TAKING DOWN THE BIG GAME (part 2)

Part 1 of this story is here.

“What the actual fuck am I doing here?” I asked myself as I looked round the table in the private card room behind the main poker area in the Aria Casino. I took my seven and a half stacks of $100 chips (20 chips in each stack) out of the plastic racks and laid them in a neat triangle shape in front of me. Fifteen thousand dollars. More than ten thousand pounds. A lot of money, and yet my block of chips was smaller than most at the table.

Recognizing some of the players from my occasional forays into televised poker didn’t help.

Todd Brunson: son of poker legend Doyle Brunson, now retired. Famous for having once won $13.5m in two days of high stakes cash poker. 

Mike (CrazyMike) Thorpe: aggressive and noisy pro player, who runs one of the biggest games in Vegas. Known for inventing crazy poker variants, and for his outrageous poker table antics.

Barry Greenstein: three world series bracelets, regular on TV in High Stakes Poker, has written a book on poker, and given millions of dollars from his winnings to charity.

The others I didn’t know, though there were two players, one a white, middle age guy with expensive cowboy boots and a southern drawl, the other Asian and excitable, who seemed to be the reason for the professionals to be there, the fish around which the sharks* were circling. And me, of course; definitely fish status in this company. I wasn’t fooled by their smiles of welcome, and could see they were already envisaging my $15,000 added to their stacks in an hour or two’s time.

What the actual fuck was I doing here, sitting down to play $300/$600 limit poker with a table of pros?

The game wasn’t the well-known, and relatively straightforward, Holdem or Omaha that I’d been playing in the previous days. This was a mixed game, with seven or eight completely different poker variations, changing after each rotation of the dealers button. A plaque in front of the dealer specified what game was being played at any time.

Professionals love this format, because it is hard to be good at all these different forms of poker unless you play them all the time.

And the only people who play them all the time are professionals.

I pushed three $100 chips forward for my first big blind,* ordered a bottle of water from the waiter, and waited for my first hand.

For the first few hours I was playing scared, barely putting a chip in the pot and folding at the first sign of aggression against me. For the next few hours I played steadily. The others at the table almost seemed surprised I knew these games, as I came from UK. But there was a mixed game in London and I had played with London-based pros like Jon Shoreman, Luke Shwarz and Richard Ashby (known everywhere as Chufty). It had cost me some of my pot limit Omaha winnings to learn but, by the time I got to Vegas, I had a good idea what I was doing.

However, in this company, being competent was never going to be enough and by mid-night my stack had dwindled by half. I took myself off for a leg-stretch round the casino and decided it was getting on for time to go. I still had $8,000 which, with the $15,000 in my hotel room safe, made this a great trip.

And I’d played in the big game and survived, and so could legitimately add a tick to my bucket list.

When I got back to the table the dealer was turning over the plaque for a new game: “BaDEUCEy 2-7″ it said. I love this game and its sister “BadACEy A-5.” I decided to play a last round and then head to bed.

BaDEUCEy 2-7 is a split pot game, that is half the pot goes to best Badugi hand (which means 2345 with each of the four suits represented) and half the pot to the best Deuce to 7 hand, which is 23457. It’s also a draw game, where the players are dealt five cards and have three chances to exchange cards with those in the deck in the hope of improving their hand.

In the second hand, I looked down at what I’d been dealt and decided to call a couple of raises, even though I needed to draw two cards.

The three cards I was keeping were a perfect 234 combination, all different suits, a great start but I needed to improve or I risked paying $600, and possibly a lot more, in the hope of finding a good card in the final draw. This is how to go broke quickly in draw games.

I slid the other two cards to the dealer and nervously peeked at what he had given me in return. The 5 and 7 of diamonds, not one but two perfect cards. With three betting rounds to go I was sat on the absolute nuts*, a hand as rare as unicorns and, in this game, almost as valuable.

