Oklahoma
is burning. At right is a view of sunset Sunday as I drove to Newcastle to give
the poker room there a try. That's not fog. That's dust and smoke. The wind
was brutal that day. Today, my first day back to work after 11 glorious days
off, it was warm and clear - but I could smell the smoke from the fires in the
air.
Send rain, please.
I love the Newcastle poker room. Out of sight and reach of smokers and the din of the slot room. The bathroom is a step away and they have Shufflemasters installed in the tables. They are only spreading hold-em now, but will be starting Omaha soon as well as tournaments. After a few hours of play, I noticed another nice "feature" - not a single person who sat down at my table had a wad of chewing tobacco in their cheeks. Suhweet.
Oh, and I managed to do this:
Which
is a remarkable achievement in of itself (best. 3/6 session. ever.), but when
you consider this was accomplished while a luckbox in the 9s who not even CJ
could measure up to, amassed even a larger stack - well, I was thoroughly amazed.
Said luckbox and suckout queen saw, oh I'd say, roughly 98% of the flops (when
she finally folded a hand pre-flop, I desperately wanted to ask her what hand
was there she considered unplayable) and she hit and hit and hit and....
Helping her along was a table filled with naive players, so quite often her bottom pair would win over 6 or 7 high card only hands. I kept wondering when the heck variance was going to smack her upside the head and she'd start bleeding it back. That didn't happen until the tail end of the session. She'd colored up earlier in the evening - five black chips with a little more than a full rack of whites for change. She finally bled away all of the whites, held out the 5 remaining black chips in her hand, and asked the dealer if she should continue playing or quit. Of course he couldn't answer, but he gave her a look that was an obvious message. She quit. I was sorry to see her go.
While my stack grew (at much slower rate than Ms. Luckbox'), I kept wondering when variance was going to smack me upside the head, too. It wasn't happening. I finally left when the table was shrinking and I felt a bit of fatigue creep in - I did not want to be on the road in too tired of a state. It was near 2 AM.
A nice start to the New Year, I'd say. Now if I can only do the same with the remaining 79¢ I have on Poker Stars.....
