I got up at my usual time today, around 6 PM. We were headed to Ballys to get drunk and maybe play some drunk poker. We got a seat in their 1/2 NL game pretty quickly.
I didn’t really like Ballys poker room. It didn’t consist of more than 6-7 tables max so it’s a small room. The chairs were very good, a lot better than at the Rio. The tables on the other hand, I hated the felt. It’s hard to describe, but it felt a lot softer than at Rio, meaning that cards were more often sticking to the felt, chips weren’t sliding the same way. I can’t believe that I at my fourth cash game session already talk about how minor differences of the table felt actually has an influence on my liking of the room, I shouldn’t be noticing this before I’d become a regular nit at a poker room.
I dumped about $450 at the table playing totally laggy, straddling, minraising, bluffing nits and everything… With no success. Most of my money ended up at Mikael and Rune so I guess it’s not totally wasted.
After leaving the poker table we went to play some video poker. Video poker is absolutely GREAT if you want to get drunk. You just sit up at the bar and play. While you play, drinks are on the house. I ended up being stuck about $60 playing jacks or better, but if you play it optimally (I did not) you can really get wasted for as little as $20.
After Ballys we were supposed to go the the Vodoo Bar at the Rio, but after a thorough consideration of our looks we came to the conclusion that there was no way in hell we were going to be let in. Oh well, some stayed at the video poker tables, I went with Helge and Thijs to the Rio cash games.
I got a seat at the 2/5 NL game right away (there’s never any queues at 2 AM). The table actually wasn’t that juicy, there were a couple of good players, and the rest weren’t exactly good, but they knew how to play. There were one real nit at the table. He was a typical WPT look a like, big glasses, cap, very serious look at his face all the time. He took like 5 minutes considering to call a $40 raise preflop, finally folding in a really provocative manner. He was so pissed with me since I constantly Mississippi straddled into his big blind, I was really working him up to a major steamer, unfortunately I never got his stack.
To my direct right was a totally wasted American, great guy. We chatted a lot, he was convinced that I was an online player on the Fortune network since he had this Danish guy from Aarhus that had his number dialed when he played online. I kept refusing it, but he didn’t really trust me. I had great success in manipulating his play by chatting to him through the hands, I got him to pay me off on my set in a pot of around $350.
There weren’t any really big hands this session. I won a lot of minor pots, winning a couple of okay pots with TPTK and so forth. All in all I worked my stack upwards of around $1k. I left at 6 AM since it was getting late and the table really wasn’t juicy any more. The wasted American had left, the WPT hero was becoming more and more nitty and there weren’t any real donators left.
I got an offer of $5k for 50% of my WSOP ME winnings that I declined. I can’t say if the offer really was for real, but my read on the guy was that he was the real deal. I declined it as I don’t really need $5k, and I believe that my current position is somewhat more worth. I mean, I’ve got about 3/4 average stack (18.5k / 26k-ish) and I don’t really feel outclassed yet.
Result for this session: $466
Overall cash game result: $1568