We can find motivation in almost anything.  The power of the internet and the instant transmission of information it provides is so powerful that entire communities can be inspired by the plight of a people half a world away.  We can marvel at engineering feats that we may never get the chance to see in person.  We can see pictures of the deepest depths of our planet.  What may be most important is we can now share our stories faster and more thoroughly than ever before.  These stories can be used to inspire, no matter how innocuous or fleeting they may appear, and those men and women that star in these stories become legendary for their personal sacrifice and dedication to their cause.

I’ve been a diehard NFL fan since I was a very little kid and my team has always been the New England Patriots.  I remember in those early days with Drew Bledsoe at the helm the knock on the Patriots was that they couldn’t run the ball consistently.  So in the 1998 NFL draft they grabbed a man by the name of Robert Edwards out of the University of Georgia to fill that particular gaping wound.  After a stellar rookie season, Edwards tore up his knee in a beach flag football game during the offseason.  He was told by doctors at the time that he may never walk again and he came very close to needing an amputation from the knee down.  Edwards just continued to rehab and to work towards getting his career back.  He would eventually find his way to the Miami Dolphins where he worked his way onto the roster.  It was during a preseason interview that I happened to be watching when Edwards was interviewed by a sideline reporter.  The reporter said to Edwards that his coaches kept seeing, “flashes of brilliance” in his performances.  For some reason, that phrase stuck with me.

I think as poker players we have an acute understanding for that phrase.  We all have moments that make us love this game.  Sometimes it’s lying in the weeds while your opponent bets off his or her entire stack right into your lap, others it’s about pushing your table around and completely dictating the action.  Whatever the case may be, you figured it out.  You got the maximum value out of your hand.  Like a great chess player, you were able to calculate exactly what your opponent was going to do next and plan the perfect counter strategy to it.  These are the moments we long for as players.  Hell for most of us, these moments are the reasons we got into the game in the first place.  We all want that Hollywood ending.  That moment when we’ve “looked into our opponent’s soul” and found all the answers we needed.

It’s also easy to fall so in love with the idea of posterizing your opponent that we forget to look for the simple value that we can pick up by just playing basic poker.  We get so caught up in trying to have our moment in the spotlight that we miss all the little hands that make us big winners in the long haul.  Most sessions of poker are going to come down to only a handful of spots that will ultimately determine the outcome of your session, but it’s the smaller hands that will be the more numerous decisions during a typical day at the office.  Yes ultimately when you get your whole stack in on a cooler hand or you get sucked out on by a 2 outer with one card to come for a several buy-in sized pot that will have the greatest effect on your bottom line.  That doesn’t mean you can just go throwing away an extra bet or two paying someone off when you know you’re way behind.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be going for as much value as your hand dictates in the smaller pots.  Those flashes of brilliance can blind us from our ultimate goal, winning.

I’m not suggesting don’t enjoy those flashes of brilliance when you have them.  What I’m trying to say here is don’t let the fact that you just snapped off a bluff attempt or picked off someone trying to run an angle shoot on you cloud your judgment in later streets.  You need to be able to put the hands in perspective almost immediately after they occur.  That’s been one of my latest projects.  I’ve had a few big moments lately at the tables, those hands where you start to believe the crap you’ve been saying about yourself.  You start to really think you are getting very good at this game and it really is just a matter of putting the hours in before you come out on top.  Just don’t suddenly forget what got you to that point in the process.  Hours upon hours of hard work.

I’ve been getting shelled the past couple of weeks at the table, plain and simple.  Since starting back up on the grind this is probably the worst stretch I’ve gone through.  Times like these it gets hard to keep your head up and keep going.  I know your told when you get into this business that you need to handle the swings and you’re not always going to get the best of it day in and day out.  I understand that fact, however it’s still possible to feel like shit when it happens to you.  I’m human, no matter how hard I try to get rid of that particular limitation it will always be there.  It’s something none of us can ever transcend and as human beings we are ultimately emotional creatures.  Some of us, like me, are certainly more emotional than others and we need to find inspiration and motivation when we get kicked in the balls.  Enter stage right, Tim Tebow.

