Had to triple check but I actually found an old (pretty hilarious) poker blog I used to write. Here is a long and the story I wrote about my first ever casino trip which was back in the spring of 2012:
https://runningnines.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/casino-trip-1-boardwalk-empire/
In my entire life, I have only taken four trips to a Casino to play poker, all in the span of May 2012 to January 2013. I say only four times because the amount of time I spend either reading about, watching online, or organizing my own games is enough that you would think I might just head out to Atlantic City a little more frequently. The truth is that going to a casino, and certainly the organized culture surrounding gambling more generally, is still a pretty scary thing to me. Those images, steeped in popular culture, of the husband coming back to his family announcing that he’s lost the deed to their only home are ingrained in my memory banks. I love poker but I refuse to lose money playing it.
Everyone, no matter how good, loses money playing poker of course. It is a game of skill no question, but it contains enough of a luck factor that anyone can have a bad day. I lose money plenty of days whether at our weekly $20 home games or our big monthly $100 tournaments at the restaurant, but what I mean to say is that I will not put myself in a position to lose more than my “bankroll” can handle. That bankroll, hovering around $2500 right now, (net winnings since I started playing in early 2011), is hard to lose at our local games, impossible even I might argue. Not so at a casino where $200-$300 is a pretty standard buy-in even at the lowest stakes, and where if you lose that initial buy-in, you have a hard time taking that drive back home without firing at least one more bullet.
The thing is I know that I am good enough to be playing in those games. The problem is that whenever I push through that initial wall of fear and convince myself that I can in fact beat the $1/$2 tables (the lowest stakes at most poker rooms) the problem of time & travel expenses usually knocks me right back down again. Living in New York City it’s hard to play organized poker. You think Atlantic City is just a car ride away but really, after hitting the inevitable traffic, you spend up to five to six hours traveling back and forth which is really too much to do in one day (that late night ride back is brutal after a full day of playing at the tables). The alternatives include paying for a hotel room at the weekend rates ($150-$250 usually), which is obviously not too appealing either.
The weekends are the only real time to go to AC–the games are softer, there are more tourists, people are consuming more alcohol, your edge just goes way up during the weekends. If you plan on staying overnight in AC on a weekend, you are looking at roughly $200-$300 in expenses just to get to the tables in the first place! Then the casino takes their cut (rake) out of every pot and you have to not get unlucky and I won’t even start about how bad (unhealthy + not tasty) and overpriced most of the food is there. Suffice to say that it’s generally not a winning proposition to plan a weekend trip to AC and stay in the hotels unless you are a very talented player or catch some cards at the right time, you do it mostly for the challenge of getting better and experiencing what live play is like over an extended period of time.
Our first two casino trips were to Atlantic City. The first one, back in May, was a disaster waiting to happen. Four of us drove out after work on a Friday without eating dinner, heading straight into New York City rush hour traffic. From there we proceeded to take the wrong route down and had to loop around all of the casino’s twice before realizing how to get to the Borgata which we finally did well after midnight. One of the first rules of sitting down for a serious session is (1) Be well rested and (2) Eat before you play… we broke those rules right off the bat. After awkwardly walking around the poker room with our chips in hand and everyone staring at us for twenty minutes trying to figure out what tables to sit down at, I ended up sitting at the wrong table (where they played limit hold em) and promptly lost $10 playing one hand in a game I did not know how to play. Not too much of a loss I guess but certainly not the way I wanted to start the night.
We then proceeded to all four of us sit down at the same table (another big no-no when you go to a casino) where we must have looked like the biggest amateurs in the room. In case there was any confusion though, we played like it too, losing roughly $400 in the first 45 minutes we were there. We had just arrived and already I wanted to leave and go to sleep. I felt responsible for bringing everyone into a situation that we couldn’t handle, very conscious of the fact that everyone at the table looked at us like they knew how they would be paying for their hotel rooms for the night. The first night took a turn for the better when our boy “Mount Airy Large” (his nickname given to him due to his early love for that classic old time casino we remembered from 1980s commercials) called a big bet on a 9-9-10 flop with his pocket 3s and somehow hit a miracle 3 on the turn for a full house. He was only 8% to hit one of those two cards remaining in the deck but it came and he won a $600 pot a few minutes later against his opponents A9 at which point we basically gave each other a (again very awkward) group hug much to the chagrin of the sharks sitting around the table. Sometimes the hunters become the hunted.
