My first attempt at a Grump Challenge

A couple of weeks ago I proposed the Great Grump Challenges. Tonight I gave one of them my first serious attempt. I decided to go for the MGM/Mirage Challenge (Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and Excalibur), as it is undoubtedly the easiest one. I thought that if I could establish a benchmark score for that one, it would simultaneously make the others seem less daunting and encourage readers to try to best my time.

I went first to Mandalay Bay, starting at 6:30 p.m, buying into my usual $1-2 NLHE game for my usual $100. On my third hand at the table, I had pocket deuces. Well, it's no powerhouse like deuce-four, but you have to take what you're given. Several of us limped in. The flop was a lovely 2-5-7 rainbow--a set with no flush draws and minimal straight draws to worry about. A player in one of the blinds led out at it for $10. I was the only caller. The turn was the ace of the fourth suit, so again not much to worry about in terms of being outdrawn here. My opponent bet $25. I called again. The river was the fourth deuce. My opponent now bet another $30. I went all in, which was just an additional $29 at that point, and he folded. I showed the quads.

The floor person came over with the form for me to sign just as the rotating display showed me the high-hand jackpot I had won: $258. A few minutes later, she brought my chips--but it was $308! She explained that I happened to hit the bonus during their "happy hour," which is 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., during which time they add an extra $50 to any high-hand jackpot. Whee! 15 minutes at the table, and I'm up by well over $300!

(I should insert here a clarification of the Challenge rules. I hadn't thought of whether jackpots should count toward one's total. I declare that they do. Any money you win from playing cash poker--whether you win it from other players or from the casino--counts. It does not count if you, e.g., hit a winning sports book ticket while you're playing poker.)

I played the rest of that orbit and one more, picking up a couple more small pots, and left at 7:00, 30 minutes after starting, cashing out for $444, uptick of $344. This challenge was starting off like gangbusters!

As I walked over the walkway to the Luxor, I was already starting to compose this post, with boasts about how I had set a nearly unbeatable time in the MGM/Mirage Challenge. I should have remembered the old saw about counting one's chickens before they hatch....

Luxor: Sat down at 7:05 in another $1-2 NLHE game. For nearly two hours, it was just a little up, a little down, no real momentum. But then a new guy came to the table, and raised his first three hands in a row, all from early position. He was highly fidgety and talkative, manifesting all the ADD-like signs of a true action junkie. Three raises in a row from out of position immediately after sitting down, combined with those traits, means that I can't give him much credit on the third one, which he made $10 to go from under the gun.

I was on the button and found A-K suited. There were two callers between Mr. ADD and me--obviously, the other players were starting to be suspicious of his raising range, too. I pushed it to $35, about a third of my stack. Mr. ADD moved all in when it was his turn. The other players folded, leaving some dead money in the pot. Of course, he might have aces or kings, but I think the range of hands he will do this with is w-a-a-a-y broader than that. He probably thinks I'm on a position re-steal without much and will fold to his reraise. I'm not one to play A-K for all my chips before the flop in most circumstances, but this is one in which I'm likely to be ahead of most of his range. Besides, I'm getting pot odds of nearly 2:1, and unless he has exactly A-A, I can't be more than a 2:1 dog. So I call.

He has pocket 10s. An ace greets me right in the door, and nothing else comes for either one of us. This pushes me over my target profit, so I quit a few hands later, cashing out for $238 (up $138) at exactly 9:00 p.m. (When one is on a Great Grump Challenge, one cannot be too concerned about being thought ill-mannered for a hit-and-run.)

Two down, one to go. I'm up $482 in 2 1/2 hours, which should be an outstanding pace for the Challenge, if only I can keep it up.

But the Excalibur has not been kind to me since the conversion to the electronic tables. The nature of the player mix has definitely changed, with fewer of the totally clueless dropping in. That has not been the problem, though. It's no tougher there than anyplace else I play. I have simply been faced with an endless stream of bad luck. Unbelievable stretches of card-dead hell get interrupted only by bad beats and inescapable second-best hands. I realize fully that complaints like this are the common refrain of the bad player who can't recognize that he's bad. But I really do have a pretty realistic assessment of when my losses are due to my own screwups and when they are attributable to bad luck, and the Excalibur has heaped more of the latter on me in the last three months than any joint in town. I've played there four times since the changeover, with these net results before tonight: +$13, -$48, -$270, and +$7. Ick.

So I approached this third leg of the Challenge with a bit of trepidation. But still, I was on a roll, and felt that it could continue. In fact, I had felt so confident that I burned about 10 minutes waiting in a slow line at the Excalibur McDonald's for a chocolate shake to power me to my glorious finish.

It was not to be.

My first $100 buy-in was lost to a bad beat (runner-runner flush for my opponent). The second $100 was lost with my big pocket pair against a one-notch-bigger pocket pair. The third hundred dribbled away slowly in a series of making or calling pre-flop raises with promising hands that all hit zilch on the flop, and in situations where I couldn't make a convincing move to steal the pot with a bet. The last of it went in on a straight draw that actually hit, only to be crushed by an opponent's quads, after he had flopped a set and turned the four-of-a-kind.

What ironic justice (or, I would argue, injustice), to start the night so well with a set turning into quads, then have it ended in such an ugly manner with the quads hitting against me.

This is exactly typical of how the Excalibur's new infernal machines have treated me--and that after I gave them a pretty good initial review! The wretched things are supremely ungrateful. The last time I tried playing all three places in one evening (post about it here), before I had conceived of the Challenges, I ran into the same sort of obstacle: up $240 in 1.5 hours at Mandalay Bay, then up $197 in 1.3 hours at Luxor, then spinning my wheels at Excalibur for a whopping gain of $7 in three hours. I tell you, those damn machines have it in for me, for reasons I cannot understand.

Long experience has taught me that if I lose three buy-ins, it is very rare for me to do well with a fourth. At that point, tilt starts to set in, as I feel the nearly universal urge to try hard to get back to even, and start playing less than solid poker. And, of course, opponents know that I'm struggling, and swoop in like vultures.

So even though it meant giving up on what had been an extraordinarily promising start to my first serious Challenge attempt, I stood up and walked away at 10:30 p.m., after just over an hour at the Excalibur. I still had a net gain of $182 in exactly four hours. That's not horrible, but it doesn't send me home whistling a merry tune and with a lilt in my step. It was far, far short of what I had had my heart set on.

As Michael Craig has bitterly but wisely observed, "Poker's a bitch mistress who exists to break your heart."