I was sitting around thumbing through the channels on my TV when I saw ESPN’s Year of the Quarterback special.  The episode that was on at that time was of Time Tebow and his path from the end of college to draft night in the NFL.  Personally I’m a fan of the guy.  I was a fan of his while he was playing for the Gators, I like him in the NFL, yeah he’s clunky throwing the rock but I root for him all the same.  During this special it showed all of the workouts that Tebow did leading up to the combine and the NFL draft.  Insanity would be a good word for it.  Take out your opinions of the man and just watch what was going on, watch this man chasing a dream that everyone is saying he can never get.  He is busting his ass as hard as possible just for a chance to prove himself on the next level.  He’s guaranteed nothing despite having won all of the awards and accolades in college that he did.  I just saw a glimpse of a man that wouldn’t let someone else take his dream away from him.  Like him or not, you can respect that about him.

In the piece Tim said something that I thought was rather profound.  When asked about his training workouts he said, “At the end of the day, was I the hardest working player in the country today and did I get better?  If the answer’s yes then it was a good day.”  Simple idea, a little cliché, but the point is still very valid.  Watching this coming off of a session where I got my ass kicked, I wondered if I could honestly say the same about myself.  Could I claim that I did everything I could to get better at the table that day?  Was I the hardest working playing in the country today?  It’s a tough question to ask yourself, because often the answer is going to be no.  No, you lost your cool a little bit and opened up your calling range after taking that big beat.  No, you splashed around a little too much after you got tired of folding for the past 4 dealers.  No, you made that crying call when you were certain you were beat.

I’ve been carrying that thought with me since my channel surfing lead me to Time Tebow smashing tractor tires with sledgehammers and working out from 7AM to 7PM on a daily basis.  For the majority of my personal history I can’t say I was the hardest working player, student, son, brother, boyfriend, or any other demographic that I’ve fit in at one point during my 24 years on this planet.  That thought bothers me a great deal.  I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of great opportunities in this life and I don’t want to add poker to that list.  Win, lose, or draw I just want to say that I was the hardest working playing in the country each and every day that I’m out on the felt or studying the game in my off days.  We as players can’t totally control our fate, the turn of a card can still corrupt even our best sessions.  All we can do is bust our asses to get better, so that’s what I’m going to do.

So this past week I found myself in an interesting situation.  It was the first time in a little while I had encountered something completely new to me at the tables.  Therefore I reacted without really considering my options as carefully as I should have.  I reflected on what went down later that night and decided that not only did I feel like I handled the situation as best I could, but I was also completely justified in what I did.  I don’t think the entire poker community is going to agree with me on this one but I’ll tell my side of the story here today and let you be the judge as to whether or not what I did was justified and ethical.

So I’m playing in a 1/2NL game down at Foxwoods.  The game has been pretty soft for most of my time there.  One such villain has been chatting up a storm.  He’s in his early 40s and has been frequenting the casino since it opened 20 years ago, or at the very least that’s the story he was going with on this particular day.  Anyway, he did seem to have a basic knowledge of the game but I wouldn’t call him a threat to me at the table by any means.  He was sitting three seats to my left so he wasn’t really someone I was expecting to get a whole lot of value from in this game.  We both for the most part just stayed out of each other’s way.  For whatever reason though, we got involved in one of the more interesting pots of last week’s sessions for me.

Action is folded around to me and I raise to $11 in the HJ with KhQd.  Our villain in question is the only caller in the SB and we see a flop of Th4d2h.  Our villain checks to me and I decided to check behind.  This guy was the the type of player to not fold if he has any piece of this board.  Bottom pair is worth seeing one more card over so I decided to take my free card option.  The turn comes the 4h giving me two overs and a K-high flush draw.  Our villain wakes up suddenly and bets $10 into the $20 dollar pot.  I think there is a reasonable chance I still have the best hand, plus I have plenty of outs to see one more card turn.  I call and the river peels off the 8d, what appears to me to be a total blank.  Our villain fires out a $20 bet this time.  I start to really think about my decision here.  I really didn’t want to fold my hand because this player had been getting a little splashy over the past few orbits and this could easily just be another example of that.  My only problem here is he could be getting splashy with A-high and still have me crushed.  I glance over at our villain, he looks like he wants nothing to do with this hand anymore.  He’s sitting perfectly still as though a cheetah just spotted him and he really doesn’t want to get into a foot race.  I grab my cards to looks at them again, more to kill time while I think than anything else.  As I do this my opponent grabs his cards very sloppily, and in doing show partially flashes them to me.  I see two black cards and one of them is a face card.  Given this new information and coupled with my villain’s disdain for his holding I make the call.  He rolls over Ks9s and I take down the pot.