I left the Borgata poker room that first night after a a few hours of play down -$125 and with a pit in my stomach. I didn’t know what I was expecting but the trip was not going how I imagined it, at least not for me. Our boy Mount Airy was up $300 but our other friend “The Governor” had run his pair of Kings up against Aces and lost most of his first buy-in right after that while our 4th friend played one hand and lost $100 not realizing what cards were on the board. I went back to our hotel with Dave (as we were the two guys in relationships) around 3am while the Governor and Mount Airy Large stayed at the bar (the two single guys) waiting to get back to the tables. I literally could not fall asleep that night. I kept replaying the hands I lost in my head (how could I miss every single flop??) and thinking about what a crazy place we had just been in.
I was still awake at 7:30am when our two friends came running into the room excited to tell us that after being down nearly $700, the Governor had gone on a hot streak and was nearly even for the night! Good news, but still little relief for me as I stayed awake a few more hours thinking about what brought me to the Borgata that night. I did not drink at all that night and in retrospect I think that was actually a mistake. I needed something to take the edge off and I was way too uptight about everything and worrying too much about what people were thinking about my every action. I was determined to have a better run the next day and I actually did, making $275 at the Tropicana casino during just a three hour session in which I felt I was in total control of the table.
The most memorable hand was actually one of the last hands I played where I was dealt pocked Jacks in late position. I had been raising and taking down a lot of pots and a seemingly tight player had raised Under the Gun (UTG) with one caller right before me. Even though usually I would put in another raise and 3-bet there, I decided to balance my range by simply calling the $10 raise, electing to avoid a potential 4-bet by the initial raiser and just seeing a flop.
We went to the flop five ways ($55 in the pot) and it comes down 8-9-10 rainbow – pretty much the most beautiful flop you could want for JJ. I had an over pair to the board and an open ended straight draw to go with it and was feeling good already up nearly $300 in the game. Then something strange happened. The guy in the small blind who was the last of five people to call pre-flop donk bets $60 into the initial raiser (a donk bet is when someone who is not the pre-flop raiser bets first after the flop, usually indicating weakness or extreme strength), which right away struck me as strange.
He was an experienced player. He told me he had been playing cards for over 20 years and had won several large pots just in the short time that I had been at the table. He also made it clear that he was in the “family business” which, following a creepy wink, I took to mean that he was associated with some sort of local mafia. What hands could he be leading out here into a tight pre-flop raiser who could easily have an overpair (I was putting the tight UTG raiser on a narrow range of AA, KK, QQ, 10-10, 9-9 and AK (I held two Jacks of course). This guy being a thinking player must have been assuming something similar, so what would he be wanting to lead out with here? Probably not the nuts (QJ) both because I held JJ but also because he probably check raises that kind of hand. I thought he might have a weak two pair hand that he was wanting to protect, possibly 8-9 or something like that. Anyway, the mafia don bets out for $60 and the original UTG raiser calls. two folds and it comes back to me with $175 in the pot and I have $350 dollars in my stack. While I was excited to see the flop, I now thought I might be in trouble. I did not want to call the $60 and have to fold on the turn to a big bet so for me it was either all-in or fold. If I was up against the mafia don’s two pair and a pair higher than mine by the original raiser then I was in bad shape.
Now these are the kinds of spots that winning players have no fear about taking. An all-in shove here probably gets the weak two pair to fold and gives the UTG player much to think about. Even if he calls with his QQ, KK, AA, I have up to 10 outs to hit (2 jackets, 4 queens, 4 sevens) – although of course if he has Queens I am in worse shape. For me, a very amateur player on his first trip to AC who is not used to playing for several hundred dollars at a time, this is just a place I don’t want to put myself in. I thought about it for a while but looking over at my $350 stack that I had worked so hard so build, I eventually folded. The turn was a blank five of diamonds, the mafia don goes all in and the UTG calls. The don did in fact have two pair (10-8) but the UTG raiser had pocked 10s and hit trips on the flop and I patted myself on the back for making a good read (and a pretty complex one for that matter, if I do say so myself). I felt less good with the river brought a 7 completing my would be straight, a card that might have won me $700 if I had had the courage to push my hand on the flop. This is the thing with poker though. You can make all the good reads you want, but at key times you have to have the guts to put the money in and take whatever small edges you can find. This is why casinos are scary. The seven does not always come on the river.
