Morning poker

If you pay attention to the time stamps on these posts, you may knit your brow in puzzlement at why a short time ago I posted about coming home from the book store. As I type, it is 1:35 p.m., which is usually about the time I'm hitting the shower after having been awake for maybe 30 or 60 minutes. But for once, I'm not only out of bed, but have already been out into the world, played poker, and come home again!

I think this is only the third time in almost three years of playing now that I have tried a morning session. The idea is to catch those who have been playing (and, often, drinking) all night. They will often be desperately tired, stressed out, drunk, and/or losing badly and trying to get back to even. The down sides are that (1) it can be difficult to find a game, and (2) many of the local retiree nits come out of the woodwork at those hours, and they are not the target audience. One time I tried this at Caesars, with good success. Another time I tried it at MGM, and failed. There was a game going, but I stupidly failed to adjust my tactics to the opposition, and attempted a couple of big bluffs at people that I should have known were basically unbluffable because of exactly the factors (as listed above) that made me seek them out! D'oh!

I sat down at the Venetian poker room at 9:05 a.m. Yes, surprisingly, the world actually exists at that hour--who knew?! You can see from the photo above that it was pretty dead, even though this is one of the busiest poker rooms in the city and they are in the midst of the Deep Stack Extravaganza, which vastly increases the number of players on an average day. There were four tables in operation.

This was my first time playing since Saturday. I ran into a pretty bad spell the last couple of weeks of March. I was starting to feel the same horrible mental wooziness that I was trapped in last August, when I was in the midst of my worst-ever losing streak. I decided that I needed to take more than my usual one day off to reset, because I had already done that two or three times, without anything improving. So I took an actual vacation from poker (except for a little online, mostly for funsies). I did other stuff that had been neglected: taxes, reading, Netflix movies, watching TV shows I had videotaped but not viewed, cleaning, grocery shopping, catching up on other blogs, etc. It felt pretty good not to play for a while, but the last couple of days I have definitely been getting back my itch to play, so today was the day. I thought the change to a morning session might feel sufficiently different from my usual evening play that it would help the whole situation feel new again. It did.

There was only one drunk guy, not half a table, as I had kind of hoped. But he was drunk enough for the whole table, so that compensated. He annoyed everybody with constant, repeated, loud, profane, and looney diatribes about the Federal Reserve system, 9/11 conspiracies, and one-world government. I quickly put in the ear buds with Elvis as my respite. He was sitting right next to me and kept attempting to engage me in his madness. I just kept pretending I couldn't hear him, and he eventually gave up, and returned to trying to warn the rest of the table about the impending collapse of civilization as we know it.

I left WINNAH after less than two hours. In this kind of situation, it's pretty important to my psychological well-being to take the money and run, rather than give it all back and chalk up yet another L in the spreadsheet (I first wrote "ledger" there--but who am I kidding?) via a bad read or an unlucky turn of a card.

My entire profit came in basically two hands:

1. I was on the button and looked down at the nappy-headed hos. I had raised both of the previous two times I had had the button, and had won both hands with a continuation bet on the flop when it was checked to me. Once was with garbage that hit bottom pair, once with two Broadway cards that completely whiffed, but were apparently good enough. I knew, therefore, that any attentive players would be highly suspicious of a steal when I put in a button raise (to $13, I think) for yet the third time.

I got just one caller, the big blind, a guy I've played with once or twice before and I know to be smart, with no shortage of bluffing and trickery in his arsenal. Before calling, he asked how much I had behind--about $120, which he had covered. This made me think that he had some kind of speculative hand, and he was wondering about his implied odds. Unless his question were a deliberate attempt at deception (always a possibility), this suggested that he was not slow-playing kings or aces.

The flop was A-J-5, rainbow. He checked. I bet $25. I was not at all suprised when he check-raised me, because I knew that somebody would be wanting to challenge me on my third button raise/c-bet combination. Normally I would just give up at this point, but because I had been expecting an attentive player to draw a line in the sand with me pretty much no matter what he might be holding, and because this was definitely a smart, attentive player, I had substantially less reason to fear him having me beat than I usually would. Besides, he only min-raised me, which could be begging me to make a move, but could also be just sticking a toe in the water to see if I was full of it. Hard to say which.

This was a tricky spot, given the stack sizes, because if I shoved all-in, he would be getting better than 2.5:1 on a call--another $70 to win a pot of about $195 (about $25 pre-flop, plus my $120, plus his own $50). That's not enough if he has, say, a medium pair and he becomes convinced that I have an ace or a jack. But it obviously won't get him to fold any set or two-pair combination, and he might not even fold either an ace or a jack. It was really hard to gauge what my fold equity might be.

But I pushed it anyway. He called quickly. Lucky for me, the queen of hearts on the turn settled essentially all of my worries. He flashed a 5 before mucking his cards. It's hard to believe he would have called me pre-flop with J-5, and with either 5-5 or A-5 in the hole, I think he would have shown both cards rather than just the 5. So my guess is that I really was ahead the entire way, and didn't need the third queen, but I'll never know for sure.

2. Big blind with 5-5. A bunch of us all limped in. Flop was a very lovely 7-5-7. Yes, that's how talented and experienced I am at poker--I can flop a full house whenever the mood suits me. I am a skillbox.

I was first to act, and bet $6, about 2/3 of the pot. My goal was twofold: (1) Sniff out who might be sitting on a 7, and (2) convince such a person that I didn't have a big hand, on the guess that he or she would expect anything beating trips to slow-play it. Ding! A middle-aged woman new to the table called. Everybody else folded. The turn was a king. I bet again, this time $15. She min-raised me to $30. Oh yeah, baby--we've got ourselves a 7 out there!

Of course, with the lowest possible full house, there is always the possibility that she has 7-5 or 7-K or will hit on the river with whatever her kicker may be--or, God forbid, 7-7 in the hole. But the situation is so likely to be in my favor that I have to be willing to get it all in here, or not bother playing no-limit. I stalled a bit, trying to look as if I'm trying not to look worried (I wish I had videotape of myself in these moments, so that I could see whether I really pull off such acting), then called, with what I hope was just a shade of faux reluctance.

Of course, if I were genuinely concerned, I would follow that call with a check on the river, no matter what came. So when a 10 hit (no straights or flushes possible to scare her), that's what I did--think a bit, then check, trying to appear as if I would welcome her to check behind. She bit, putting out another $30. I had hoped for a little more, but decided that she was practically pot-committed (another $90 or so behind), and moved all-in. She insta-called and showed me 7-4.

I'll take those chips now, please. TYVM!

Not exactly rocket science, but very satisfying. I scored me a decent W for the session and felt pretty much back in the saddle again.

Giddyup!


Addendum

I forgot to mention something. When I saw the Q-Q and knew that I would now be raising the button for the third consecutive time, I had a flashback to this column by John Vorhaus about this exact thing: opponents anticipating a pattern of yours the third time you execute it, and how you can and must be prepared to exploit their attempt to exploit you.