I thought about this later on.  Was what I did ethical as a poker player?  While I was pondering this at the table the villain in question was just kind of in shock.  He finally said to me, “I couldn’t get you off that hand for $20 huh?”  At this point I felt like if I mentioned to him that he flashed his cards at me he would have thrown an angry fit.  So I just calmly said to him, “Nope.”  I’ve been thinking about this hand for a few days now and I’ve told the story to a few poker buddies of mine.  Each time the reaction has been the same, “Sick call down with K-high.”  I’ll be honest here, I don’t feel particularly achieved having made this call.  I imagine this is what a slight of hand magician feels like after pulling off a trick.  He or she knows the only reason it looks amazing is because you are standing at a certain angle or you just missed one or two moves in the process.  I don’t feel like I had a soul read on this guy by any means.  He just freely gave me a ton of information and I took it.

Upon reflection I can say this for certain, I have absolutely no remorse for this guy.  Yes I did call because I saw what he had, but I wasn’t the one who made him reach for his cards.  I wasn’t shooting an angle to make him fumble with his holding and let me sneak a glance.  I wasn’t ducking my head down to try and sneak a peak at the answers in the back of the textbook.  I simply sat there, observed my opponent, and played my hand accordingly.  I feel completely justified in my actions.  If you don’t protect your cards, you deserve to be posterized like this.  Plain and simple.

Let me know what you think.  Am I just some angle shooting donkey or is there some merit to my argument?  Leave a comment or contact me via any of the following platforms.

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I’ve been trying to set regular goals for myself.  Laying out milestones for me to achieve has allowed me to keep focused on the task at hand.  Having a laid out track helps greatly.  The problem is the nature of poker doesn’t really lend itself to being restricted to a straight and narrow path.  There are probably dozens of ways to get to a particular milestone, each one of them valid in its own way.  This is also a business where just getting over a milestone doesn’t mean you’ve beaten it for good.  You can set a bankroll milestone to hit X dollars, spend 3 weeks grinding 10 hour days to get there, sail hundreds or even thousands of dollars past your goal, and then in the following two session hit a brick wall of variance and be right back to where you started.  I’m not suggesting you just rip up all the hopes and dreams you have to be a poker player, but setting goals has to be done differently than in any other arena of competition.

Poker is a very open ended game, particularly when talking about cash game play.  Not only do you need to play the game itself well, but you must also have a solid grasp of the outside factors affecting your play.  You have to evaluate how each of your opponents are playing, if they seem tilted or fatigued, are you tilted or fatigued, do your opponents overplay hands, are they nits and easy to push off of flops and turns?  A big part of being a professional is evaluating whether or not a table is a “good game” or not but that is a huge judgment call.  As with most questions in this business, the answer is more than likely going to be “it depends.”

I bring this topic up this week because the month of May is going to be a long month of grinding for me.  May has 31 days in it, and my plan at time of writing is to spend 26 of them at the casino and roughly 12 hours each day.  I feel like this is the best opportunity I’ll have to reach some of my financial goals.  I’m sick of coming up short of the marks that I have set for myself.  My bankroll needs a serious boost, and I think this is going to be the best way to inject a little life into my career.

