Part II

Part I having already covered most of the poker stories (here’s the link: http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4817.), the only other poker aspect of this trip report was my brief foray into the NLHE realm which, in hindsight, was a big mistake under the circumstances (foreshadowing). But before addressing that, Saturday must be dealt with in general. As noted in Part I, while I played the 11 am $65 TI tourney, the rest of the group spent the morning/early afternoon at the Mandalay Bay pool area, paying ridiculous amounts for foofy drinks and generally ogling girls half their age. We had a local connection via the nephew (“Nephew”) of one of our single guys who lived in Vegas and worked in the industry and got them into that scene while I was shining at TI (for the only time the whole weekend).

After those activities, the group got together at the Mirage in an attempt to watch the games in the sportsbook. Yeah, right. Note to self: You can’t arrive fifteen minutes before tipoff on Final Four weekend in a Vegas sportsbook and expect to get a seat. So, we meandered around the Mirage, and finally found the only spot where nine guys could sit together and see a TV: Japonais! Interesting experience, drinking warm saki and watching basketball, I’ll tell you. :lol:

After game one, we were dead set on being somewhere other than the Far East for the late game, so someone had the bright idea to go to Harrah’s outdoor area. Figured, why not? Gorgeous day, Blackjack tables, TV’s......NOT! They were having some kind of audience participation dance party hosted by DJ’s in big fake afros (Hilarious!) and playing ridiculously loud and bad music. Only tourists were there, and most of them were obviously from Iowa or Wisconsin. Zing! This led to the following comment from one of our single guys: “If I had to choose between staying here for an hour or being shot in the head, I wouldn’t have to ask what kind of gun was going to be used to blow my brains out.”

Closing in on 2nd game tipoff, and with people wanting to get bets down, we went into the Harrah’s sportsbook. Flush with my tourney winnings, I promptly sat down at a NLHE pit table–not the card room version. You know the one. Silly game, but after I hit A/Js on second hand and having $5 on the bonus button (15:1) I figured the game was easy, I could drink free while watching game etc. An hour later, and $100 down the crapper, I realized the stupidity of that game. We rode the second game out there, and then headed back to TI to clean up/change for the Big Saturday Bachelor Night Out! If you listened carefully, you heard a fanfare.

Aforementioned Nephew had gotten us on the VIP list at LAX in the Luxor, which, apparently, is THE club to be in Vegas right now. Now, as a married father of two, I’m into clubbing like Jake Gyllenhaal is into women, but it’s my brother’s bachelor party, so majority vote carries, and with the four single guys being gung-ho, that was the plan. We rendezvous at Stack in the Mirage. Great bar, lots of activity, single guys were happy, drinks semi-reasonable. We’re there for about an hour, then it’s time to go. So ten of us (nine plus Nephew) pile into a limo, which one of the guys had gone out and “arranged” while we finished up at Stack, for the trek up the strip to the Luxor. As I was sitting on someone’s foot on the floor and supporting my weight on the empty limo bar, I began wandering why we didn’t just take two cabs instead of piling ten semi-drunk guys into a limo that comfortably sat six. We get to Luxor, and drunk guy that arranged the limo tells us all we each owe $10! :?: :shock: :x Since we all knew a cab ride would have been about $15-$20 total per cab, with tip, a couple of people “expressed concern” (that’s lawyer speak for “Are you f*#@ing kidding me?!?”) at the “deal” that had been negotiated, but the general consensus of Vegas Baby! prevailed and so did cooler heads. [Score: Limo Driver: 1, Drunk Negotiator: 0]

So we walk up to the front of the line at LAX, where Nephew (very cool guy, but may have still been learning some things) has previously told us that for $20 each, we can skip the line and get in without the $40 cover. Happy days, right? So, we’re loitering in the bar area just shy of the casino floor in the Luxor, waiting for Nephew to call us over to walk past the sheep who’ve been waiting forever to get in, with a smirk on our faces. It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know! Suckers. Well, Nephew’s talking to bouncer who looks like Shaq, only bigger and not as doughy, and clearly Nephew is not happy. He comes over to us and says that the deal he’d set up was for eight guys, not ten. So if we wanted to skip the line and get in, we could, but now we’d have to pay the $20 AND the cover. So, $60 to get into a club and pay $14 for drinks. Apparently, we don’t know the right people. Bedlam ensues. Half say who cares, we’re here, let’s pay it. The other half didn’t really want to go in the first place, and were making the very solid point that we were having a blast at Stack which had no cover, cheaper drinks, and just as much action for the single guys. A small but vocal minority was lobbying for skipping the whole club scene, not passing Go, and proceeding directly to the strip joint, where the $60 would be better spent. I don’t do strip joints (flame away), but as Best Man, my motto was “What Bachelor wants, Bachelor gets.” So I pull my brother away from the scrum and ask what he wants to do, and he says, “Back to Stack!” So back in the cab line at the Luxor, Drunk Limo Negotiator says we call all take the limo. :shock: That’s news to us, since he’s the only one that doesn’t realize that there is no limo anywhere in sight. Once in the first cab, holding me, Nephew, both brothers and one other, Nephew states that Jet, the nightclub at the Mirage, is pretty cool, and he has a connection there. NEW Plan! $15 cab ride with tip (five ways=$3 each :evil: ) and we’re at Jet. I, however, am cashed. It’s almost 2am Sunday. I’ve slept two hours since getting up at 6am on Friday morning. I pull my brother aside and say “I can’t make it.” He graciously understands (he slept five hours while I was playing poker), and I bail for the tram back to TI WITH EVERY INTENTION of going to bed.

