Life and Times of a Poker Addict

I'm about two and a half hours into Event #1 of the Borgata Winter Poker Open and the best hand I've seen to this point is A5 suited. Meanwhile two poker players of equine capability at the table are accumulating stack upon stack, calling all-in with A4 offsuit on an 885 board where the pot has been raised, and the original raiser has now check-raised them all-in. To sum up, frustrating. And then I got it. Pocket nines, the Hellmuth, 9s9c... and I had to pitch it when they guy in front of me made a larger than normal raise, with what turned out to be Kings. And that, readers, sums up my four and a half hour foray into Event #1. A whole lot of nothing punctuated by having to pitch the best hand I got the entire time.

I finally got knocked out in the middle of level five, about four and a half hours in and somewhere around 560th of the nearly 1400 entrants. Quite frankly, I'm just impressed that I actually made it that deep given the cards. Since the Borgata poker room was about 400 people deep, a bunch of us ended up heading over to the Trop to play some cash games later that night. I got Aces cracked for one half of my stack and Kings cracked for the other half, and there was about six hours of poker in between that which amounted to my stack vascillating between $150 and $180. So after running horrible all week up to AC and then a ridiculously card dead Friday, I packed it in for the week.

Stayed in the room and chilled out and didn't do much of anything on Saturday except try and beat this cold that's been dogging me for like a week and a half. Got up on Sunday at like 3am, felt a little better and headed down to the poker room at the Borgata where thankfully, the list had finally evaporated. I ended up giving the $2-5 NL game a shot and it ended up being the highlight of my trip. Not only did I make about $700 for the session but I got a guy on tilt for about six hours.

I have previously written about the mystical powers of TiltBoy Footloose and his magic hand of 47. Well, after the horrible week of cards and not much getting going on the $2-5 table, I look down in middle position to find 4c7c. Since I haven't played a hand in like 30 minutes, I figure I'll try and trade on my table image a bit and raise it up to $20 and get heads up with the big blind. The flop comes down 10 5 6 rainbow and it's about the best i could hope for other than flopping the nuts. The big blind has the lead and fires $20 and I smooth call. The turn is a beautiful red 3 completing my straight and he leads out again, this time for $40. I smooth call again. The river is another 10 and as soon as it hits I can see him sit up a little straighter. Now when he goes to make his bet he's much more deliberate, so I know this ten is about to get me paid off. He fires out $70 and looks over at me. I've been chatting with the guy next to me most of the time and when the guy was loading up for the river bet I whispered to him that my opponent wasn't gonna like this. He looked at me and mouthed, "4 7?" I nodded and then I put on my best semi-confused look, stared at the board for a minute, looked at my opponent again... and then I put the rest of my stack in, another $150 on top. He doesn't hesitate to call and I turn over the Footloose and the guys face is completely blank.

"7 high?"
"It's a straight." (moment of recognition as his A10 offsuit suddenly shrivels up and dies.)
"You raised with 74?" (in a slightly agitated voice)

At this point I put on my most serious face, stopped stacking all my chips and looked the man dead in the eye and said:

"It was suited."

And that my friends, is how you put someone on tilt for an entire session.