I love playing poker for a living.  I feel better about myself and the direction my life is going in when I’m sitting at the tables as opposed to being another cog in a machine working away the prime of my life in a cube.  The downside is that I’m flirting with the poverty line on a monthly basis.  Now that’s not to say I was living high on the hog at my last job, my income really hasn’t changed since returning to action, but there will come a day when eating Ramen for two meals a day just isn’t going to cut it.  I’m very confident in my abilities to play this game.  I feel like I have evolved as a player these past 15 weeks.  I am seeing the ball well, making some timely plays and reads, and now I feel like it’s time to put myself to the test.  Win lose or draw, I just want there to be no doubt that I did everything I could to succeed.  If I fail despite my efforts, then at least I’ll know for sure this life just isn’t for me.  Until then, it’s off to my arena of competition in southern CT.

Spending a lot of time in the casino you tend to see the same types of people.  There are the guy who’re doing the same thing you are, putting in hours upon hours at the tables.  You’ll see the “after work crowd” who like to come to the casino to get drunk during happy hour rather than head to the bar across the street from the office.  My personal favorite is the couple.  Yes the couple, usually consisting of a guy who is very into poker and a woman who is very into her man.  Together they make for endless entertainment, and just to illustrate my point I brought some examples with me to share.

Couple number one is more or less the cookie cutter example of what you’ll see.  The guy is taking poker seriously.  He may not be the best, but he watches poker on TV so he thinks he can handle the casino environment.  He’s decked out in his finest “cool clothes.”  It could be a button down shirt with some graphics on it, could be his most baller T-shirt, the point is he’s peacocking for the night.  His significant other however is less than enthused about the entire process.  To her poker is just some silly game that’s played in a casino.  It’s all just gambling anyway.  She sits behind her man and pulls out either her iPhone or iPad and starts playing games and texting friends.

An example of this couple sat down at one of my tables a few weeks ago.  Long story short, the gentleman got his money in on the flop with QQ on a 6d5s3s flop.  The board ran blank on the turn and a 6 on the river at which point his opponent tabled his 6s4s to win the hand.  The guy just chuckled to himself and mucked his hand.  Afterwards he turned to his girlfriend and asked her for more money, which made me chuckle a bit.  He must have gotten some kind of look from his girl because when he turned back to the table he said, “OK guys, can you please explain to my girl what just happened and why I need to reload?  She doesn’t understand poker.  She doesn’t understand how unlucky I just got and how I did all I could.”  No one took the bait.  I seriously doubt the ride home that night was very much fun for him.  If you’re going to call out your soul mate at the table, you might want to bring separate cars.

Couple number two is a younger couple.  Neither of them is all that experienced at a casino and they are here sharing the moment together.  Neither one really wants to wander far from the other because they are so unsure of their surroundings.  As a result, they have no concept of personal space with each other.  There was one such couple at one of my tables and they were sitting directly to my right.  The guy was playing, the girl was watching on the rail.  Normally this isn’t really a problem but this woman had three things working against her that pissed me off.

1) She decided to sit directly in between my chair and her boyfriend’s so every time I pushed my chair back to get up from the table it would bang into her chair.

2) After the first time I banged into her chair I looked over at her, she was one of those girls who wasn’t attractive but had that “hot bitch” attitude because she had a man.

3) She kept bouncing her hoof up and down next to me and poking her boyfriend with it.

I was on the tail end of my session anyway so I left without saying anything.

Bottom line, I don’t understand how either the guy or the girl can be enjoying themselves.  Guys, at some point it’s ok to have a life outside your relationship.  Ladies, your man is considering this “quality time” so don’t be shocked when you want to do something the next day and he says, “We just spent all day yesterday together.”  Not all couples are like this either.  There are the occasional couples they get it right, and each play poker, at different tables, on different sides of the room, and reconvene 4 hours later to get some food together and talk about their luck.  Eh, whatever works I suppose.

So karma has a funny way of working sometimes.  When I started this blog the original conception was to tell funny stories that happened to me on both the virtual and brick and mortar felt.  As I began the ritual typing of my keyboard again last week it seemed like the crazy people started coming out of the woodwork at Foxwoods.  Maybe I’m just more used to it but I’m very rarely surprised by anything I see in the poker room anymore.  It wasn’t until this past week that something completely unique happened.

