By the way, change your bookmarks! Card Club at Lord Admiral Radio has moved URLs. Here is the new site.Also, congrats to Sean and his wife Cheryl! The have a new addition to the family... a baby boy. Alexander was born on Sunday afternoon. Sean is the man, he still found time to throw together a show and post it.
I was in much better shape and relatively sober when I taped my interview with Sean & Brent on Friday evening for the Lord Admiral Card Club Radio Show and Podcast. If you don't know by now, it's the best podcast dedicated to poker in the universe.
I'm no Gretzky, but over the last few months, I've become a huge cult figure in Canada thanks to Cinci Sean & Brent Stacks. As always, I'm happy to be a part of their amazing show. Sean and Brent are working hard every week to get their podcast done (for free) so stop by and show your support.
You can download the MP3 of last week's show... Episode of 38: Here. (Right Click and Save As)
You can download the MP3 of last week's show... Episode of 37: Here. (Right Click and Save As)
We discuss a bunch of things in a short Q&A including the origins of the Hammer and everyone's favorite poker gourmand Grubby. My interview begins at 27:30 of the podcast. I dropped the ball with the one question about pros who I've become friendly with. I forgot to mention Charlie Shoten, Lou Krieger, and Max Pescatori in the list of players who I got to know a lot better during my time at the WSOP.
If you want to catch up and listen to previous episodes, please visit their archives over at Brainscat. Stop by Card Club at Lord Admiral Radio and download the extra nuggets that Sean posts during the middle of the week. Thanks again to Sean and Stacks for having me on and congrats again on the new baby boy!
Moving on...
Vegas Rounders
How about another edition of Las Vegas Rounders starring yours truly and Grubby? One of the things I'm gonna miss about living in Las Vegas is hitting up local spots for cheap food with Grubby and storming a card room soon after. Sometimes I get the itch to play Party Poker. I then kick myself in the ass and head out to the Strip to play in a real card room. If some assclown is gonna bad beat me, I wanna see the mother fucker's face and give him the evil eye for ten minutes after yet another brutal river suckout.
Friday
I forgot to tell you about my table at Mandalay Bay. There was a black guy in a purple suit who would raise blind before any of the cards were dealt. He looked like Bernie Mac and sat to my left. He'd straddle my blind, which sucked, so I would always fight back and re-raise his straddle with junk hopping to hit a flop. He was up $600 or $700 at one point before he pissed away his stack. He won consecutive hands with 3-6o and got most of the table on tilt soon after. I had him cracking up when I'd blurt out quotes from Friday.
"Everytime I go into the kitchen... you in the kitchen."There was the random hot girl at our table. She wore tight jeans, a wife beater tank top and a green cowboy hat sat on top of her flowing sandy blonde hair. She drank kamikazes on the rocks and I think she was from New Hampshire which was a little weird. I only knew one guy from New Hampshire. He was in my fraternity and his nickname was "Bad Idea." Playing in any pot with the hot chick was a bad idea. She was the Suckout Queen.
Anyway, there was a geeky guy sitting across from me with a t-shirt that read, "I eat pussy." Of course a guy like that probably hasn't seen a vagina up close since the early years of the Bill Clinton administration and I deeply suspect that he had to either pay for it or she was so drunk or knocked out on GHB, that to this day his last spontaneous bout of cunnilingus borderlines on a date-rape charge. He's the type of guy who would eat out a hooker.
Talk about a sobering thought.
These are the types of people I see everyday fly into Vegas and fling chips around with the reckless abandon of a Roger Clemens fastball. Except Rocket is going to the Hall of Fame, and the dipshit with the "I eat Pussy" t-shirt is headed back to the online waters at Party Poker. That's where he thinks he's a stud. Some folks are only suitable for the online arena and they can't function in the real world. A lot of those internet poker experts come into town thinking they can school everyone. Instead they run through a rack of chips within an hour. Did they ever think about the fact that their face is full of obvious tells?
Saturday
After I left Barge and the Plaza, Grubby and I headed over to Excalibur to play against drunk tourists and take advantage of the double wheel spins. Grubby ended up getting pocket aces four times inside of two hours. He got them cracked once and he spun a $100 on the wheel which netted him $200! At my table, one guy got A-A cracked twice inside an orbit. I have yet to spin the wheel since late last year. In fact I have only seen aces once in the last ten days and that was at Palms when I hit quad aces for a jackpot there. I'm due for a wheel spin!
Grubby and I have become fixated with the cute chip runner. We've been trying to construct her back story and we have a few theories. Bottom line, her ass is spectacular and more than makes up for her tepid personality.
