Boulder Highway adventures

I mentioned recently that I've been trying to call Club Fortune and find a time when they're spreading a $1-$2 no-limit game, because I've never seen their new poker room, even though it has been open for months. After being told that this virtually never happens, however, I resolved to head out there sometime and put up with a low limit game, just so that I can report on the room. I decided that today was the day.

But on the long drive out there, I got interested in a news story on the radio and missed the turn. Before I knew it, I was at the point where Boulder Highway becomes limited-access, and there was no way to turn around for several miles. The first opportunity to head back north comes right at Railroad Pass.


Railroad Pass

I've been to this place once before, in December, 2007. I took a couple of pictures of its one lonely, unused poker table, and did a post about it titled, "The smallest poker room in Nevada."

I had not been planning to visit it again, but as long as I had accidentally ventured that far out (22 miles from my downtown apartment, right on the border between Henderson and Boulder City), I decided to peek in and see if the one table was still there.

It is not. I have no idea when they stopped trying, but there is definitely no poker room at Railroad Pass now. Which means that I can claim to have played in every currently operating poker room in the area. (Unless Speedway still has a table or two. I kind of doubt it, but I don't know for certain.)


Club Fortune

I headed back north on Boulder Highway and managed not to miss the turnoff this time. I quickly found the new poker room and got a seat:












Aesthetically, it's a fairly nice little room. The colors are tasteful. It's quiet and genuinely smoke-free. There is plenty of room around the tables, which are a nice tan felt. I wouldn't mind spending many hours there, if (1) it weren't so far away, and (2) they had a game at which I could make money.

In terms of game selection, well, you already know. They typically have either a $2-4 or $3-6 LHE game going evenings. I hear that they often have a stud game one night a week.

What kind of place is it? It's the kind of place where you can, and will, frequently hear the dealer announce, pre-flop, "All in for $2."

It's the kind of place where you can, and will, hear a good ol' boy say, while throwing in the chips for a crying call on the river, "I'm suckin' hind tit but I gotta call ya."

It's the kind of place that does one better on the annoying (but, thankfully, dying) practice of chopping $1 chips into half-dollar coins: They use quarters. (If you think it's slow waiting for some old geezer to gather up four $1 chips for a call, wait until he has accumulated that much in quarters, and wants to get rid of them by putting them in the pot.)

It's the kind of place where a player next to you will ask you to trade you a white chip for four of your quarters, saying he needs them to tip the cocktail waitress. It's the kind of place where he will not be kidding.

The play was typical $2-4 LHE, maybe a little worse than average. Let me tell you about a few hands.

1. My first hand at the table I was given pocket jacks in the cutoff. I raised. Eight callers. Flop KdQd7s. Checked around to me. I think it's pretty hopeless, but ya never know, so I bet anyway. Six callers. Jumping to the end of the story, I'll tell you that it was won by a guy who had 7d-9d. He rivered the flush. He had flopped a pair and a flush draw. Can't fault him for playing it, really, though he would have been better off betting than playing it passively. But passive play is a hallmark of this structure everywhere, so he's just doing what everybody else does.

2. A few hands later, I have Ks-Qs. I raise. I was already getting dirty looks. Apparently raising twice in one orbit is a significant faux pas, and makes one stand out. Five callers. Flop A45 with two diamonds. Once again, with perhaps more hope than sense, I bet when it was checked to me. Surprisingly, I had only one caller this time, the button. She obviously has either an ace or a diamond draw, right? Turn is 10d. Check-check. Hmmm. River: offsuit king. I check. She bets. I think most likely she has an ace, and checked the turn not for deception but because she feared I hit the flush. But she has me a little puzzled and curious now with this late bet, so I make the crying call. She has Q-10, no diamonds. I win, with considerable surprise. So play back what happened: She called on the flop with no pair and no draw. When she actually made a pair on the turn, she checked behind. Then when another overcard came on the river, she bet. Go ahead--you figure out her logic. I can't.

