Returning With a Bang

Last night was my first session at Foxwoods since the World Poker Finals last October. I had a plan going into the evening to play until the sun came back up, find a quiet spot outside to sleep assuming it was nice out, come back Saturday afternoon and evening refreshed and recharged to play again. Well…that didn’t happen. To be fair, these first few trips I expect are going to be the ones where I test out a lot of these ideas and figure out which ones are good in practice and which ones are half baked and brain dead. All that said, it was a pretty fun night.

I sauntered into the poker room at around 7:30PM and saw that it was open seating for 1/2NL. I was pretty shocked given the number of people in the room and it being a Friday night but I wasn’t going to complain. When I first sat down I was a little concerned that I’d be rusty, that since it’s been a while I’d start making live poker specific mistakes like looking at my hand too early or sloppily so other people can see the cards or acting out of turn. For the 8.5 hours that I was there it was as if I’d never left the poker room. I fell right back into my old routine, except now I was actually smiling and being social. Normally I wouldn’t talk to people at the table but this time around, especially if I’m going to frequent Foxwoods for many more weekends to come, I don’t want to be pissing people off. I was trying to be Negreanu-esk minus the whole Canadian and being an elite world player thing. I was just trying to make sure everyone was having some semblance of a good time, particularly the three really bad players at my table that looked as though they had never been in a live casino before.

I did get into a minor altercation during the session, despite my cheery outlook. There was a gentleman at the table who was short stacking. He bought in for $60, and was noticeably not used to playing short stack poker. During a dealer change he thought the button hadn’t moved and that he had to pay the big blind twice. The gentleman who was the button now claimed to be the small blind last hand, and I agreed with him. The short stacker didn’t take too kindly to me backing the button up. After about 10 minutes of him periodically saying how wrong the two of us were and how he would prop bet us for thousands because he’s, “Never wrong in this spot, EVER” I finally spoke up.

Me: Do you really want the dollar back dude?

Player: No it’s not about that…

Me: If I just give you the dollar back will you stop talking about it?

Player: (Shakes his head) Two dollars.

Me: (Tossed him a $5) I want change.

The table got a kick out of it and even the player in question was happy with the result so I don’t mind tipping this guy to stay quiet. Poker wise everything went my way up until the last 30 minutes of the night. I wrote down a couple of hands to talk about in the next blog but I’ll cliff notes some of the spots here. I win AKs v AKo on KxxJ with the flush draw on turn, hit runner runner straight on a paired board with a made flush out and it was good, called down $80 on turn and river combined with A-high and it held. Final tally, +$659 on the night, and that’s after I dusted off $80 on one of my last hands because, “the dude HAD to be bluffing there.” Regardless I’m happy with the results and my play, now I’m going to get food and get another session going.

DTools22 on twitter if you want to bug me while I’m playing.