[MrWookie]

Saturday:

Getting to sleep at 3 am, I wasn't thrilled when Smurph said we had to be out of there by 11. I was up by 10 anyway, however. After a quick shower, we were out the door, checked out, and back to the Fallsview, where I went straight to the car for me to get a change of shirt, which I had forgotten there last night. Perhaps this wasn't a good plan (see above).

We got a quick breakfast at a smoothie place in the hotel (not as good as Jamba Juice, but not bad), and then I got my name on the list for 5/5 NL. After the disaster the last time I played in this game, I had a vendetta against it. My plan was to make up the $500 I'd lost the last time, plus another $500 to partially make up for the profit I'd lost in the on that one fateful hand. Smurph wasn't thrilled with this plan, since there wasn't much for him to play there. He's too much of a wuss for 1/2 NL, so he decided to head to Casino Niagara when I got a seat. Which was another problem. The list was again very long, in spite of many open tables where games could be created. I guess they were short on dealers at this hour. We hung out and talked while watching one of the $1200 sattellite donk n' goes into the WPT event. I actually spotted Mr. Terrible (from my last time here) playing in one. He was the first to go BUSTO.

We bummed around there for an hour and a half or so before getting lunch (they'll give you a pager so you won't miss your call if you request one). We got burgers, and I still wasn't called, but when I got back, I was 2nd on the list. They opened up a new table shortly thereafter, and I got down into the 6 seat, one of the best at the table. It also looked like my relative position was amazing. The 1-5 seats were all incredibly loose and passive, and the 7 and 8 seats were somewhat tighter, and still passive. I thanked my lucky stars when Mr. Terrible sat down in the 9 seat just after I arrived. He only bought in for a hundo or so, and he was BUSTO before I think I even played a hand.

This whole game was a dream. I saw limped 7-9 handed pots not infrequently, and 5 was about average. In my entire session, it was folded to the blinds exactly once, and I don't need two hands to count the number of times it was folded to a player in the hijack or later who raised. People were a little more judicious about calling raises than the table my first time here, but raises of 5xBB would still typically get 1-4 callers. People were also a lot more hesitant to call an 8x preflop raise than my first table, and if someone raised 4 limpers to $40, they would occasionally all fold. There were a few multiway, reraised pots, but the game wasn't aggressive enough to have that many reraised pots to see exactly how common it was. If it was checked to the player on the button in a limped pot, he could take it down with a bet surprisingly often, even with 4-6 to the flop, but sometimes I'd get 3 callers and just feel stupid for taking a stab at it.

I opted for a fairly nitty preflop strategy. I didn't have to raise implied odds-type hands preflop to start building a pot becaue all the limpers would do that for me. I wasn't anxious to be playing regular old high card strength hands in pots with this many players unless I was limping in late position, keeping the pot small. I folded KQo UTG, for example, but this is pretty standard for NL. However, my starting hand selection really sucked, and my VPIP couldn't have been over 15%. I'll get to that more in a bit, though. I didn't play as well as I would have liked, but I didn't have any huge mistakes. One hand I raied a bunch of limpers on the button with T9s to about $30. I got called in several spots, including the SB, a fairly tight older Asian man who liked to overbet the pot rather than letting people call his good hands. I bet out a flop that was Q high and gave me a flush draw for 60 and only got called by the SB. The turn was a J, giving me 15 outs. I vascillated between the semibluff and the free card. I opted to bet out 100, and got c/r'd all in by the SB for about $120 more, making it an easy call on my part getting something like 5:1. It wasn't a big deal, but I think I should have known that if he called me on that flop, he had something he liked. The river didn't help me, and the SB showed AQ with the A of trump, so I actually only had 14 outs. Oh well. I replenished my stack with the chips in my pocket (always a good idea when playing NL, btw), and I was back in it.

As mentioned above, my cards were piss poor. I played for about 11 hours, and here are some things I saw. I got 22 seven times, and I never hit a set. I never saw AA or KK. I hit exactly one set, and here's how it went. I limp 44 in late position after a bunch of limpers. Flop comes K43, all diamonds. It's checked to a college internet type guy in the 5 seat who was decent, but not great, and he bets 20. I raise to 60, and one of the tighter guys behind me calls (o rly?). He's the only caller. We get to the turn, which is a brick. He checks, and I check behind, mentally screaming "Pair the board!!!" River bricks, and he tosses out a hundred dollar bill, which play in this game. I call, and he shows the flopped nut flush AJs. Big shocker there, folks. I very effectively lost the minimum.