3. I have A-J offsuit in the small blind. There are, I dunno, about 30 limpers ahead of me. I raise. I think one of them folds. Flop is a lovely A-A-2. Two hearts, of which I have zero. For a second I consider slow-playing, going for the check-raise. But I quickly rule that out, since even in a family pot, this crowd could easily check it all the way around, and if they're all going to be as inclined to keep calling as history has shown, I'd like to let them. So I bet. Not only do I get callers, I get raised, and reraised. It was the only time the entire hour I played that a betting round got capped--five ways! My head was reeling. What the hell was going on? How many aces are there in this deck anyway? I can guess that one of these knuckleheads has the case ace, one or two have a flush draw. But what about the others? Did somebody luck into a boat with 2-2? I am completely at a loss to understand what is going on.

Turn is an offsuit 9. I don't know where I am in the hand, but I bet out anyway. Three callers this time.

River is a king, putting a third heart out there, which I hate. I give up and check, because surely at least one of these people just made his or her hand. But to my amazement, the action is checked all around. Seriously, now--WTF? Why would somebody with a full house have checked? Why would somebody with a flush have checked? It all made no sense whatsoever.

I show my hand first. The big blind slams his A-10 down on the table face up, uttering an unpleasantry in the process. The others quietly muck. So no flush, no full house. What in the world were those people calling with? What caused them to cap the betting on the flop, then let one bet stand on the turn, and check the river around? I still have no idea. It's one of the most bizarre, inexplicable hands I've ever played.

4. The final board is 6-10-6-10-2. On the river, Player A bets, Player B raises, Player A calls. Player B shows, not too surprisingly, suited 10-9. Player A lets out a sigh of relief and flips over his 6-6.

Monsters under the bed, sir?

5. Final board: K-3-8-2-9, no flush possible. There is a bet and call. Bettor shows 2-3 offsuit, bottom two pair. Caller flashes Q-10 offsuit before mucking.

Nice call, sir. Way to keep him honest.

I played my requisite hour, then said good-night and went on my way. Next stop:


Jokers Wild

Again, this is a place that I scratched off of my list of rooms to play in about a year after I moved here. It was so bad I thought I'd likely never return. I wrote two stories from my one hour in that particular patch of poker purgatory, here and here.

My main purpose in stopping was to snap a few photos for the "Guess the casino" series. (This constitutes fair warning for those of you who play along.) I had not yet hatched that idea when I first visited. I did stop by the poker room. They had a one-table tournament going, no cash game, so I didn't have to ever consider whether to subject myself to another stretch of locals $2-4 LHE.


Eastside Cannery

I gave a friendly wave as I drove by. I might have stopped to check out the poker action, but decided I had better things to do than to spend a night in jail for trespassing, so I kept driving.


Boulder Station

There are now just three poker rooms in the city that allow cigarette smoking right at the table: Boulder Station, Texas Station, and Arizona Charlies--Decatur. Boulder has a distinct advantage over the others: It consistently has a no-limit hold'em game, at least in the evenings and on weekend days. The others do not. It also has worse-than-average players. My friend "Las Vegas Michael" frequently Tweets about his big scores there, tilting the local rocks when he cracks their big pairs. So I reluctantly try to hit it once or twice a year, just to keep it in the rotation. And as long as I was in the neighborhood, I decided tonight would be such an occasion. (Upon getting home, I see that it has been just over a year since my last time there, a visit that featured one memorably wild hand.)

Alas, no such stories to relate tonight. It was one of the tightest, nittiest $1-2 games I've played in a long time. Raise and take it, win $3, over and over again--or a continuation bet and win maybe $10. I ended up with a little extra pocket change by the time I left, and a serum nicotine level that will probably be off the charts for a while. Good Lord do these people smoke! The guy next to me went through seven cigarettes in the two hours I played. Ugh.

