Vegas Trip Report: Day 1

Thursday

12pm - 12:30pm: Luxor tourney sucked ass. I was so pumped to play in Vegas again but my enthusiasm was slightly deflated when I got knocked out of the tourney within the first half hour. $28 down the drain and it was my first poker action of the trip. Some dirty Brit caught runner runner on the turn and river to catch a flush and crack my pocket KKs. Dirty fucker was calling my preflop raise with 3-6d. I flopped a set and the English bastard kept calling all the way to the river and knocked me and some girl with a set of 3's out at the same time. I hate that the Luxor tourney isn't no limit until the final table. That's what sucks about limit games. Too many callers who catch shit. Unfortunately I don't have the bankroll to play with better players. But who doesn't have a story about someone calling crappy hands to the river and catching lucky miracle wins? I guess there's way too much WPT and espn tv watching. The one thing I learned at the Luxor is that pot limit can kill you just as easily as low limit especially when there's tons of loose players and dirty runner runner catching Brits!


1-4pm: If you have to play low limit games, Excalibur is the place to go. They have $2-6 spread/unstructured texas holdem games. If you get pocket AA cracked, then you get to spin a wheel where there's money amounts listed for you to win as a consolation prize. Better some then nothing, I say. It takes away the sting from getting your pocket AA's cracked. The wheel has a cheap game show feel to it but free money erases the pain. I sat down with my brother at a new table with some Phish phans. One guy looked like Jesus. And he wasn't Puerto Rican. We played for 3 hours and I left the table up $77. Some of that was jesus' money. Nothing is better than stacking chips after winning hands and then walking away from a session up. There was some shady young asian woman playing and she kept button raising with nothing trying to steal pots while drunk as shit. She was ordering two drinks at a time while chain smoking. A few times she had a hand but mostly she was rebuying the whole time. This chick sucked but she thought she was a player since she lived in vegas.

5:45pm-3:45am: Excalibur again. My brother, Paul, went to the Phish show so I kept busy playing 2-6 at the recently moved poker room. The Excalibur is in the process of renovations and they flip flopped the keno and poker room. The keno room is already set up but they're still working on the area where the poker room will be, so for now the poker room is situated in between the keno and poker room in a huge open space next to the exits. It was a different look than the last time I played there in December but most of the dealers where the same.

My first hand was KK. I hate playing my first hand when I sit down but how can I fold KK, right? I bet out $6 dollars in LP. Two callers after me. No one else. one guy was a really large man. He looked like Mo Lewis from the NY Jets. The other guy looked like Jack Klugman. The flop: 9-4-7. There's two bets and I raise since I have pocket K's. Klugman folds but Mo Lewis calls. The turn is a 7. I have two pair! Mo raises my $6 bet and I reraise and he calls. I'm thinking he can't have pocket AAs because he almost folded after the flop out of turn by mistake and he didn't raise my preflop bet. I figured he had rags. The only thing isIi didn't know how raggy his cards really were. He was all in now before the river. His stack was depleted and I was pissed that I might have showed up too late. His play was obviously loose and sloppy and I wanted some of that action. I was hoping he'd rebuy. Mo Lewis had 4-9 off suit in the hole and a 4 came out on the river. Mo caught a boat on the river and he wasn't chasing it at all. The crazy thing is he was intentionally betting that way and not fishing. I was stunned. I hate playing my first hand.

Over the next few hours, I took this guy for some money and his loose play paid off for me in the long run. But for some reason, the 4's full of 9's bad beat is the thing I remember the most from this 10 hour session. I left the table feeling glad that the Jets cut Mo Lewis this offseason.