As for my other PP's, I got TT twice, and it was pretty good to me. I won a couple of mid sized pots. QQ and JJ were not at all good to me, though. I got them right next to each other, too, and lost them both almost the same way with the same cast of characters. First hand, I raised JJ in mid position after a couple limpers to 30, I get called by the 1 seat, who's an ATM I can never get cards against, and I get minraised to 60 by another loose, passive player who loves to slowplay. I'd already seen him limp or cold call AA and KK preflop, and I'd never seen him raise preflop. He loved to wait to the river to spring his trap. I wasn't sure what to make of this minraise, but I had an easy call with pot and implied odds even if he were to show me aces. Flop is all bricks, he pushes for about 150 more, I call, and seat 1 folds. He flips over QQ, and I don't suck out. Just a few hands later, I raise QQ to 20 UTG, and I'm called again by seat 1 and minraised by the same guy. Now I know exactly what's going on, but I still have an easy call preflop. Flop comes A high, I check, and seat one leads. The minraiser folds, and I have a ridiculously easy fold. Mr. Minraise flashes KK after I do, and seat 1 flashes the A. Much, much later in the night, I get JJ one more time in EP, and I reraise to 50 after a boisterous black man (I'll talk more about him later) raises to 15 in front of me. I get called by Mr. Minraise in the SB (o rly?). Flop comes 789r, it's checked to me, and I elect to bet out about 80. I seriously considered just going for the free card, but I was worried about being outplayed on the turn by the black guy. Anyway, Mr. Minraise pushes, and I have an easy fold. I'd have to give some serious thought to even calling with KK there. That's the extent of my play with my PP's. If this is the best you can do with PP's in NL, it's EXTREMELY hard to have a good night. Suited connectors weren't much better for me, not that I got dealt many. 76o was one hand that I seemed to be getting disproportionaly much, though, and started looking like a good idea to call a raise with it in MP my cards were so bad.

Anyway, after having lost with a set, JJ, and then QQ in rapid succession, my stack was decimated. I had slowly worked my way up to a profit of about $700 on top of my $500 buy in at my peak, but even after having used up my rebuy chips after the T9s hand, I was down to a paltry $250 stack and I had to rebuy. I was back to $500 and ready to chase my roughly $500 in losses. And fortunately, things started to look up. I reraise AKs to 75 in the SB after a bunch of limpers and the college guy in seat 5 raised OTB. We had 3 or 4 to the flop of A84r in a huge pot. I bet out a hundred, the stragglers fold, and the button raises me to 200. I'm not really sure what I feel about this. There aren't any reasonable draws, and he almost certainly doesn't have two pair. This is AK, AQ, AJ, or a set, pretty much. After thinking for a bit, I decide that I'm better off if he calls my push now than if he either takes me all in on the turn, or if he calls my push on the turn. I push, and he hems and haws for a bit before folding. I rejoice at my new stack.

Not much later, I get ATs OTB, I raise to 30, and I get called in, like, 5 places, including by the SB, who's another horrible, horrible old Asian man named Mr. Lee. He's known by all the dealers and some of the other players, and he's been playing bad all night, but getting there enough to stay alive. I flop TPTK and then nut flush draw, and I bet out a hundo. Only Mr. Lee calls. I turn the nuts, bet 150, and Mr. Lee pushes. I beat him to the pot, and my nuts hold against his hand which was almost certainly drawing dead.

Not much after that, I get another AKs in LP in which I get to reraise and get 3 or 4 to the flop. I flop TPTK K's, and I take down a good pot with either a flop or a turn bet. I don't remember the details of this hand. AKs was the only hand that was really good to me all night.

Right about this point, it's about 7 pm, and there's a huge mob of people watching outside the small wall that partitions the poker area from the slots and the bar. They've been lighting off $1200 sattellites in rapid succession all night, and they're about the only thing that you can see from the wall (can't railbird inside the poker area), so everyone who was waiting for their turn at either the 1/2 or 5/5 NL game (a 4-5 hour wait at this point, or their donkament (another goodly wait). They seriously need a bigger room here. I elect to get dinner at this point, and fortunately, I can keep my seat, but just for an hour, and I have to pay time while I'm gone. See, the NL games don't take a rake. They just charge you ever half hour when a new dealer comes. For 5/5, it's $6/half hour. It works out to be pretty comparable to most rake rates, I estimate, but it is kind of scary to know exactly that the house is making $100-$120 per hour per table of this. I opt to eat at the pub again, this time getting the bbq chicken. It's nothing special, but I inhale it and get back to the tables.