So I was grinding Thursday night in a 1/2NL game.  The game was a little on the crazy side.  People were showing big time bluffs, pushing action very heavily, and chirping at each other.  One player in particular was trying to take on the role of table captain and in doing so had built up a nice winning session for himself.  He did seem to be a little on the aggressive side as far as personality goes.  I’m sure we’ve all sat with guys like this before.  Everything he says and does is great poker, “I lost the pot because the donkey made a bad call.”  He was that guy.

It was getting a bit later in the evening, around 11:30PM and moods were shifting a bit.  What were once smart ass quips meant to entertain and slightly annoy were now grenades being launched from the trenches of war intended to destroy a player’s psyche.  The table got quiet due to mutual fatigue, then banter quickly turned ugly, then another quiet lull before the fireworks would start again.  Emotions were running a little high for some players more than others.  In my experience, this is when the really good stories are born.  These are the conditions where once a spark lights the fuse there is nothing left to do but sit back and watch the mushroom cloud expand and take shape.  This night was no exception.

So our table captain, who was sitting in the 10 seat to the right of the dealer, ordered himself a fruit juice from the waitress during one of the table’s lulls in badinage.  As it turned out this drink would be this gentleman’s unintended exit strategy.  A minute or two after the gentleman put the drink down, he exclaimed to us all, “What the fuck, my pant are wet.”  Not really sure how to respond the table just remained in our conversation rut and waited for the player to continue his rant.  “Seriously what the fuck is going on my pants are wet.”  The dealer would be the first player to break the tension of the moment.

Dealer: “Well did you piss yourself?”

Player: “No I didn’t my cup holder is wet or something.  Put your hand right here.”

The cup holder is about 10 inches away from the player’s crotch.

Dealer: “Yeah…that’s not happening.”

As this was going on the cards continued to fly, I for one started laughing my ass off at the ridiculousness of the situation.  Did I think this guy really pissed himself?  Probably not, however I did find his overreaction to the situation quite hilarious.  With another hand having been dealt the rest of the players remained focused on the task at hand but our table captain just couldn’t get his mind past the complexity of his dilemma.

Player: “Seriously, look at my pants they’re wet.  My crotch is wet.”

Dealer: “I’m really not sure what you want me to do.  Is your cup leaking?”

The cup holders at Foxwoods for the record are made of metal and are therefore not easily punctured, just as a heads up to provide some context to this matter of bladder security.  Eventually the dealer called the floor over.

Player: “It’s not that big a deal.”  Just as a side bar from me, no one at the table except for this player has been making a scene about anything that’s been going on.  So for him to now say it’s not a big deal got me chuckling again.

Dealer: “It’s not a problem sir, the floor will take care of you, that’s his job.”

Two separate floor managers were called over, both of them rendered speechless at the situation.  By this time the river card had been dealt out and the board was 6J8J9.  Our table captain minraised a river value bet and lost another $80 to one of the loose cannons at the table when his rivered straight fell to the cannon’s J6 boat.  Our table captain had had enough at this point.  He got up from the table a furiously stormed off to get himself a chip rack.  We all watched as he made a lap clean around the poker room, walked up to the cage behind our table, grabbed a rack, then racked up and left.  As he was parting for the night he kept making cracks about how the dealer was trying to “embarrass him” in front of the table.  Once he left the floor managers just looked at each other and shrugged the whole situation off.

No one is quite sure where this phantom fluid came from.  Could it have been from his drink?  Maybe he was just getting a little sweaty and it was starting to turn up on his clothes.  He could have just had a few too many exciting hands for the night.  Sadly like an opponent’s hand folded before showdown, we will never really know for sure.  Some people just do a better job at tilting themselves than you or I ever could.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/dtools22

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AIM: DTools22

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.  There have been a handful of instances over the past few months where I had some thoughts, started writing a blog post, and then after about a paragraph or two would just run out of steam.  Without the everyday adventures of online poker I guess I have a little less to talk about.  With that said, it’s not like I’ve been loafing around not grinding.  I’ve played every week since the start of my return to the felt full time.  It’s been a rather humble existence as far as my day to day living is concerned but it makes me way happier and I feel way more fulfilled than I ever did grinding out a paycheck in some cube somewhere.  I figure with this blog I’ll catch up on some stuff that’s been going down these past few months, where my head is at, and then get ready to write these on a consistent basis again (read: stop being my fucking lazy self).

