The Best Laid Plans...

…of mice and Rick, often go awry...

Well, work is crazy today, but I wanted to take a minute and post an overview of the past week in Atlantic City. To save time, I will just post a typical day, rather than the specifics of each day. The results are the same, only the hands and opponents vary slightly.

Early Morning
Feel good, feel confident. I’m ready to begin the tourney du jour and start scooping some chips!

Late Morning
The tourney has begun, and an hour or two into it, I’m actually the chip leader and captain at my table. My good hands have held up, and I’ve made a couple of nice power plays to take pots away from better hands. Every time I look up at the board, another dozen or so players have busted out. If things keep going well, I’ll make the money!

Early Afternoon
I have no chance to make the money. I’ve continued to get the chips in with the best hand, only to get sucked out on by players who called over-sized turn bets while getting horrible pot odds drawing to straights and flushes. In this respect AC is no different than Raleigh. I nurse a short stack for a while, but it’s just a matter of time before I’m off to the cash games…

Late Afternoon
I’m at the cash game table, mostly playing $2-5 NLHE, with a $500 buy-in. The table is a mixture of donkeys and good local players. I play fairly tight and slowly build my stack up to $700-800 or so before the suckout gods find me again. Rebuy.

Early Evening
Screw this, I’m getting hungry. We go and put a bad beat on the buffet.

Late Evening
I go and try my luck again, but sadly, it’s just more of the same. I can probably count four or five times I put any significant amount of chips into a pot when I was behind (and a couple were nut flush draws in multi-way pots where I obviously knew I was behind, but was getting a great price). I can also remember only four or five times when I went in ahead and actually won the hand. I give up, time to go to sleep and try again tomorrow.

I played so much poker that all the bad beats kind of ran together. One tournament hand sticks out, however. I was the big stack at my table in a $500 buy-in event, and I look down at J-J in middle position. I make a normal raise, and the button and big blind (second or third in chips) both call. Flop comes J-5-5. Oh, Baby! BB checks, and I check to the button, who has been fairly aggressive. He makes a bet of about ¾ of the pot, the BB raises (sweet!), and I pause for a minute and decide to smooth call, hoping the button pushes in. He doesn’t, and folds instead (he was clearly trying to buy the pot). Flop brings either a 2 or 3, I can’t remember which, and the BB leads out with a large bet. I make a min-raise, and he comes back over the top. He’s pretty much pot-committed at this point, so I go ahead and put him all-in. He calls and turns over 5d-6d, and his jaw drops as I turn over my jacks full. Of course, in keeping with the theme of the week, the one-outer 5 comes on the river, giving him quads and putting me on life support yet again. The entire table let out a collective moan when the five hit, but I just sat in silence, well-conditioned by years of similar beats.

Though I lost money overall, the trip itself was a great experience. Next time I’ll be playing cash games at Borgata, which is 100 times nicer than the dumpy Taj. The action seemed to be a lot better there as well, and half-naked cocktail waitresses add to the, um, ambiance. Most of them made me feel like I was wearing 3-D glasses.

I think the main thing I learned is to go ahead and push in on the turn when I know I have the best hand. Most of these donkeys clearly don’t understand the relatively simple math involved in calculating pot odds and implied odds. Even though in the long run, you’ll obviously come out ahead by giving them, say, 2.5:1 pot odds on their 4:1 draw, that gives you no consolation when it costs you your chance in the tournament when they connect. I’ll be content to win lots of smaller pots, and I’ll attempt to only get into confrontations with stacks much smaller than mine.

I'm looking forward to the next trip, hopefully for the Borgata Open in January. Until then, I'm back home where I can start rebuilding my bankroll through Dave. Yeah, I know, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but it beats sitting at home and watching Love Boat reruns...

See ya at the tables!
Rick