The only remarkable thing that happened during my time at the table was that the power went out. That is a first for me in a casino, despite the number of hours I've logged in them over the last four years. In fact, it happened twice, a few minutes apart. The lights flickered, and the cable or satellite feeds on the TVs went out, but otherwise not much happened. The backup generators apparently kick in extremely rapidly. The staff had to reset computers and their connections to the other Stations poker rooms (for the combined-property bad-beat jackpot), but that was about it.

The greatest thing about Boulder Station is that its poker room is the only one out of the 60 in the valley that is right next to a Dairy Queen. Just about everything is made better if one is eating a Snickers Blizzard while doing it, and that includes playing poker. Nom nom nom.

Then I went home. The end.

My night among the smokers

Once or twice a year, something hits me (a stroke, maybe, or a brain tumor) and I decide I should put in a session at one or more of the handful of poker rooms in town that still allow smoking at the table. (Wow--strange coincidence. I just noticed that it was exactly one year ago today that I first put up my frequently updated categorization of degrees of smokiness in poker rooms.) Tonight was such a night. I took in Boulder Station and Hooters. Nothing interesting happened at Hooters, but let me tell you about Boulder.


New room

They're advertising a new poker room at Boulder Station. Baloney. It's the same old room, with barely enough change to call it a face lift. They moved the check-in desk from one end to the other, put up new wallpaper, and are gradually replacing the chairs with more comfortable ones. That's it.


Pictures

Despite what has happened to me and other photographers in other Stations properties, I walked around snapping pictures at Boulder unnoticed and unmolested.


Massage

There was a young woman in uniform walking around offering table massages. I had not seen this at Boulder previously, though I've only played there twice before, so maybe it goes on all the time and I was just unaware of it. I've added it to my list of places where you can get a massage while playing.


Oops

On my next-to-last hand of the night, I was dealt J-J, except the second one flipped up and was exposed during the pitch and had to be replaced. I got an offsuit 4 instead. Ick. It's the first time ever, as far as I know, that I have had a big pocket pair broken up and taken away because of a dealer's bad pitch.


My big hand

OK, here's the story I really wanted to get to.

I had started with my customary $100 buy-in, and after a little less than two hours had worked it up to $201. I was two off the button and looked down at K-J offsuit. Not a great hand. Sometimes I'll throw it away, sometimes limp, sometimes raise. As is so often said in poker, it all depends. In this case, there were three or four limpers already, and it's not a hand I want to play in an unraised pot. I hadn't played a hand in a while, and hadn't raised pre-flop in a long time, so I thought that if I raised I could get credit for a bigger hand than I actually held. Furthermore, the cutoff and the button were the two tightest players at the table, so I thought that a raise had a good chance of effectively giving me the button for this hand. I raised to $13. I got four callers, including the button, which was not good.

The flop was Q-T-5 rainbow, giving me an open-ended straight draw to the nuts. The first three players checked. I bet $35 into the approximately $65 pot (a couple of limpers had folded, both blinds had called, and I think the max rake is $4--close enough), basically running a flag up the pole to see if anybody would salute, as the saying goes.

Boy, did they ever! The button reraised all-in for his last $95. The small blind pushed all-in for a little over $400. One guy folded. A middle-position maniac pushed all-in for about $250. Nothing, absolutely nothing like this had happened during the previous two hours! What in the hell was going on?! As the chatter and oooing and ahhing started, people started coming over from nearby tables to see what was developing.

I hated this situation. I probably had the worst hand among the four of us left contesting this pot! I had $153 left at this point. I estimated that I was getting better than 3:1 on a call for the rest of my chips and that I was right around 3:1 to win it. (Eight outs twice is about 33%, but you have to factor in some discount for the possibility of somebody hitting a runner-runner flush, or, more likely here, the board pairing and giving a full house or quads to an opponent currently holding a set.) It was close, but I thought the math favored a call.

