Poker and gambling

I hit the Big Game last night for a 5 hour stint and brought along two guys: my old poker buddy Chris and a coworker Chad who works at one of our office outside DC.  Despite some drama last week involving a Big Game employee skipping town and some missing money, the game went off…

I’ve been at a plateau for a while in my poker career.  I felt I just couldn’t get past a certain level of play, and the only way I could get any better was to play a very tight game, and even then I felt like I was being slung around by the statistics of…

The season finale of The Sopranos was particularly disappointing.  I was excited to see AJ start to turn his life around, but that didn’t make up for the complete lack of a plot climax. However tonight starts the new season of High Stakes Poker on the Game Show Network.  I first heard about High Stakes…

Had a 4.5 hour session at the Big Game again that was profitable.  Many of the same characters were there, including Scruffy the poker machine.  The man will push $100 at a pot and you often don’t really know if he’s got something or not.  More often than not, people fold, and that’s how Scruffy…

This didn’t occur to me until Sarah observed it, but my guess that Friday night would be a good day at the Big Game was dead wrong.  They could barely field two tables, and at midnight were down to just five players at one table of $1/$2 NL Hold’em.  I was ahead over $400 so…

As any live poker aficianado knows, it’s a good time to be a no limit hold’em player, an okay time to be a limit hold’em player, and a rough time to be an Omaha/Stud/Razz player.  These games are just hard to find in a casino.  When I was last in Vegas the various regulars I…

I was reminded today of the volatility of no limit poker as I dragged a $200 pot in my new favorite No Limit Omaha/8 game.  It’s a beautiful thing, but you’d have to be crazy to think that a weekly paycheck based on poker winnings wouldn’t be emotionally trying.  In the last World Poker Tour…

So there I am, sitting at the Big Game last week, playing the lowest no limit they have ($1/$2).  I’ve seen them starts lists for $5/$10 no limit with a $2,500 maximum buyin, but that’s a tale for another time. I’ve just spent an hour bullying the table for $200 and I look down in…

I finally took a statistical downswing at the Big Game. But wait, don’t you want to regale with tales from this session?  Isn’t there something pithy to say?  Not really, I got crappy cards and overplayed them.  Exactly what the players with better cards needed to make money off me.  I’m not broken up about…

Honestly, this is getting a little silly.  I played at the Big Game again tonight and counted four chip dumpers around me at a table of 7 people, myself included.  Avoiding the players will real card selection skills, I was still in a target rich environment. I bullied the table all evening and finally got…