Hooray for Vegas, but not for the reasons you might imagine. I didn’t play a lot of cards in Vegas this time around–only two sessions for a total of maybe 12 hours. Normally, I’ll pull several sessions at least that length by themselves, but this trip was to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday, so the first two days were non-poker. The third day I tried to sleep late in hopes of a marathon session, but ended up blowing through two buy-ins in under 3 hours (all-in for $280 on a nut-flush draw when I knew my single opponent only had a weak kicker on his paired ace… I was right, but he still called and my club-flush never game; and then I was smooth called all the way, $40-flop, $80-turn, and all-in on the river with TPTK by a donkey with TPWK who hit two-pair on the river). I was mad at poker and mad at Vegas, so I went back to the room and looked into going home a day early. Fortunately, flights were too expensive.
Day 4 in Vegas was fun. We went downtown and toured through some of the old rooms like Binyon’s and The Golden Nugget and walked all the way down Las Vegas Blvd. back to the strip, with stops at the Stratosphere for a Video Poker financed comp beer or two and at the Circus Circus for some $1 Blackjack. After a respite in our room, complete with awesome take-out Chinese, we decided to play some cards. I have played the crazy $1/1/3 game at the Luxor before and liked it. It’s a strange structure, with a min/max buy-in of $50 that encourages drunk tourists to get their feet wet but also brings out the LAG in more veteran NLHE players. The last time I had played in that game, a little more than a year ago, I made a decent profit and felt like it was ripe for the picking. So we headed out for that game around 9:30 p.m. We walked down to the New York New York Casino and were going to take the tram across the street from the Excalibur to the Luxor. I had seen a list on the Internet ranking the general competition level of the various Vegas cardrooms and the Excalibur was supposedly one of the softest, so we decided to drop in and take a look.
We got on the list for $1/3NL and 20 minutes later were seated. My session was fairly unremarkable. I played pretty tight and won a big double-up pot when I raised six or eight limpers from the button with 69o and got one caller directly to my right. The flop was 99K and I led out with a $20 bet just hoping he’d called with AK. Sure enough, he insta-pushes over the top and I insta-call, showing down a terrible hand that connected with the board nicely.
The nice guy from Utah to my left said, “How do you do that?”
“What?” I asked.
“I know you haven’t been playing cards like that all night. How do you know when to go crazy and win?!”
M had a good and bad night and another table working her buy-in all the way up to over $400 and then losing it all by miss-reading an annoying LAG as a simple bully instead of a LAG who caught top-two on the flop and going all-in against her Aces. Oh well. Remember not to go broke with one pair, babe… even if they are Aces.
Ended up closing out the Vegas trip with a couple of big hits on slot machines (I know, I know, but M likes ’em and I like her) and flew back home with a modest profit. Viva Vegas.
♠♠ No-Limit Hold 'em ♠♠ 