♠ Friday, July 23, 2004
A Casino Trip, and a Question
I had an entry to a drawing at Little River Casino in Manistee yesterday, so I went up. Not so much for the drawing as for the extra people that a drawing usually brings to the casino; my hope was that a lot of money would leap into my pocket.
It turned out I was mistaken; the drawings are Thursday nights in August, which meant that I was at the Little River casino on an ordinary weeknight, when the games are generally pretty tough.
Still, I sat down, since I'd just driven over two hours to get there. There were a couple of new faces at the table, but I don't recall any of them being particularly fishy. That meant that the worst player at the table was in the "typical" category, an admittedly large box that a player I don't know goes into until he shows me something different. (To my detriment, most players end up staying there; I don't have boxes for "typical but will fold to a river bet" or other things that would help me a lot.)
I didn't get really wealthy at the table; the cards weren't unkind but they weren't hitting me in the face, either. I was probably down $20 to $40 when they opened the second table, where I jumped pretty much instantly. Good move, as it happened; the table had three or four guys who had never played in the casino before, and it showed. Two of them busted out pretty much immediately (with some of their money in my stack), and the third ended up not busting out, but only losing $50 or so before he left. I don't remember if his money ended up in my stack.
In any case, I was up over $200 at the point that the last newbie left, and the table reverted to more typical players. All of them were quite loose preflop, but played acceptably postflop. My own cards went into the crapper, and I became a folding station, tossing my cards into the much almost as soon as I got them, hand after hand. I did end up winning the occasional small pot, which paid for my blinds, but I lost two big pots that I played stupidly, and a third where Over buttons were in play and my AK♣ refused to hit a damned thing. (Over buttons double the stakes if a betting round begins with only people who have them.)
All in all, I left up $80, which was pretty much exactly one big bet an hour.
—A non-poker-related project I am about to embark upon, at the strenuous insistence of the inestimable (well, actually, thoroughly estimable) DylanBaker, requires message boards. A Google search actually returns too many options, so I'll ask here for suggestions on whose message boards to add to the site. ...Oh, wait, never mind; I'd have to upgrade my hosting to enable scripting at RWJ.com. Okay, Yahoo! Groups it is, unless someone has another suggestion.
