was King-8-x, and I had my second set of the day. I had called a modest raise to see the flop. I don’t remember the betting action until the river, but I’m pretty sure there was money in on both the flop and the turn, but not big bets. Again, I took no notes. I do know that on the river, another King hit, giving me a boat. I bet $40, and the one guy left first put out $80, which he did by putting out a rack of $1 chips which had one column empty. But then, he started to put the rest of his chips in the rack, which seemed like a string bet unless he said “all-in” before he put out the initial $80.
Instinctively, without really thinking, I asked the dealer, “Did he say all-in?” The dealer said no, and told the player his bet was $80, no more. He actually took the extra chips out of the rack and put them behind it. I’m not sure exactly why I didn’t shove there, I guess I was still thinking about his string bet and also the thought did occur to me that he might have King-x with x being one of the other board cards for a bigger boat than mine. I couldn’t imagine he would have played pocket Kings the way he had played his hand, so I wasn’t worried about losing to quads.
I guess I was thinking that his raising me on the river might have meant he had a bigger monster than my monster, so I just called. He did have King-x but he hadn’t paired his “x” and my boat was plenty good. This added over $100 to my stack. I was happily stacking my chips and was looking for a chip runner to get my $1’s colored up to $5’s when someone pointed out that the other guy wanted to bet more and because he made the string bet he couldn’t. That reminded me of something I remembered from the Ventura poker room.
I asked the dealer, “If I hadn’t said anything, would you have called the string bet or did I have to call it out myself?” He said that it was only because I had said something that he prevented from making the string bet. “Heads up, I’m staying out of it. If the other player doesn’t call it, we don’t say anything.” I knew to ask because I had seen the same thing happen in Ventura. I guess this is true in all Southern California rooms? It’s only a string bet if the other player calls it out. The house won’t intervene. That’s certainly not the rule in Vegas. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen dealers call out string bets long before the other player(s) question it. I’ve seen dealers actually push bets back to the player on their own. But in CA the other player has to call it. What about where you folks play? Is a string bet always a string bet or is it only a string bet if the player bet into calls it out? I’m curious. And do you like that rule? I'm thinking it is bad for newbies who might not know to call out a string bet.
I stayed a few more orbits and by then I had colored up to red and cashed out $536 for a $336 profit. I guess that’s not quite a sensational enough result to cause me to do a new blog post in and of itself, but I thought there were enough interesting things about it to for me to get off my ass and publish my first blog post in well over two years.
Can I ask you folks a favor? It’s been so long, no one would be expecting a new post from me, so if you found this and liked it, please spread the word to anyone who you think might be interested in this material. And if you didn’t like it, tell people you hate about it to get even with them. Thanks.
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