Monday, June 05, 2006

A Poker Weekend: Part 1

2 weeks and no update? I must be dead...

After a pretty mundane short week, I headed out to Simi on the 26th to meet up with Casey late at night after a smallish loss at the Mash. I got there at around 11PM and cruised over to Doug's house where Casey and his girlfriend were at a party. Doug, Casey, and I all used to work at Mervyn's back when I was living in Simi and attending CSUN, and the three of us had a hell of a good time. I hadn't seen Doug since I moved out to Santa Barbara, though, so it was really cool chillin with him again. I recently had come into contact with an even older friend who I hadn't seen for two years, and I also told him that I'd call him next time I was in Simi. I called him from Doug's and told him I was in town at a party. He said, "Oh, Doug's party?" .......ok Simi is too small of a city. Apparently he knew Doug from a while back and word had gotten out around a ring of people that Doug was having a party. Andrew dropped by and we all hung out for about an hour and a half.

After a little while Casey brought up that Nick was having a get-together at his house, so Decker(Andrew), Casey, Summer(Casey's girlfriend), and I all headed over to Nick's. We all hung out, had some drinks, played games, and told stories of old times and joked around. It was great fun, and since I haven't seen Decker for two years, and Nick and Casey for months, I really had a blast. Decker and I crashed at Casey's place, and we gathered up Nick and couple others and headed to my dad's pizza shop for lunch. It was great food, and everyone gave compliments. My dad just opened it recently so it was cool to have good reviews of the food, which seems to be the general consensus so far.

After lunch I spent some much warranted time hanging out with Decker. We chilled at his house for a while and caught up on lost time. He had to go to work so he took me to retrieve my car, which I had left at Doug's the night before. It was around 3:30PM and Paul's game was at 6. I headed over to my dad's house where I saw Pam and my little sister Ally, both of whom I haven't seen for quite some time either. I showered up and hung with the family for a little bit. And I also bought some socks. I really wanted some new socks.

We had Paul's home game later that day where I met up with Darsky. The two of us have been having some mixed feelings about the setup at Paul's lately, mainly the lack of players. A little info about the usual game: The game is a $50 buy-in NL tournament, which at it's peak was bringing in 30+ people. We run the tournament twice with a side game going amongst those not "fortunate" enough to still be in the tourney, the side game consisting of either $1 No Fold 'Em Hold 'Em (I'll explain that in a later thread) or $0.25 dealer's choice games. The number of players was increasing at a steady rate until we hit a 40-person mark when we had a game featuring professional poker player Amir Vahedi, who is close friends with one of the regulars.

Nowadays the numbers have decreased immensely, due mostly to an intentional effort to keep the game smaller, as the environment was becoming a bit too crazy once it hit the 40-person mark. Certainly no one can blame a guy for wanting to keep his house and garage to a reasonable decibel level, but as of late the tournament has been lacking so many players that there barely is a tournament! We only play once a month now whereas we used to play every other week. Therefore the attendance is a bit more important than it used to be. In April's game, however, we had only 8 people. It was known that Paul had purposefully not been telling people about the game, but to players like Darsky and me, 8 players simply doesn't constitute a worthy tournament. We both let him know that if he didn't call people this next time around that he would be down another two players.

This time Paul was more or less coerced into calling people, and although he only called a few, we ended up with 14 players for the first tournament and 12 for the second, which was at least better than last time. Dar and I had talked earlier that week and had planned on going to Morongo after Paul's game for an overnight session. Had we not had enough players, we agreed, we would have just left to Morongo and completely skipped the tournies. Once we showed up and figured our game for 14 players, we were both sufficed to stay and play. Coming off of a 3-week rush at Chumash I was feeling pretty good to play that night. Darsky and I have been trying to get heads up at one of these tournies for the longest time, but we always seem to start at the same table, even when we had 3-4 tables going, and of course with 2 tables nothing changed. We both started at the same table but managed to play some great poker and dodge bad luck at the same time, and wouldn't ya know it we ended up heads up! We've been meaning to do this for quite some time, but somewhere along road to heads up Darsky or myself always takes a dumb beat and can't hang to the final two. Tonight was different, and we started heads up with me having a considerable chip advantage. After about a fifteen- to twenty-minute match, I couldn't put him away and Dar took first place. I was happy with my play for the whole match, though, and I gladly took second place to the master of poker.

Most of the other players were being very annoying when Darsky and I were fighting our epic battle, and it irritates me to mention it because I think it lacks class and makes the bunch sound like little impatient kids, but Dar mentioned briefly in his weekend recap, so you might be able to find what I'm talking about. Anyways we started up the second tourney after a brief food break, and once again Dar and I ended up in the top three. When it was lookin like we might end up heads up for the second time of the night, the third player, who was a very horrible player and easily beatable over time, had too many chips to overcome and took out Darsky in third, and myself in second. So overall I had two second place finishes, and while I was proud of that I was also half-expecting it because of the way that I feel like I was playing going into it.

This past week hasn't been to good for me up at Chumash. Joe recently quit his part-time job and has decided that he'll be living off of the 2/5NL game there, which I think is easily doable for his level of skill. Him going up there more should mean that I'll be playing on quite a regular basis as well, so the last week's losses should be easily rebounded this soon. I wish I had more time to write, but I gotta go play some cards!

Until next time

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