I hate this sort of thing. If I'm going to be playing a huge pot, I want it to be on my terms, when I have reason to be confident that I have substantially the best hand. I might semi-bluff all-in on a good draw like this against a single opponent if I could be the aggressor, but calling all-in on a draw? Into three opponents? It's against my religion!

But I was finally persuaded by my estimate of the numbers that it was the right thing to do, so I stacked up my chips and pushed them forward. We now had an actual crowd around the table.

The dealer put out the turn card: deuce of the fourth suit. Didn't help me, but it didn't pair the board, and it killed the possibility of a backdoor flush.

River: a 9! Yes! I spiked my gin card, and now held the absolute nuts. The button mucked without showing. The small blind had 5-5 for a flopped set. The middle-position maniac had A-Q. (I don't know why he didn't raise before the flop. That was uncharacteristic of him.) The dealer pushed me about $654, and gave the rest to the small blind.

Here's the actual math, now that I can take the time to work through it with 20/20 hindsight. First, though, I have to guess at what the button had. I think it must have been 10-10, Q-Q, or Q-10--maybe A-Q or A-A, but I think those are less likely. Given his tight nature and how I had been playing, those are really the only two hands with which he would have called my pre-flop raise and then raised me all-in on the flop. For now I'm going to assume it was Q-10.

The pot was actually offering me $501 that I could win (the $65 pre-flop pot, plus my $35 bet, plus the button's $95, plus $153 from each of the two bigger stacks). That's 3.27:1 on my money if I win. The odds calculator at cardplayer.com assigns us the following rounded probabilities to take the hand: 27% (me), 13% (for the presumed Q-T on the button), 58% (5-5 in the small blind), and 2% (maniac with A-Q). That makes my odds 2.7:1 against winning. So I was basically right that it was pretty close, but mathematically favored the call that I ended up making. [Patting self on back.]

(If we assume instead that the button had flopped a bigger set, it change the odds between him and the small blind, but doesn't change my odds meaningfully. Because he was the short stack, he wasn't eligible for any side pot and therefore wouldn't have to show his hand even if he did have a better flopped set than the small blind's 5s.)

It's nice to be presented with a moderately complex situation, work out the right decision, and have the poker gods reward it. Study your math, boys and girls--it really does come in handy!

I finished that orbit, but didn't have another playable hand (because my jacks got taken away). I packed up my chips and told the table, "Gentlemen, I know when my luck has gotten as good as it's going to get, and that would be now, so I'm leaving before it changes on me." That was my flimsy apology for the hit-and-run. But I just didn't feel like taking a chance on giving it all back, like I did the last time I had a comparable stack. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Sometimes that means take the money and run.


Good dealer

By the way, I need to add kudos for the dealer. He announced verbally each step in figuring out the pot. He showed that I had the button covered, gave his stack to me, then counted my stack and took the same amount from each of the two big stacks, gave those sums to me, then gave the rest of the A-Q's stack to the small blind. He explained clearly at every point what he was doing and why. In multi-way pots, it's easy to make mistakes, but if the dealer says everything out loud along the way, it's makes it far easier for those involved to either be reassured that the outcome is correct or recognize that a mistake is being made and speak up to make it right. I tipped him more than I usually would for being so open and clear. Dealers usually get these things right, but do the work silently, so I have to figure out what they're doing as they go. That's not always easy, because there are several ways one can go about the process. I much prefer this dealer's uncommon explicitness.


One Hooters story

OK, I forgot about the one notable thing that happened at Hooters: I saw somebody flop a royal flush. He had A-K of hearts, and the flop came Q-J-10 of hearts--in that order, even. This is, I think, the third royal flush I've seen made using both hole cards, but the first one that hit on the flop. Given how much I play, that tells you something about how rare a phenomenon it is.


So all in all, my night among the smokers turned out OK. As soon as I burn the clothes I was wearing and finish coughing up a lung or two, I'll be fine.