I decided I had two choices: play slow and wait for someone else to get a good (but not good enough) hand, or bet aggressively and make it look like I wanted to push people out of the pot. This was a spot where, paradoxically, more aggressive play might suggest a weaker hand, so I chose the second option, but half the table came along for the ride! I made a bit of a play of trying to decide whether to throw a card and improve my hand on the next draw (HA! like my hand could be improved!) and Crazy Mike and the Asian guy decided I didn’t have much. By the end of the hand, nearly all my chips were in the middle as part of a huge pile which the dealer slid over to me once I had shown down my perfect hand.

Crazy Mike grimaced a “nice hand!” at me and the Asian guy threw his good (but not good enough) hand at the dealer in disgust.

I was instantly well above my $15,000 starting stack. I was back in the game! More than that, I started hitting cards. For a few hours, it seemed that every time someone had a good hand, I had a better one. A player would bet hard with the third best possible hand in a draw game (“I’ve got Number 3,” he’d say full of optimism) only to find I had the second best hand. I’d look at a hand and think: “A three would be nice here”, and the dealer would obligingly slide over a three.

I “played the rush,” betting hard early in the hand to build a big pot that I could win when the right cards came. My pile of chips continued to grow.

And, as players started treating me with caution any time I entered a pot, realising not only that I did actually have some idea what I was doing, but that my cards were on fire, I ran a few bluffs. These were the kind of bluffs that said “Yup! The dealer is still treating me like I’m his twin brother.”

2-7 Triple Draw plays like BaDEUCEy but the whole pot goes to the hand closest to the perfect 23457 low hand. I was dealt three 2’s (deuces in poker) and, as the rest of the hand held promise, stayed in and threw two of the deuces at the first draw. The dealer gave me the last deuce. It is not possible to make a good hand in 2-7 Triple draw without a deuce and I had seen all four of them. The poker term for what I did then is “snowing.” I didn’t draw any more cards, making it look like I had already made a top hand, and bet and raised at every opportunity with as much confidence as I could muster. (What I actually held, with its pair of deuces, was worthless). Crazy Mike got sticky and raised one of my bets, so I re-raised back at him until even he conceded that I must, once again, have a great hand. I stacked another huge pile of $100 chips.

I left after three in the morning, when the pros started trying to change the games we were playing.

“Let’s kick it up to 500/1000,” they said, “C’mon Bill. you’ll just win faster!”

“Sure, or lose faster when my luck turns and I have to rely on my limited skill!” I thought.

“Let’s add No Limit Single Draw!” they said.

“Yeah right!” I said to myself. “A game where I could be playing for my whole stack at any moment. No thanks!”

I was their perfect nightmare; the tourist who wins big and then gets on the plane! That’s not how Vegas is supposed to work, not for these guys.

I tipped the dealer generously and found my chips only just fit into the five racks the card room manager had brought me. I counted out just under $50,000.

I didn’t sleep much in the few hours I had before the alarm told me to get up and go to the airport, and I felt like a drug dealer as I declared my $65,000 in cash and casino chips at the special customs office.

“How did you get this lot then?” asked the officer.

“Poker,” I replied, “at Bellagio and Aria!”

“How much you bring in?” he asked.

“$7000,” I replied.

“What did you do buddy?” he asked with a smile, “Did you come to Vegas and take down the big game?”

“Ha!” I exclaimed, “I guess you could say I did!”

 

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* Sharks and Fish: Poker has its own language for different kinds of player. Shark is obvious. A fish is a weak player who is generally going to lose. The origin is fun: a weak player is a fish because he’s often still in the hand at the river (last card. “Fish in the river,” Geddit?) when he should have thrown his cards long ago. 

* Blinds: The position  immediately in front of the dealer button (a disk which moves one place to the left each hand) is called the small blind and must place a blind bet half the regular bet amount, $150 in this case. The second player is the big blind and must bet the full bet amount, $300.

* The Nuts: The best possible hand in any given situation.