Busto in Budapest (and Prague): A Trip Report

[goofyballer]

...Well, almusto, then I kinda robustoed.

After dinner, where our waiter kindly informed us that there's a 10,000 forint minimum (forint is the Hungarian currency, ~180ft = $1 US, thus $55 minimum whereas our dinner was $33) to use a credit card and thus forced me to wait for like 15 minutes while my mom went to find an ATM, I felt like playing some poker on my last night in Budapest. Matt, an American expat living in Prague who I met at the casino inside the Hilton there, had recommended the Tropicana Casino to me, and it just happened to be 3 short blocks from my hotel, so I walked over with $400 USD and 3,700 Czech crowns ($185 US) in my pocket.

As I walked in, I was directed to the reception where I had to sign up to get a player's card. This cost 3000ft ($17), which was refunded to me in the form of a special 3000ft chip that had some Hungarian phrase I didn't understand on it (as opposed to their regular chips, were just like you would expect; they said "Tropicana Casino" and then "1000 HUF" or whatever the denomination is). I walked over to the poker room and saw one game going, 500-1000ft (almost $3-$6) PLHE with a 50,000ft minimum buyin. I got on the list and waited for about 30 minutes before a seat vacated; I was 3rd on the list, so I didn't take it and waited for a floor to tell me to sit. Finally a player at the table told me "just take the seat" (most people in Hungary seem to speak decent English, though all table conversation was in Hungarian at the time), so I took my $400 USD to the cashier to get some chips.

Both casinos I've played at in Europe have the same procedure; you give them a certain amount of foreign money, they'll give you a crappy exchange rate on it (I got 173ft:$1 when the real rate right now is like 181ft:$1) and a receipt, which you can use to get your foreign money back at the same rate later on. When I signed up for the 3000ft fee, I had given them $20 and gotten 3450ft (the special chip + 450 forints, which was worthless), so I had a receipt for that, and now I had another receipt for the 69,200ft my $400 got me as well.

I walked back to the table with my 72,650 in chips only to discover that while I was gone some dude who was apparently ahead of me on the list had come back to the table and taken the seat, so I got to wait some more. Finally the 8 seat opens up, and I sit down.

Play is, as you would expect, not that great. A couple people seem to have a clue, and then other people are showing down [censored] like K2o in raised pots. I get in a slight bit of trouble early on when I discover that the 50k and 10k chips the cashier gave me do not in fact play, and I had to change them down to 5k chips; fortunately I had only been folding up to that point, so no harm done. I also discover that my special colorful 3k chip is only good at pit games, so I can't use that either. I start out losing pretty solidly; I call a raise with 7d6d for 3k from some evil nit lady who I saw slowplay AA preflop earlier (flat calling BB behind a raise and three callers is SO TRICKY, and then gets even trickier when you lead-call the T97dd flop and go busto to top set). Flop 632 one diamond, nit lady leads 3k again (YOU BET THE SAME AMOUNT YOU RAISED PRE, THEREFORE U WHIFFED!), old dude I have no read on calls, I call. Turn is another 3, nit lady checks, old dude bets 10k, there's like 30k in the pot at this point so I call, nit lady folds, river 9 check check TT is good you passive old nitbox.

I call a couple more raises and whiff, then finally I get ATcc in middle-ish position. I open to 4k behind one limper, three people call. Flop is T54dd. Someone checks, I bet 11 or 12k, guy to my left calls, button shoves for 28k total. I'm more worried about dude to my left than button, finally I decide to just shove cause [censored] it, I'm short. Guy to my left grumbles and folds, villain flips over A9dd and ships it with a diamond turn. Gay.

My stack now down to like 15k, I cheerfully ask the table where the nearest ATM is. A young guy says 10 meters to the left outside the casino; wtf, how long is a meter? I go outside, construction is going on on both sides of the street and no ATM is in sight, so I end up walking what I estimated to be about 150 meters to a Citibank, of which there are many in Europe. I had taken my mom's ATM card since she rigged it to not get charged ridic fees, pull out 50,000ft ($278), and head back to the casino.