And at this point, if I thought I was card dead before, that can't even compare to now. 92, 82, K8o, 73, T4. The rags just kept coming. I really, really had to force myself to fold KQo UTG that one time. I'd get free looks in the blinds most times, hit nothing, and fold. I took down a few small pots either after raising somthing no better that KJs preflop, cbetting, and taking it down, or I'd sometimes limp something marginal OTB and stab at the pot when it was checked to me. It was all I could do to break even. Maybe I should have switched into a hyperaggressive mode OTB for a few hands and just raised whatever crap I had to see if anyone actually was paying attention to me fold for orbit after orbit (not really), but it would still be me OTB with rags versus 5 very loose limpers and me hoping to get them to fold. There was seldom a "good spot" to play my position and the players instead of my cards because the table was just too loose. I'm also just not that good at NL yet, and completely unfamiliar with that style of play. I need more practice, and I wasn't anxious to try it out for the first time for fairly decent sums of money.

Around 10 or 11, things got interesting, not because I started catching cards, but because we got some new faces at the table. One, but least interestingly, was the woman who sat next to me here the first time I'd played at Fallsview. She was a regular, and she was much better than the standard player at this table, but I was certainly not afraid of her, either. We also got the boisterous black man I mentioned above. He sat down in the 10 seat with a stack of just over 1k, all in red. There were some initial objections due to the $500 max, but apparently he'd come from another table, so he could do it. This rule was different from the Turning Stone, where if you switch tables, you're considered a new player at the new table and have to buy in for no more than the max. If you get booted from a must move game to the main game, though, you have to keep your stack. Here, though, you have to keep your stack when you move. I'm not sure which rule I prefer. Anyway, this guy is quite talkative and looking for action. He talks about how aggressive he is, how he likes to overbet pots just to see what people will do, and how he likes to steal blinds. This is not the kind of player I really want to be dealing with at this point in my NL development, but he alone is certainly not reason enough to move. He might not even be good, and he could easily be a gold mine, even if he's harder to play against than Mr. Lee. The table is less than thrilled with this guy, since they just want to limp. He folds or steals the blinds for a few hands with PFR's of 40ish, and fortunately enough, he decides to start limping along with everyone else for the most part. He is happier playing poker with lots of limpers than just stealing blinds. Really, he wants to play many large pots all the time. (You see, I had lots of time to take notes on all this because I just kept folding hands, getting rags rags rags). This was exemplified in one hand he wasn't involved in, actually. I don't remember who raised preflop, if it was the tighter guy behind me in seat 8 or the ATM in seat 1 who was still around running very, very well. I think it was seat 1. Anyway, we get to a flop of AhKxQx, and seat 1 bets, and seat 8 calls. Turn is a Jh, and it's checked through. River is a brick, and it's checked through again. Seat 1 shows AJ, seat 8 shows KhQh. The black guy can't believe it, saying he would have put 200-300 into the pot on that turn with two pair and the royal draw, straight possibility be damned. He would be talking about this hand until he got obliterated and left (below).

Our wild fellow eventually moved to seat 5, right in front of me, a position I was pretty happy to have him in. I wanted to keep track of what he did, and in the event I actually encountered remotely playable cards, I planned to punish him. However, we got more new players to the table as tight guys behind me left. And these were not at all the kinds of guys I wanted to encounter. I got a young, nerdy looking guy sitting just behind me with whom it didn't take long to figure out that he knew what he was doing and played extensively online. We also got another shark in the 10 seat who had traveled up from FL for this tournament. And then we got another wild Canuck in the 9 seat. This guy was the most obnoxious player I'd ever played with. Every decision he made, including many preflop ones, was accompanied by needling any players involved in the hand with questions about their holdings looking for reads (I think I heard him say "Eh?" more in two hours that night than I had from the sum total of all the Canadians I'd hung out with this summer, and I was in Canada a lot this summer). He'd do the showboating where he'd partition off from his stack the chips necessary to call, and then shove in $200. I saw him minbet the flop and then come over the top huge. Every ridiculous "play" you'd ever seen made by obnoxious poker players, he made it, all accompanied by the requisite amount of hemming, hawing, showboating, chip-trick-fidgeting, and needling. The amount of penis waving this guy was doing was staggering. On the upside, he did buy the whole table a round of drinks, so I got a Hoegaarden off him for having to deal with his crap slowing down the game (no free drinks at Canadian casinos). He was only partially forgiven.