As I mentioned above, I’ve been grinding a lot.  All of my hours this year have been spent grinding down at Foxwoods rather than splitting between there and Mohegan Sun.  I just like Foxwoods better.  It’s where I started when I first played in a live casino, including a few times sneaking in under age :).  There are also consistently more tables running and better game selection than there is over at Mohegan.  As a result of all this I’ve earned a lot of comps over at Foxwoods, for a poker player anyway.  Foxwoods has a card specific to the poker room which once earned you get double the comp points at the tables of your choice.  The card requires 500 hours played and 75 visits within a 6 month period and is simply call the “Black Card.”  I asked a floor host 2 weeks ago how far away I was from the card, thinking I’d be well short.  As it turns out I had 450 hours logged and 60 visits, all of which are from this year.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear that.  I should have the hours no problem by the end of this week and I’ll pick up the visits by the end of next week.

I’ve had some decent moments in those 500 hours of grinding, but I’ve yet to grab my break out moment.  So far it’s been a holding pattern this year.  I’ve been able to take a couple of shots up at 2/5NL but for the most part I’ve been relegated to 1/2NL and haven’t been able to shirk that buy in level just yet.  The first goal on my poker to do list is to build up a BR to play 2/5NL.  Once there I believe things will get a little bit easier for me from a financial standpoint.  I’ll be able to pull my monthly winnings out completely rather than splitting it between life expenses and my poker operating budget.  Once I get to that point, trips to Los Angeles and Las Vegas for poker would be much more feasible than they are now.

I’ve mixed in a few tournaments but predominantly my grinding has been in the cash game room.  I think I’m going to try and mix in some of the daily tournaments down at Foxwoods.  The buy ins range from $80-$230 depending upon the day of the week and the time of day the tournament starts.  This is more just to get the practice under my belt.  The couple of MTTs I’ve played over the past few months haven’t gone well.  I understand that it’s the nature of tournaments to be streaky and I’m not concerned with the results of either of the events.  The recent $300 event I played in during the Foxwoods Poker Classic however I felt very uncomfortable at the table.  I just felt out of practice, like my opening ranges and CBs weren’t quite as solid as they could have been.  I’d like to fix that.  Plus I’ll get to the end game of a tournament much faster in the daily events where 100 people or less is common and the events only last 7 hours or so.  The blinds will skyrocket and the structures aren’t great but that will force me to really pay attention to what my opponents are doing, how light they are going to call off, what they are opening with, and NO ONE understands proper short stack strategy in that poker room save for maybe a handful of former online grinders.

That about catches me up.  My plan is to return to writing these posts once a week, probably every Monday.  I don’t know if I’ll be putting them out twice a week like I did before.  I’d like to, but I feel like I’m going to run out of things to say since I’m playing less hands and I have less exciting news to share.  I’m open to doing it twice a week again, and if I have a cool story I’ll bang on my keyboard for a few hours and post it.  For sure though, I’m going to go back to writing these once a week at the very least.

So here I am, grinding out 1/2NL, living a humble existence while I build up my bank roll, and I couldn’t be happier or feel more satisfied with myself.  If you want to get in touch with me, I’m doing to leave my contact information below.  If you want to get in touch with me, whether it’s a question, start a poker discussion, or you just hate my guts and a comment on the blog won’t work for you, feel free to get in touch.

As long as you aren’t at my table, good luck to you.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/dtools22

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AIM: dtools22

It’s been a while since I’ve had a really funny story coming from the casino floor.  I actually started this blog off with a couple of stories; one of them being how there was a gentleman who literally lost his pants at the table.  He got up and suddenly had nothing on but his tighty whities down below.  This time around things were a bit less graphic, and I was actually the center of most of the attention.