I get chips for my 50,000ft and also pull out 3,500 crowns, earning me 29,500 more forints and my third receipt. I take my chips and go back to the poker room aaand...wtf?!?!

The game has moved from table 1 from table 2 with no explanation; my chips are alone on table 1. I mean, wtf, I was gone for like 5 minutes!! Ok, maybe ten. I'm told that table 2 is a 1k-2kft game with a 100k minimum buyin, and I have little interest in playing $6-$12 PL in some foreign currency that I don't even have enough of so I set out on trying to cash back my chips. My receipts at this point are as follows:
- 3450ft for $20
- 29500ft for 3,500 crowns
- 69200ft for $400

...and I have a total of 93,800 forints, meaning I can't quite get all my money back. [censored]. Not only this, but when I actually inspect the new game it appears to actually be 500-1000, even after two floorpersons told me it was 1k-2k. WTF!! THANKS FOR KICKING ME OUT [censored]

I give back 69,200ft to get my $400 USD back. I take my special green chip, head to the nearest roulette table, and put it on black; I win! Sadly, I was only given 3000 new forints; my unmarked chip remained on the table. Apparently the only way I could get rid of it was to bet it and lose...so rigged. I win one more spin on black before losing it, so at least that was a positive endeavor. I cash in the 3450ft, leaving only my crowns remaining; I ask the cashier if I can just get part of my money back at the same rate, he says I have to have all of it, and I was 2350ft short of being able to get my crowns back. That can only mean one thing: MARTINGALE TIME!

Since I've never really played roulette before, I was trying to figure out how to communicate to someone who speaks broken English that I want to bet exactly 2,350 forints on something when I don't have exact change for it, cause I didn't want to have to hand the dude like 5000 forints and then deal with those fake roulette chips because that just seemed confusing. Before I could arrive at a conclusion, the poker room dude saw me and said "You play Texas Hold'Em?" and I saw a few people sitting at a table. I asked "new game?" and he said "five players" and that sounded good so I went to go sit. Of course, this also means that I had to go back to the cashier and cash the $400 I'd worked so hard to re-obtain back into forints. I returned to the table with chips, only to discover that the game actually now had three players (including me) and what the dude was saying was that they need five players minimum to start a game. We sat around waiting for like 40 minutes before a couple more guys sat and we could get going.

Just one hand I remember from the start of that game: someone minraises UTG to 2k, I call OTB with 97ss, 3 or 4 to the flop. A76, checked around. Turn 8, BB bets 3k, UTG calls, I call with 8,724 outs. River J, checked around, BB open-mucks, UTG turns QQ and I muck.

Right around this time I had ordered a water (both here and in Prague I'd only seen people ordering non-alcoholic drinks from cocktail waitresses, and I didn't want to be the alcoholic American that ignorantly asked if they serve beer, plus being drunk by yourself when everyone else is speaking a language you don't understand isn't that fun anyway); apparently in Europe you need to be very specific about these kinds of things, because they won't give you ice unless you ask for it and I got sparkling water (which is gross) instead of regular water. Next time around I asked for "water, no gas (apparently that's European for "not sparkling"), with ice"; it still tasted like it had gas. Very fishy. Shortly thereafter, Matt the American from Prague showed up with his buddy Tomas, who I also met in Prague (nationality unknown, he speaks English very well though); he'd told me he was gonna be in Budapest so I thought I might run into him. They both sat at my table, though across from me, which made me sad because I was getting so lonely surrounded by foreigners. Tomas ordered a water with no gas and ice, and it came without ice and he said it tasted like it came out of a toilet. So yeah, I guess that's something to watch out for at the Tropicana. I stuck with Cokes for the rest of the night. You can't mess up Coke.

