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#109 – Prisoner of the Bellagio, Part VI – Sick of Poker, or Just Sick

Posted by Editor | Filed under Bellagio, Me in live tourneys

[This was written from notes of my experience in the $1,000 Bellagio tournament on Friday, April 6.]

The night before the start of the Bellagio Five Star, I decided to see if my luck and good play continued by entering the Friday night $1,000 tournament at the Bellagio. Standing in line only a few minutes before the 7:15 PM start, I believed I was jinxed by a discussion that took place in front of me.

“Are you signing up for tonight’s event or tomorrow’s?”

“Both.”

“Both, are you crazy? Don’t play both. If you’re playing tomorrow, play some cash tonight or don’t play at all. Don’t sign yourself up for a late night then expect to play your best tomorrow at noon.”

The instant I paid my thousand plus juice, all I could think about was that I was overplaying, hurting my chances tomorrow with every hand I played tonight. Worse, I got a call just before the tournament started from Roxana, Ted Forrest’s girlfriend. Ted had just woken up and if I wanted to come by and visit them, I could at any time. So now I was also thinking that if I wasn’t playing this rotten tournament, hurting my chances for tomorrow, I could be visiting with my friends.

Great frame of mind to start, right? I’d like to tell you that I soared to great heights from such a negative mental state, but I played exactly how I felt. With 5,000 starting chips and 40 minute levels, there is plenty of time to be patient and build a stack, but not for me. I was shoveling out chips like they had the ebola virus, losing half of them by early in the second level.

And naturally, when I’m feeling crummy, it seems like everything at my table stinks. Several players are underbetting every pot they play. Several others are overbetting every pot they play. I’m having trouble calibrating the strategic changes I need to make with these players, and there are a couple guys who WILL. NOT. STOP. TALKING.

The guy in Seat 6 started from the first hand. He made a straight on the turn but a third suited card appeared on the river and the woman in Seat 4 led out, betting 500. Seat 6 put his head down and mumbled, “I know you got there, take it,” as he tossed a 500-chip in front of him.

She heard “take it” and mucked her hand. So they had to call the floor. The dealer held her cards under his left palm and the floorman had him turn them over. They were, as she said, 6-Ts for the flush, and she took the pot. Seat 6 had to spend the next several (it seemed like a thousand) hands apologizing yet not apologizing. And then every hand he played, he had to make reference to the straight he made getting beaten by a flush on the river. And whenever Seat 4 played a hand, he would call, reminding us, “I’ll play with you any time. I’m on a freeroll after not going broke on the first hand.”

Then there was the guy in Seat 2, who came in late and called one of Seat 4’s small raises, calling her small bet after a flop of A-7-3 and folding after her bet on the turn. He insisted on theatrically folding what he told everyone was two pair. A couple players took up his joke, so he spent the rest of the night – I swear, just about every hand – insisting that he folded two pair. When the son of Seat 4 came by, he made a great show of telling him that he folded two pair to the young man’s mother, so great a player she was.

I finally got moved to a table where I was shoehorned in but ignored the discomfort after getting action with pocket kings and pocket aces. As I approached the first break at 9:20 PM with 10,000 chips, I realized I had a splitting headache, probably because I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Folding my final hand before the break, I mused what the coroner’s office would think of a man starving to death with a pocket full of comp meal tickets.

On the fifteen minute break, I took off for Snacks, a stand-up place in a corner of the Bellagio that probably has Las Vegas’s most expensive and best casino fast food. Grab a hot dog, eat it on the way back, and return in complete control of my faculties, ready to stick it to these guys.

“This comp is good for a lot more than a hot dog,” the helpful woman at the counter told me. Eventually, I got a hot dog, a bowl of chili, a piece of cheese cake, a cookie, and a gigantic bottle of water.

Unfortunately, this took so long that I missed the first ten minutes after the break. Wedging myself into my seat – the guys on either side, seeing my absence, encroached significantly on my already diminished borders – I realized I barely had room to look at my hole cards, much less eat a meal. After losing a couple thousand while wrestling with bags and containers, I stepped away and inhaled the hot dog, nearly choking.

That was all I needed to lose the rest of my chips. I was gone before indigestion set it, and set in it did.

On the positive side, however, I had freed myself up for a visit to Ted and Roxana.

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