I was sitting at my usual 1/2NL table, having a pretty good session to this point in the evening.  I’ve been at this particular table for a couple of hours now.  Normally I don’t talk much during a session.  When someone brings up a topic of conversation that interests me in some way or I have something witty to say I’ll chime in, but I won’t be the one to break the ice at the table.  One of the players at the table had no trouble picking up my slack when it came to conversation.  He was talking about everything from strippers spanking him to the Teletubbies.  No topic was too distant a segue nor too taboo to mention.  Eventually, this made its way to a discussion about me and my appearance.  I know I don’t have a ton of pictures on my poker profiles so I’ll give some quick notes.  I’ve got brown hair a little below shoulder length, a thick gotee, and I’ve got a black American Eagle sweater on.  This gentleman decided he liked both my hair and my sweater and decided to compliment me on it.  It was completely harmless and he was just a talkative and jovial fellow so I thanked him for the compliment.  I even brought up how my father HATES my long hair and he is getting to the point where he’s ready to just grab some clippers, hold me down, and start trimming.

As the session wore on people started coming and going and seats opened up in the game.  The dealers also attract attention depending on what dealers they are and who they know.  Our dealer when all of the following happened was very personable and had people coming up and talking with him.  He was constantly joking around with the players at the table and just struck me as a very genuinely nice guy.  One of the people that came over to talk to him was a younger woman, maybe in her mid 20s.  She came over and was scoping out the table to see if she wanted a seat.  She was talking to the dealer, but at this point I haven’t even bothered to look up at her.  Finally she gave me a way into the conversation, “I like playing cards with the boys, I don’t like having women at my table.” There is a seat open directly in front of her and the only woman who was at this table gave up her seat about 30mins ago.  So I harmlessly said to her, “There’s a seat open right there.”  Her retort to me was word for word, “Oh I thought you were a woman.”

I just kind of smiled and shrugged it off.  I wasn’t expecting to be the target of a one liner so I just let it pass.  It was pretty funny in the moment.  Once she walked away from the table the dealer said she would have, “wrecked the game” which in this case he meant the fun loving table that we had.  Apparently that particular woman likes to get into it with other players at the table.  People like her are why I have headphones with me when I’m playing.  In the event that someone sits down and just starts spouting nonsense I can just tune that person out.  But she never came back and the table went back to being its fun loving normal self.  I finished the day up pretty big and then drove back to my apartment around 1AM.  In the event that my father does see this and reads it later, here is the first strong argument I’ve been presented for cutting my hair.  I don’t open myself up to moments like this.

The poker world as it turns out is a very big place.  Most of us got interested in this industry from one of a few tent poles.  We saw Chris Moneymaker win the WSOP ME on a $40 online qualifier or we watched Rounders and got very interested in the prospect of playing cards for a living.  Whatever the case may be, the poker world has a lot more going on in it than people think of at first glance.  I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground to find some events to travel to and play in that would be within my buy in range (for MTTs $200-$600) and still generate enough buzz to really build some cash game action.  This is to build what I am calling the “JV Circuit.”  Events that are well worth my time being a smaller stakes grinder at this point in my career, but nothing so big that the poker media will suddenly be covering my every move if I win.

The easiest place for me to start is Foxwoods.  Essentially my hometown casino, they run a series roughly every 8 weeks.  This week is one of their Mega Stack Series, which features 4 two day events ranging in buy ins from $300-$1200 as well as some one day events that will generate quite a buzz.  I’ll be there Wednesday through Friday this week using some of my comp rooms.  Unless things go well that first day I probably won’t play in any of the 2 day events, but I’ve got my eyes on the $230 bounty event on Wednesday.  Each bounty is worth $100, $20K guaranteed prize pool, and 25 minute levels.  It’s not a hugely serious event and there will definitely be some gambling going on, but with such a huge price on each head I don’t know how I could pass it up.

Thumbing through Poker Player Magazine I stumbled upon an article for the Delaware Poker Classic.  This year’s event will be from March 14 through April 2 and will actually be hosted by Greg Raymer.  More importantly, the event features a very ambitious schedule with some very fun looking events.  There is a $230 head’s up championship event that I would love to head down for as well as some other really solid value events for under $400 buy ins.  If I can swing taking $1500 down there and grinding in some of these smaller events I’d love to take that shot.  I’ve actually never been to Delaware Park so it could be a whole new experience in and of itself.