Unfortunately, as most of you know, to get to the TI tower elevators from the Mirage tram you have to walk past the TI poker room. Yikes!

So, before the inevitable carnage that is to come, let’s recap! I spent countless pre-trip time on this site asking questions and learning about dipping my toes into the 1/3 NLHE game at TI, and a pretty common theme, if I remember, was “DON’T BE ONE OF THOSE DRUNK GUYS THAT PLAYS AT 2AM!” I think it was in blinking neon if I’m recalling correctly. Wait, let me think....Yes, it was in blinking neon. But I rationalize that I’m still well up from my tourney win where I played pretty solid TAG, used position, trusted my reads and tried to focus not only on my cards but also on what other’s likely held. I can just do that again! Where was the angel on the other shoulder, dang it! So I buy in for $200, and take the only open seat at table 2. If you’d had infrared glasses, you could have seen the large target on my chest. If I hadn’t been seeing almost double from alcohol and sleep deprivation, I’d likely have seen the drool spilling from the mouths of at least five of the people at the table as they watched me unload my tray.

Regardless, I sit right into the BB, and spend the next hour playing loose/passive–just my style! Down to about $140 after numerous limp, call (chase), folds, I find myself on the button, and look down to see two Kings and two Nines, both hearts. :shock: Wait...Shake head, look again, it’s actually K/9h, just two cards. I follow four limpers (well played PF!) into the pot. SB completes, BB thinks a moment and checks. Seven to the flop, pot= $21. Flop K/10/9 rainbow. Yes!!!! Two Pair! It checks around to me, and I figure I have to bet with that wet board, so I bet $15. SB folds. BB, who has about $500 behind, thinks, then check/raises me to $50. :shock: Folded around to me as fast as lightning. So, I sit back and try to put raiser on a hand, I take my time, eliminate various possibilities, figure him for AK, and push all in.

No, wait. That’s not what I did, I just insta-pushed for the rest of my stack without thinking at all.

Villain separates his shoulder getting all his chips in the middle and flips QJ for the nut straight. :oops: Turn is a 10, and three more outs are added to my other six, but river is a 3 and I stand up, probably looking punch drunk and retarded as I wander away from the table. As an honest lawyer (one of the few–Grange is not one of them), I do now recognize the inherent fairness of me not sucking out by filling up with a K, 10, or 9 on the river to send flopped str8 guy to the bar, as I was a 4:1 dog after all the money was in, and a 6.5:1 dog after the turn.

[For those of you legitimate players reading this, please don’t ask me for my read on Villain based on the previous hour of play. If you don’t’ know why that’s a dumb question at this point, I can’t help you.]

Now let’s again look at this action, because anyone reading this who has ever played more than one hour of NLHE was probably, just a few moments ago, screaming at their computer, “FOLD! FOLD DANGITT!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! WELL OF COURSE HE HAS QJ, AND THEY WERE PROBABLY SUITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Which they were (diamonds); so what obviously happened was that BB had a healthy stack, and with QJ sooooooted in the BB, he gets to see a free flop with six limpers. No reason to raise there when, if he hits, he wants as many fish as possible in the pot to pay him off, right? Flop gets him the nuts at the time, he checks hoping to trap, and drunk guy (me) makes what could be just a position raise or, more likely, has just had his leg crushed between two teethed, steel bars. Either way, at worst, villain’s thinking about me having a set or having A/Q or A/J catch up for a chop if a Q/J hits on turn or river. But all of those hands are hands that I likely would have raised with PF on the button after four limpers, so he’s probably not worried about anything other than how my stack will get him three lap dances. So he three bets me=a solid play which paid him off - - as drunk tourists at 2am NLHE tables typically do. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to wonder if that’s maybe why he was there!?! Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Anyway, for my part, his three bet should have been screaming QJ, as he probably/likely raises PF from BB with six limpers in front of him with the other hands that lead to his post-flop actions: KK or AK. I suppose 9/9 and 10/10 were also possible. But either way I’m probably felting there. Which means I insta-raised my entire stack while myopically drooling over my two pair. Of course, had I bothered to, for a moment, consider villian’s likely range post-flop based on his action, I would have realized it included 9/9,10/10, Q/J, K/10– all of which have me crushed. Well Played! With only $18 invested in that pot, I, too, would have followed the lead of the other insta-folders behind me. Lesson learned.

Since the last leg of my report will be a poker free zone, I suppose it’s worth noting a somewhat bizarre trend that got more and more of my attention as the weekend progressed. To wit: through three tourneys, all of which I went deep in, an hour of disastrous NLHE, and another 4 hours of 2/4 limit (which wasn’t worth chronicling here–other than, “chased everything, hit nothing, lost $100"), I was dealt a GRAND TOTAL OF THREE POCKET PAIRS, none of which became trips. I figure about 12 hours of actual play (after deducting tourney breaks etc). Using online resources that say you average about 30 hands per hour at a casino poker table, I mathematically should have gotten at least 22 pocket pairs (6% chance x 300 hand =22 times). I know, not much of a sample, but come on! Three!?! So that just proves that B&M poker is rigged!

Part III coming soon.