Sunday
We ate at Ellis Island and Grubby got their $4.95 steak special. I ordered the Ellis Island Angus burger with bacon and Swiss chese. After dinner, we hit up three different card rooms. First stop was the Aladdin for their Sunday SNGs. If you don't know, the Aladdin runs three MTTs from Monday thru Thursday. They run one on Friday. Saturday is dark. And on Sunday's they introduced $50 + 5 SNGs.
My thoughts on the SNG? Not impressed.
First of all the $50 + 5 seems like the standard buy in. However, there is an additional $5 per person taken out of the prize pool. In reality, $45 goes to the pool, $5 goes to the house rake, and $5 goes to the dealer. So there's only a $450 prize pool and $50 goes to the Aladdin and the dealer gets $50. Now, here's what really sucks... they only pay the top 2 players. First place gets $360 and second gets $90. Felicia would be livid.
Grubby and I were seated at the same table. You get $1000 in chips and the levels are 15 minutes in length. The blinds start at 25/50 and in the blind of an eye there were 100/200! I looked down at just $900 after playing one hand (AKs in the LB). I had to make a move with the tabling being 7 handed. I found QQ in EP and moved all in. The guy behind me called with KK. A guy in LP called with 10-10. Grubby folded A8s and that would have won when an ace flopped. Anyway, I took 7th while Grubby bubbled out in 3rd. Grubby didn't like the SNG format at all. The players were awful but the structure is horrible. We'll never play that again.
Afterwards we headed to a locals casino called Silverton near Blue Diamond which is south of the Strip. Their poker room has only been open for a few months so I got to see one of the many new card rooms around town. Silverton has a cool lounge called Shady Grove with a pool table and candle pin bowling. Silverton also has the largest aquarium in Las Vegas with 4,000 fish, which is a stoner's wet dream. They have a bunch of cool looking devil rays that look like Stealth bombers and the tropical fish radiate this trippy glow depending on how the light hits them. They also have a mermaid show where women get in the tank and do an aquatic acrobat show.
The Silverton looks like a ski lodge and the poker room looks like someone's study. I expected to see a fire place in the corner and a bear skin rug on the floor. The poker room has several plasma screens along the wall. There are five tables in the tiny room, so space is limited. They spread 2-4, 4-8 with a full kill and 6-12, along with 1-2 NL. We got on a list for 4-8. Right away, I sensed it was a table full of locals and Southern California style players. The betting was capped preflop almost 75% of the time in every freakin' orbit.
I stayed out of the way until I found J-J in the LP. All rags hit the flop and turn. I check raised the remaining players on the turn. A ten fell on the river and I bet out thinking I had the best hand. The guy in LP, who had blown through three racks in less than 37 minutes, raised me. I thought about popping him back, but figured he might have rivered two pair on me with a junk hand like 10-8 suited. Anyway, I called and showed my pocket Jacks which was enough to take down a huge pot. Mostly every pot there was over $120.
There was an interesting hand involving a young local and one of the old guys. On the river, with two jacks on the board, the old guy bet. With two other players still in the pot, he flashed one of his cards... the Queen of hearts. One guy folded and the young kid thought about it, as the old guy put the Queen on he felt. The kid thought about it for a minute and called. The old guy showed the Jack and the kid mucked.
"That wasn't cool, asshole," he said.
"What did you say?" barked the old man.
"That wasn't cool, asshole," he said a second time.
The old man jumped up and challenged the kid to a fight. Here we go again, eh? The floor was quickly called over and he scolded the kid for using bad language and told the old guy that what he did was technically legal but unprofessional. The kid wouldn't let up and the old guy told him to fuck off. The kid got up and left the table and Grubby gave me a look and motioned to the front door with his head. I got up, stacked up my chips, and cashed out. I was up $100 after that huge hand with the pocket Jacks.
It wasn't even midnight so we stormed the castle at Excalibur for their double wheel spins. We were bummed out that our favorite chip runner was not working. I could think of 101 temerarious things that I could do to her with just a bottle of whipped cream. I'll share that list with you another time.
Grubby and I were seated at the table and nothing really happened aside from the fact were were in the 9 and 10 seats. The only notable things from that session were the side bets that Grubby and I would make on the wheel spins. The wheel is broken up into three different colors; Blue, Yellow, and Green. We would make bets on what color would hit. I went 1-4 during the last hour. It was ugly. Grubby would pick "Yellow" and I'd go with "Blue" and the fucker would appear to come to a neat stop on Blue, yet skip over into Yellow miss me completely. Oh well. It gave us something to do in between getting a run of cold cards and folding. We didn't have any eye candy to look at so we were recuced to betting on wheel spins.
We'd gamble on anything it seems.
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