I also have some connections out in LA that are interesting.  There are friends of mine that I could go out and visit, stay with them on the cheap, and catch a ride from them to the Commerce Casino.  The LAPC is actually going on right now, though I doubt I’d be able to get out there for any of the prelim events.  There are however some more low key series going on out there.  The California State Championship has the majority of their events under $400 buy ins in the spring, just before the WSOP really gets underway in Vegas.  I also have some friends in Florida that are interested in flying me down to play in some of the smaller dailies down there.

I’ll probably be able to travel to some of these events at the end of the month.  I know Turning Stone and Atlantic City will eventually be destinations I’ll look to go to as well.  The idea is simple, the more poker I play the better my chances are to win money and if this is the career I want to have I have to spend the time competing at these different locations.

Every once in a while you hear these strange stories coming out of casinos.  Some are so outrageous and fanciful that by the time they reach the ears of the outside world it’s just assumed that they have been over exaggerated and details have been drastically skewed as would be expected when playing a bad game of Telephone.  They range from people dressed in funny costumes to serious medical emergencies happening at the tables.  Even though everyone has stories like this it’s just human nature to assume that the whole truth isn’t being told and that while a person may have had a clown nose on while grinding out a session, he wasn’t an exact replica of Ronald McDonald as the story will surely state.  With that in mind, I’m going to do my best to give this tale its due justice.  I was witness to a medical emergency down at Foxwoods last week.

Let me set the scene a bit.  Monday afternoon I arrived at the casino to do my usual grinding.  Normally I cap off my session around midnight and begin my trek home.  On this particular night there was a pretty bad snowstorm and the roads were just awful, so rather than take a risk driving home while half asleep behind the wheel I opted to get a room and stay the night.  Tuesday was a big day for me, I found myself at a very live table right out of the gate.  One player seemed to be driving the action, I would later find out he was stuck for around $3,000 at this 1/2NL table.  I managed to pick up about $450 off of the game and when the villain left, I cashed in my chips and grabbed myself some dinner.  I came back to another table and found the exact opposite dynamic, namely people weren’t putting hardly any money in pre-flop.  The game was still pretty weak so I bided my time and got into some decent pots with people who were just overplaying their hands.  I had managed about a $270ish profit when things went all crazy in the poker room.

I had my headphones in at the time and was sitting in the main section of the Foxwoods cash game room.  For those who have been there before, I was a table or two to the left of the skylight.  At about 9:15PM EST a few of my table mates started pointing over towards the 5th Street Café.  I looked over and saw a woman being restrained by a couple of security guards.  My first reaction was that some kind of fight broke out, we are in a casino after all and tempers can flare up.  I took my headphones out and heard this woman wailing at the top of her lungs and suddenly the fight theory seemed to melt away.  Right about then one of my table mates noticed that there was a body down on the ground over by one of the tables.  The person down on the ground appeared to be motionless.  About 8 security guards at this point came out with bed sheets, large white ones, and began holding them up around where this guy was at the table.  The floor came over to talk with the tables in my section and just remarked, “When they put those sheets up, it’s not a good sign.”  Many thought this player had died right there.

I can say for sure that as the gentleman was being carted out, he was alive.  I could see small movements and heard him moaning in pain a few times before making it to the ambulance.  The player I’m told is a regular at Foxwoods, in his mid-50s, and has been on and off chemotherapy for some time now.  The woman crying out was his wife.  After this mess was all sorted out I just felt completely unnerved.  I cashed in my chips and called my mother on the phone to tell her what I had just witnessed.  I don’t know this person but to have an experience like that was just too unsettling for me to keep playing that day.  I’ve read about stories where players have had medical emergencies at the table during long sessions, but I never really gave it much thought.  It’s one of those things you just never expect to see.  We all have heard crazy stories before.  Many of us are now familiar with the gentleman who was playing World of Warcraft, thought he had super powers, and jumped out of this 80th floor of his building.  Seeing this unfold at Foxwoods was like being in the living room when the dude jumps.  You never expect to see something like that happen on just another lazy Tuesday.  So much for a normal day.