Saturday morning I was running around like crazy trying to take care of errands and get a few things done before I got to this poker tournament at a friend’s (kind of) house. I really didn’t know what to expect as I’ve never hung out with this guy before, only played basketball with him. It was at his house in Burbank, which is in the valley east of Los Angeles. In my typical fashion, I was about an hour late.
When I got to the house they hadn’t started yet. As noted on the flyer in the previous blog entry, it states that the tournament fee is $60. $50 for the tournament and $10 for food and drinks. Because I woke up late on Saturday, I didn’t get a chance to eat before I got to the tournament. The way I had it figured out, this guy should have some pizza, maybe some hot dogs and burgers on the grill. I mean you got 25 people paying $10 each for food and drink. $250 should provide some food, right?
Wrong.
There was one tinfoil trey of carne asada that was all but gone and some tortilla chips. However, there was a keg and a large assortment of beer choices. The only problem was that I was starving and didn’t plan on drinking at this particular function. So basically it’s over for me and eating lunch. I did get one carne asada taco in my stomach before the cheese fell into the beer cooler. Everyone else just ate beer for lunch. And dessert.
It turns out the tournament was held in this guy’s backyard. He advertised it as, and I quote from the flyer, “NFL Draft will be on all the TVs.” Probably to my own fault, I’m picturing two plasmas in the living room with the draft going on. Wrong. We’re working with one 17-inch TV playing the draft in a corner of the garage. The tournament was actually held in his driveway and garage.
But enough with the negative stuff, there were many good things about this tournament.
1) 24 people showed up and there were re-buys, meaning if someone lost their chips, they could buy into the tournament again (see: extra $$$).
2) The players, for the most part, were horrible. My first table was almost too good to be true.
3) Almost everyone except for myself was drinking. Meaning that once we had played for five hours, most of the players would be tipsy as hell.
4) Everyone was real cool and friendly. It turned out to be a lot of fun.
At my first table we had the following players:
1) Classic loud-mouth guy who tries to play like a bully and refuses to let anyone else bully him. He goes all-in constantly and let’s the world know when he wins. This guy was hilarious and at the same time obnoxious. He told multiple people to “Suck it, bitch!” and I was the beneficiary of both of his buy-ins. Apparently he is the maintenance guy at the host’s workplace. He’s a 6’5” bald white guy that pounds beers like they’re liquid gold. It was like having our very own Stone Cold Steve Austin playing with us.
2) Fugly female who thinks she is sexy, is constantly getting hit on by the drunk players at the table and thinks she is the best poker player in the world. She quickly was given the nickname “Breasted Assassin” and she loved it. The temperature reached about 95 degrees that day so naturally she was wearing a too-small-for-TV tank top that allowed her gut to hang out with us as an extra player.
3) Weedhead from Washington. No, this wasn’t me. This was another guy who was clearly a space cadet and was relentless in discussing famous athletes that have come from Washington with me. He was a real nice guy and not a bad player, just very spaced-out. Let’s just say he was a big Bob Marley fan. I actually doubled him up when the flop came 10-7-3 and he had pocket kings and I had pocket jacks. It was the last hand before we took a break so that sucked. The funny thing about that hand was that Stone Cold Steve Austin Jr. actually flopped two-pair with 10-7 and we both called his all-in but the turn was another king. I was happy to see the Stoner take the pot over Stone Cold.
4) Nice guy who wants to make friends with everyone. This guy was sitting next to me and never stopped telling me how good I was playing. Not much to say about him except he was a cool guy and talked a lot. He never beat me in a pot because he talked so damn much that I knew exactly what was going on with his hand every time. If he has a monster, he stops talking all of a sudden. If he has anything but a monster, he is telling me his life story.
5) Quiet guy who never plays any hands. These type of players, you can never remember any of the pots they’re in but you see their chip stacks deplete slowly but surely. Then they get a half-decent hand like JJ and push it all in and lose. This is what happened to this guy.
So as this tournament went on, I found that these players were not good. We eventually got down to nine people and I had about 5000 in chips, with the average being about 2.5k. I was looking good but my demise was near. I had a hard time figuring the stoner out all day. He played the pocket kings on me so weakly that I never put him on them. He was always in pots with me and seemed to be pretty good at reading me. Then I have ace king in the hole and I flop the ace. Two hearts are on the board. Basically, he pushed on a flush draw, I called and he hit it on the river. Typical. He and his boys do a little celebration jig they stole from Chad Johnson and then they go to take a smoke break. In all honesty, I was fine losing to this guy. He told me he had no job and was a real nice guy who had similar tastes in sports and music as myself. I later found out that he won the whole tournament so at least my chips went to good use.
Overall this tournament was cool. By the time I had left there are three white guys with no shirts on playing beer pong on one of the empty poker tables, Stone Cold is handing out bad beats left and right in a $.025/0.50 no limit cash game and proclaiming that he’s the best ever, while the Breasted Assassin is telling him that he sucks and stoner and his boys are lighting up cigaweed in the front of the house.
It didn’t turn out how I planned, but it was another experience nonetheless. Oh yeah, needless to say I did not meet my weekend goal.
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