Anyway, once we had this new cast, things really started getting interesting. I wasn't liking this table much, but seats 1-4 were still veritable gold mines if I actually found a good spot to play a hand. Now, the hand. Seat 1, Mr. Minraise, and our boisterous friend in seat 5, limp to me in with 66, and I call in the CO. Nerdy button limps, too, SB checks, and our Crazy Canuck raises to 25 out of the SB, after talking about it for a while with seat 5. Seat 1 folds, Mr. Minraise calls, and seat 5 LRR's to 75 (o rly?). He was full of [censored] quite likely, but 66 still doesn't look good for that much preflop not closing the action against a guy who's already raised. I fold, as does the button. The CC blabbers and eventually folds, and Mr. Minraise calls (o rly?). Mr. Minraise open pushes for a hundred and change on the flop of 953, and seat 5 instantly calls, cracking Mr. Minraise's KK or QQ with 53s. Mr. Minraise leaves disgusted.

In one of the very next hand next hands, we get just about a limped family pot, and I limp K3s out of boredom and implied odds OTB. Flop comes 9[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]8[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img]4[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], and the Florida Shark (10/20 NL player on Bodog, according to him. If that's true, I presume he's slumming at 5/5 until he can get a seat at a higher limit) bets out 20. Seat 5 raises to 100 or so, I obviously fold, and the guy behind me raises to 300. Shark folds, and seat 5 calls, and it's pretty easy to start putting people on hands. The turn is either the T or the J of clubs, and Seat 5 takes the scrawny guy behind me all in. He instantly calls, and if you haven't figured out their hands by now, it's time to quit poker. River is a 9, and seat 5's crub frush gets pwnt by 88.

Next hand, the Crazy Canuk raises preflop, gets reraised by the Florida shark, and after the mandatory two minutes of yabbering about it, the CC makes the call. As he's needling the shark before the flop is dealt, the shark says something about "you're just going to check to me on the flop," presumably because the CC was already needling him about his flop play. Ugh. As he's saying this, the flop comes AKJ, and CC glances to see it and instantly says he's all in, waving his gigantic penis in the face of the shark who was so ridiculous to suggest he'd do such a girly thing as check. Shark instacalls and shows AK, which pwns CC's TT. WTF? CC rebuys for another 300.

Next hand, there may have not been some limps from the usual suspects, but the black guy raises, I fold something crappy, and it's folded to the CC who does his expected song and dance before coming over the top. Seat five reraises, and CC pushes. CC's AK pwns the black guy's KK with an A on the flop. Oops. For those of you keeping score at home, seat 5 has now just lost 800 in 3 hands, and the CC has been down 500 and up 300 in the spand of 2. Black guy is obviously shaken, but he doesn't go on tilt like I'd like him to. He starts playing regular old conservative poker. It's easier for me to play against him this way, but it's not like he starts spewing the last 700 in his stack for anyone to catch. Not like I had anything remotely good enough to catch it anyway. About a half hour later he finally leaves. He's replaced by a skaaaaanky older woman who's wearing a black mesh top with visible strapless bra, and hotpants. She also has disgusting teeth. Yes, she's right next to me.

Over the next half hour, the CC leaves for the 5/10 NL game, but he gets replaced by another guy who looks like he traveled in to kick ass in this tourney. Then ATM in seat 1 leaves, and Mr. Lee finally leaves. At that point, I know I'm just going to finish out my time and head out. It's 1 am when I finally do. I cash out and discover that I'm actually up about $130 for 11 hours of playing. It's better than minimum wage, I guess, and that set of winnings alone almost exactly paid for my expenses this trip, including the room, gas, tolls, and food. Most people don't get to have a fun weekend like that for free, and as bad as my luck was with respect to finding big hands, I'm pretty happy.

I thought that'd be enough time to get home w/o risking falling asleep at the wheel, but I was sorely mistaken. There was a big backup on the Rainbow Bridge getting back to the US. BTW, if you're ever going that way, always be in the left lane on the bridge. The way things work out, the left lane of the bridge tends to feed into 2-4 inspection booths, but the right one feeds into just one, maybe two. I chose wisely here (I knew about this having done it once before w/ Brad), but when it came time to choose which final line I pick to actually enter the US, I didn't do so well. Things were even at first, but then the guy in the booth started giving every car the third degree. He checked the trunks of 3 cars while I was there compared to 0 in the other lane I could have picked. Even when he wasn't inspecting trunks, he was asking a ton of questions. Seriously, I could have gotten through 6 cars earlier had I picked the other lane. Ugh. When he finally got to me, he wanted to know not only where I'm from, what I did and if I had anything to declare, he wanted to know exactly what I did, what I wanted to be when I grew up, how much I'd won at poker, everything. It sounded more like he was meeting me in a bar rather than finding out if I was a terrorist. It took me over an hour to get through it all. I get home at about 3:45 am, and I really should not have been on the road for the last 20 mins of that. I didn't run over any nuns or sideswipe any cops, though, so all is well.

I'm still down for my career at Fallsview, though, so I'll definitely have to go back and destroy that game next time [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].