Up and Down
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
--Bruce Springsteen
Just don't meet me at the Borgata, or we're going to be waiting a long, long time for a table.
We had ourselves a little mini-con in AC yesterday at the Borgata. The august bloggers in attendance included:
1. Carter from Cuban Links
2. "Dawn Summers" from Clareified
3. Joaquin from My Little Poker Blog
4. Jordan from High on Poker
5. SoxLover from Fish Soup
6. Me!
It was great to see Carter and Jordan again, two guys that I don't get to see often enough and who are lots of fun. Carter was wearing a green t-shirt with the words "I Carry No Cash" written on the front in large white letters. (This elicited a comment from the table idiot that, in DC, the thugs speak "eboli" and wouldn't be able to understand the t-shirt anyway.) We almost managed to get four of us on the same NLHE table at once, but Jordan was quite happy with his very passive table and elected to stick it out over there.
God, the place was packed! The expansion of the poker room at the Borgata from 34 to 85 tables (currently scheduled to be completed in Q2 2006) cannot come soon enough. It's almost getting to the point where I don't want to play there anymore. Almost. The action on Saturday is still too juicy to pass up, especially post-midnight, but the problem is that if you get there at any time after noon on a Saturday, you have to wait 1 to 3 hours to get on a table. That's 1 to 3 hours that could be better spent playing at the Trop, the Taj or any of the newly opened AC rooms (Bally's, Harrah's, Caesar's, etc.) that don't have such deep waiting lists. When we pushed back from the felt last night around midnight, there were 72 players on the $1-$2 NLHE waiting list, and another 40 on the $2-$5 list!
I made some bad plays and I made some good plays. The hands that I was most proud of were two separate hands with pocket deuces where I moved people off of their hands after the flop. My bets and raises were getting lots of respect. All it took was showing down top set on the first hand that I took to showdown (cracking kings and doubling up from $250), and then mixing it up some, but not too much, afterwards. If I had been a smidgen more aggressive, I could have had complete control over the table (perhaps with one exception). The problem was that I had a very big stack on my immediate left (~$1100) who cramped my style a little bit. He wasn't a particularly tricky player, but I was careful to ensure that I didn't gift my stack to him.
In the end, it was some nice padding for the bankroll. Nothing MAJOR, but a few more weekends like this and I'll be in good shape for Vegas.
The WPBT Sunday Shootout Satellite, on the other hand, was a different story. It's very clear that I'm out of practice playing NLHE tournaments. I think the last one I played was a few months ago at a midtown club, and before that I have no idea. I donked off most of my chips in spectacular fashion, misplaying just about every hand I took past the flop. Maybe I'll do better next weekend, but this was a pretty ugly showing.
UPDATE: "Dawn" has written an amusing post about the trip. All of you other poker bloggers should thank Almighty God that she's not coming to Vegas, because she has a steel trap for a memory combined with a complete and total lack of hesitation about writing up anything she witnesses (first-hand, second-hand or third-hand). Plus, she's evil. And crazy.