Weekend update and the blogger homegame

Happy Monday everyone. I made it back from NYC late yesterday after a great weekend with my son and my sister.

My son and I left on Friday intending to drive down to the city. We got going a little bit later than I had wanted to when we left at about noontime. My sister said it would actually take about 5 hours to get to her place and I started to worry about sitting in NYC traffic. A couple cell calls in the car later, we are heading to Boston to catch the train rather than drive.

Got to the city at about 5pm and walked to my sister’s place from Penn Station. I was really glad we had taken the train and didn’t have to deal with the drive and possible delays. We headed out to the Empire State Building and spent a little over an hour waiting in the line to get to the top. After we spent about 10 minutes up there looking around and freezing our butts off, we got to wait in the line to leave for another half hour. It was a long wait all around but my son seemed to like it a lot so it was worth it I guess.

At that point, we decided to head back to the apartment and just order dinner in. That worked well because I wanted to get my son into bed by 9pm for 2 reasons. The first was because we had a busy day planned for Saturday and he needs a lot of sleep to function well. The second was the fact that the NYC blogger homegame at Jordan’s was starting at 9:30pm. Couldn’t be late for that.

Jordan and Dave did a few recaps so I won’t bore you with too many details but it was an interesting game. It was great to meet a few of my blogger friends in person. Jordan’s post with the box of chocolate’s analogy was a good one. I walked in and was quickly introduced to everyone but said a quick hello and sat down to suck down a beer. I still didn’t know who everyone was, even after the intros. I knew Jordan, of course, since he had answered the door, but the rest of group was a mix of bloggers and friends of Jordan, so I wasn’t sure who was who.

After a couple minutes of sitting there, Hoyazo came over and introduced himself again as his blogger persona. Ah, ok, cool, now I know who will be trying to steal my blinds by face ;)

After deciding on the format of the tourney, I drew the 9th seat of 9. Again, I am not going to recap much here but 2 hands really stood out for me. The first one and one against Hoyazo.

Being in the cutoff for the first hand, I am dealt A9s. The action gets to me with a few limpers so I limp as well. We see an unraised flop and I connect with top pair of Aces but, which would prove more importantly, I had a flopped nut flush draw. The action checked around to me and I bet about ¾ of the pot to see where I stood and it was folded around to SoxLover who called. The turn gave me 2 pair when a 9 fell. Sox decided to take the lead in betting and fired out 400 (I think) so I raised it to 800. He thought for a beat and then called. The river gave me the flush. Immediately Sox said he had to go all in and I called. He said, “I got the flush”. Uh-oh, I had the nut flush. I had doubled up on the first hand. There was really no way he could have thought I was drawing to the same flush he was because of the betting. It was just really bad luck for him that I had a strong hand before the flush hit, but an even stronger one after he made his drawing hand.

I flopped around for a good amount of time and even called another all in because the push was a small amount of chips and I had the big stack to call. I sucked out with a pair of 4s I think to knock another guy out. Even with this big stack though, I would manage to screw it up.

A while later, I am in a blind, which I think were at 100/200 at that point. Hoyazo was UTG and he raised it to 600. He had about 1800 left at this point and, after it was folded to me, I looked down at AQs. I had a big stack and thought he might have just been trying to steal (shocker, yes) so I raised it up to 1200. He thought for a second and then called. He was pot committed at that point so I knew I was putting him in on the flop and hoping for the best. The flop came and I missed it but I bet the 600 that he had left and he called. He had pocket 3’s. They held up as I didn’t improve and I took a really big hit to the stack. Kid Dynamite looked over to me after and suggested I should have pushed pre-flop. I totally agree that would have been the better move with my questionable drawing hand anyway, especially if I had paid closer attention to Hoyazo’s stack before making the re-raise. It is good to play with people that know what they are doing. It helps donkeys like me learn.

There was another hand that I lost a good chunk to Jordan on, but I don’t remember any of the details. I was done shortly thereafter when I had to push in the BB after a raise.

I then sat in with Sox, Hoyazo, and 2 of Jordan’s friends for a 50c/1.00 NL cash game. We all bought in for $50 and I let everyone know before we started that I suck at NL cash games. That should have been a warning Sox, haha.

After donking off about $20 in 20 minutes, I got into a hand with Sox that he wasn’t too happy about. We were 5 handed and Sox was UTG. He limped in for $1 and I raised it up to $3.50, the standard raise at the table, with KJo. I just wanted to take down the blinds and try to chip back up a bit. I didn’t think he was that strong since he had limped, which he hadn’t done much of since the game had started. Also, after I put in the raise, as he was stacking his chips from his previous pot, I thought he kinda winced. It was folded to him and he thought for a second then raised it to $12. I took this as a resteal (am I paranoid or something?) and didn’t really think he had the goods that he was representing. I thought for a minute and decided to push in the hopes that he would lay his hands down. Umm, wrong. He had big slick and called me. As soon as he called, without even seeing his cards yet, I said “I’m dead”. He flipped them over and so did I. He had me dominated. Until, umm, the J hit the board. Again, he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t in the ‘das poker’ mode. I felt like the donkey that I played like.

I had almost wished I lost the hand anyway because it was starting to get late and I needed to get out of there. I had promised to go out with a friend for a drink and he called me right after the hand. I obviously couldn’t leave at that point so I played for a while until Sox got his stack back up, I gave some of it back and basically wound up even in the cash game. The tourney was just getting over so I was able to take off without feeling like too much of a loser for sucking out and then leaving with someone else’s money.

Anyway, everyone was very cool and I had a great time. The next time I am in town, hopefully we can pull it together again.

We woke up the next morning and went to breakfast, did a little crappy gift shop browsing, visited Ground Zero, Battery Park, grabbed lunch at the ESPNZone and went to see The Lion King on Broadway. The show was great and my son loved it. After that we went to a great Brazilian, all you can eat, meat fest called Plataforma. We all stuffed ourselves then went back to the apartment. The only bummer for the day was that it poured all day long. It continued to pour yesterday morning as we trudged around in the morning. We ended up grabbing the 1pm train back to Boston and got home about about 7pm after all was said and done.

Anyway, I haven’t played a hand since I finished second in that 180 SNG. I did cash out a big chunk to redeploy on various whoring ventures. Not sure where that is going to take me.

See you all tonight at DADI 5!