Poke ‘er
by phill
photo credit: greenapplegrenade
I finally succumbed to Kevin “Sav” Savige and Jon “Joe” Rabies Van Something’s insistence that I come to the Waterford Tavern on a Monday night to enter the free poker tournaments that they have there every week. I was pretty nervous, because all I’d ever played beforehand was with small groups of friends in a relaxed atmosphere. This was something like seventy people I didn’t know, in a pub I don’t regularly frequent, so I was getting a little sweaty until Kev offered the advice that it was free, people were friendly, and no-one cared if you fucked up too badly; they would take your chips off you whether you were an arsehole or a nice guy. Good point, said I, and proceeded to enjoy myself. I got my butt handed to me after about ten hands, but it was good fun. Definitely making it part of my regular outings. Neither Sav nor Joe got much further anyway, so I didn’t feel bad about bombing out early. This Friday marks my return to the regular poker sessions we have with the Curtin physics crew, and we’ve got a couple of cool things planned, including a blog with reviews of each player and game that I’ll be maintaining somewhere on this site. A new excuse to vomit more words on an e-page is fine by me.
Poker, to me, is something very interesting to participate in. I’ve been involved in a lot of games–from your traditional team sports like soccer, or baseball, to online team sports like Counterstrike, and strange ones like off-road rallying and orienteering–but nothing quite approaches the level of competition that people engage in when at a poker table. Maybe it’s the perfect blend of skill and luck that does it, not a lot of other games I’ve been involved in rely on luck as a mechanism (other than card games), much less a mechanism that can be overcome with mind games. With skill, the luck of the game becomes less and less relevant. It’s peculiar the way that some people can really get to you, and others not at all. It’s a very reflective game, in that everything that results is an indicator of your personality. You can tell a lot about a person from their strategy in a poker game: obvious stuff like whether they are able to bluff effectively or not, their aggressiveness, passivity, whether they are conservative, or take risks, whether they play the numbers, or bound in regardless of the stack of the deck. It’s about as close to war you can get in your living room.
Picked up the guitar I bought the other week and started picking at it a couple of days ago, starting once again from various 12-bar blues progression riffs. I got a program off Joe that can load tablature and he recommends learning a couple of songs like that to start with, so I’ll work on it slowly but surely. My fingerpads are getting ripped to shreds just from playing an hour or so a night, but maybe that’ll stop me biting them so much. Nah, doubt it.
No related posts.
Comments
Poker is indeed very interesting. The venue definitely matters:
Onlline – I reached a point where I was playing low stakes (5 or 10 dollar entrys) to either single table tourneys and winning more often than not, or entering 2 or so dollar multi tourneys (2500 people plus) and winning it outright or finishing top twenty, well within the money. At the same time, if I were to deposit 50 bucks right now, I bet I’d lose it all within 2 hours. Too much of a crapshoot. Some skill is involved but there are cheat programs, and I think it caters best to the mid-level strategists who are lucky enough to wind up on tables without bot programs/somebody playing 20 tables at once with a money edge.
Vegas – I played at the small poker room at the Monte Carlo. It was supposed to be a friendly room, but one guy showed up and was a total and complete ass to one of my friends. He tried to play through it, but it almost came to blows, so I had to pull him out of there. We wound up sitting at a Carribean Stud table at 5am much later, and he hit a hand that got him 1400 dollars. I lost my ASS at that table, despite doing well at that game on a small gambling cruise a few months earlier. The lessons?
1. Carribbean Stud is a game of pure luck. It’s a tourist game. But you can win.
2. If you wind up with the right asshole at your table, it might be impossible to brush it off as you should easily be able to do. This guy was digging and digging, and not in a good/friendly/professional way. The problem for him was that 3 of us were friends at the table and we all stood up and left, leaving him with only the small stacks of 3 old guys to plunder. He shit talked himself out of money.
Dog tracks. This is your goldmine. Old guys and working guys with a small amount of expendable income go there looking to just kill a few hours. They usually aren’t very schooled in the mechanics of poker and probably haven’t read Supersystem (Doyle’s book, which is the bible).
Meanwhile, if you know what you are doing, you can annihilate them. I bought in for 40 bucks and wound up wiping the table and in the meantime slipped my family chips…and walked away with over 300 dollars. Not high rolling, but considering the amount I gave away, it would have been an acceptable days work at about 600, for about 2.5 hours work. They hated me at that table, which always becomes a risk as you win more. Know when to walk away with their money.
Casinos outside of vegas. I play at a Hard Rock in my area. I’ve had varying success – usually losses, but I expect to lose. Some bad beats, etc. But overall, I know it’s fair, and if I lose it’s my own damn fault for chasing shit. You won’t find people who are pros at getting inside your head at 2nd rate casinos; it’s not worth it to them. Also, you can win. I’ve walked out with 300 plus – again, not big numbers, but you can feel good about that if you’re playing limit hold ‘em.
Guitar – practice, practice, etc. The same shit over and over. Tedious, but worth it. Once you get those basics down ( chords, not scales), you’ll find yourself tooling around with them in your own creative way. That’s when it becomes cool.