Right when the two of them showed up, and right as I got delivered my 2nd water (tasted like toilet), I picked up ATdd in the SB. Some loose guy had limped, so I potted to 4k. He called. HU to flop of A76ss. I bet 7k into 9k pot, he calls. Turn Qx, I lead 15k into 23k pot, he calls. River Jx with 55k in the pot; his line screams draw (all of which whiffed), or MAYBE a very passively played two pair like A6 or 76. AJ is prob in his range too, but other than that I think I'm ahead like always and he's been playing aggressively enough that I can probably bluffcatch. I check, he bets 25k and I turboinstajedicall. He's so embarrassed at the ownage that just happened that he simply throws away his cards. Finally, I win a decent pot!

I think I put the dude on semi-tilt cause from that point on he calls EVERY single raise I make preflop. Or maybe he's just too loose and sucks at poker...yeah, that's more likely. Anyway, later he makes it 3k UTG, three people call, I re-pot in SB with AKo to 19k. He calls, everyone else folds. I have 100k more behind, he covers. Flop KJ8r. I...am not really sure how to play this. Bet-fold is gross, so I guess I can bet-call or bet-shove turn if he calls, and I can't really decide if I want to try to let him bluff and c/r AI. Eventually I just throw 30k out there and he grumbles about what a crappy flop it was and folds.

Next hand I have AKo OTB and pot to 6k behind limpers, like 3 people call lol people are bad at poker. I whiff and fold on the turn.

Last semi-interesting hand: Tomas opens to 3k, Matt calls in position, I call in BB with Q8cc. Flop is 942cc, checked around. Tomas c-bets pretty aggressively so I'm fairly sure he doesn't have a hand at this point. Turn is 7x. I check (could lead here, but didn't really feel like it at the time), Tomas bets 7k, I'm fairly sure he's FOS so after Matt folds I raise to 22k, he folds relatively quickly.

Eventually Tomas goes over to the main game and our game slowly but surely breaks up; rather than wait for a seat in the main game to open up, I decide to just head home. I have about 165k forints, meaning that I can cover my two receipts (for $400 USD and 3700kc), the 50,000ft I owe my mom, and still have a little (like $80) profit on top! I head over to the cashier to try to get a rack so I can carry my chips over.

I feel I should preface this by discussing the Hungarian language. It's probably the weirdest language in all of Europe; Czech is pretty high up there too, but it's still part of the Slavic language family and is thus related to other European languages like Slovakian, Polish, Serbian, and Russian. The Magyars (Hungarians, who may have been thusly named when mistaken for Huns when they arrived in Europe in 896 AD) originated somewhere in Asia and thus have a super weird language to accompany them; it's most closely related to Finnish, but even that is stretching it a bit. Learning just about any pieces of it for the purposes of my visit seemed like it wouldn't be worth the effort; even the one time I tried saying "köszönöm" ("thank you"; the ö sound is apparently like the "ea" in "earth", and putting that sound in between consonants three times is just awkward; also, "sz" is pronounced like "s" and "s" is pronounced like "sh", so that's fun) to a cocktail waitress was laborious and probably induced laughter from her when she walked away from the table. So, I have no idea if it's similarly difficult for Hungarians to understand us English speakers. Also, I'm certainly grateful that they speak any English to begin with since I'm the foreigner in their country and if anything I should be learning how to speak their language, so I don't blame them or anything; it's just interesting to think about and kinda funny.

