Betting in the dark
Chris hosted our regular $1/$2 limit hold’em with a full kill tonight at his house in the pouring rain of Hurricane Ernesto’s wake. Everyone at this game is comfortable at higher limits, but everyone plays really hard against each other regardless of the stakes, and it’s a very friendly bunch. Chris has a tight image, and so he cold calls raises with marginal hands in order to thwart that image. Obviously when he hits he gets paid off, though he has this habit of pretending like he’s thinking a long time before laying his junk down. Everyone knows he’s folding, but he puts on a good show.
(Chris has been threatening to start a poker blog for months now. If he ever starts I’ll be link whoring his blog to you all every chance I get)
About an hour into the night the power went out. I called the babysitter but she was ok. The baby was asleep and I think she was watching TV. Without anyone questioning if it was time to go home, we kept on playing as Chris hung flashlights from the chandeleir over the poker table and we continued to play. It was still dark, even after Chris lit a few candles. We were all checking our hole cards from the lights on our cellphones. At one point Mogdan flashed his hand and another player who was still in the hand looked right at it. Frankly, he couldn’t see a thing and it was obvious he was telling the truth.
I lost one pot to Jason because it was too dark to read the board and I didn’t see the flush come on the turn.
"Man, we are a bunch of degenerate gamblers," I observed.
"Naw, if the batteries on the flashlights went out, we’d call the game for the night," said someone else.
Somehow I don’t think that redeemed us.
Dinner was a real challenge, as the Dominoes had also lost power and wasn’t picking up their phone. We finally got through and though there was no power at Chris’, they were back on and we ate our pizzas in the darkened kitchen.
I was playing lots of trash and getting paid off when I hit, though I was down $35 for the night. I played a 87s classically, raising and re-raising my draw on the flop, and then getting paid when it hit the turn and my opponent didn’t even suspect me. I think the sickest was when Jason raised in middle position, and I called in the small blind with 62 suited. I had just won a big pot, and if I won another it would be a kill pot. Of course I ended up hitting my flush and cracking his big pair. He just shook his head in disgust.
That of course made one of the few kill pots of the night, and I cackled as I stacked my $2 on the button. "Look what I did to get a kill pot for you people, I called a raise with 62 out of position!" Nobody thanked me.
I promptly got taken to school when one of my opponents received Aces and relieved me of $8 before I came to my senses and folded whatever trash I had gotten dealt for the kill.
We broke up around midnight. Sarah comes home tomorrow (today) which will be good for my sleep schedule. I really need to be relieved or stop staying up late after Moishe falls asleep. The big problem I’m having is that I need to spend a little time to myself, playing cards, playing Xbox or surfing the net before I go to sleep. If I wake up, take care of Moishe, go to work, come home, take care of Moishe, and then fall asleep, I get kind of crabby because I’m neglecting all of my various hobbies. The result is that I go to sleep at midnight and wake up with Moishe at 6:30am, which isn’t enough sleep for me, and it slowly eats away at my joy. I don’t mean to sound dire, I’d adjust my schedule if it was going to be longer, but I figured it was only a day or two more.
Tomorrow (today) that all changes, and I’ll be letting Sarah take some slack for a while. It’s been a good week though, and I’ve run into a number of people who said they were surprised I happily took Moishe for over a week (8 days!) by myself. I guess it’s not something most husbands would do. (That surprised me)