I asked the cashier for a rack, and he looked at me blankly. "You know, plastic thing, carry chips, I have lots of chips in the poker room"; he still looked blank. There was a pile of racks on the back wall of the room, so I pointed at them and said "those", he still didn't get it (and he did speak English since this was the guy that helped me change my USD and crowns like 7 times already tonight). He yells something in Hungarian to another floor dude, who comes over and asks me in English if he can help me; I ask for a rack, he says "two percent", I'm like "what?", he says "the rake in the poker room, it's two percent." I say "no, I need a rack, a plastic thing, to carry chips, those" as I pointed at the racks again. Finally the cashier dude picks up one of the racks and I say "yeah, that" and the exchange is done with. So, that's my language barrier story for the day. I cash my two receipts back in (while being fairly sure that the guy cashing in my receipts for the 7th time that night hates my guts), along with the 65,000 extra forints in my stack. Hungarian money is kinda cool, it has these metallic strips near the edge and the dealer had a little blacklight thing at the table which apparently checks the strips for authenticity. Plus European money in general tends to have cooler pictures than just people's heads. It's only like 1am so I'm a little disappointed to be done so early, but after being so stuck and having to go to the ATM like a busto-ass degenerate I guess it's cool to have made some forints. Now I just have to figure out how I'm going to cash these things into dollars before I go back to Prague.

Part 2:

It turns out that my mom used the 65,000 forints (50,000 of which belonged to her since I took it out of the ATM) to pay for most of our hotel bill. I can't really complain since she'd been paying for most stuff over here, but still, I mean, that's poker winnings yo. We took the train back to Prague, which was a 7 hour ride and I fell in love with a Czech girl that actually wasn't even that hot compared to most Czech girls cause of her face, but was still probably a 7 and had legs for miles and a perfect waist-hips combo. However, despite my best efforts for seven freaking hours, we didn't make eye contact once. Her failure to return my many furtive glances must mean either that we had bad timing at exchanging our many furtive glances at each other, or that she did not share the feelings I had for her. I hope it wasn't the latter. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] We went through Bratislava, where another Czech or Slovak guy got on and joined our car, totally ruining my mojo. What a cockblock. Anyway, we eventually arrive in Prague and go to the taxi stand. A bunch of dudes are sitting around, one of them asks us "Taxi?", my mom says "yeah, how much will it be to go to Parzhížská because that's where we're staying and Prague cabbies are notorious for ripping off tourists. He says "I have meter in car" like that's supposed to make us feel safer. Sadly, we are pathetic American tourists, so it does, and somehow we are surprised when the meter (which wasn't visible from the backseat) reads 800kc, or $40, for this weakass trip. Yeah, we got owned. I sure showed him when I didn't give him a tip though! Yeah, that'll teach him!

So yeah, I'm now in Prague and once again busto from hotel bills and cab rides. What it do.

[EmpireMaker2]

I didnt read that but stay at the four seasons in prague and hit up the huge nightclub by the bridge

[LGeneral]

[ QUOTE ]
I didnt read that but stay at the four seasons in prague and hit up the huge nightclub by the bridge

[/ QUOTE ]

that huge nightclub is also one of the best nightclubs ive been to

[David LoPan]

tl; dr
dont care

[BarryLyndon]

Goofy,

It's kinduv endearing how you treat a fairly boring trip report which includes vacation with mom with the same level of dignity and interest as you do one where you try to [censored] some hottie. Nice job, though I hardly read this past the 2nd paragraph.

Barry

[Georgia Avenue]

Great story dude. But geez why travel with just your mom? Hard to have fun when you have to hang out with her...Anyway, go out to bars and talk to american chicks when you get alone time, plese don't gamble anymore.

Sigh.
gl.
--GA

[holy32]

Nice read.

[ QUOTE ]
Next time around I asked for "water, no gas (apparently that's European for "not sparkling"), with ice"; it still tasted like it had gas.

[/ QUOTE ]
tsk, tsk... americans...

[stealyourface]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I didnt read that but stay at the four seasons in prague and hit up the huge nightclub by the bridge

[/ QUOTE ]

that huge nightclub is also one of the best nightclubs ive been to

[/ QUOTE ]

that club is whack, go to Kross Klub in nadrazi holesvice

[dersl]

eastern europe tr and no stories about hookers? im disappointed

[prodonkey]

"sparkling" water is like the nastiest [censored] ever.. no clue how people can drink it.