Wednesday, February 12, 2003

The poker community really is unique. If you play poker with someone today, or deal to them tomorrow, sooner or later you’re going to cross paths again. That’s a good reason to always leave a game in a calm, pleasant manner rather than having a fit and storming out when you take a beat. Your past play, attitude, and table presence follows you everywhere. It’s extremely important to never let them see you sweat or bleed…keep them guessing and in awe of your table presence. That’s a free tip for the day. 🙂

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The sad side of poker came to visit last week. On Thursday evening, the 6th, Peter Nagy had a heart attack in the poker room. He crossed Death’s Threshold that night and will be missed by many of us.

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On the humorous side of poker, you have to love Doyle B. He called Carmen over to pick up his chips and put them on account. He had a few chips short of a full rack of $5,000 chips. The other players teased him with, “Do you always win?…Don’t you ever play until you lose?”

He chuckled and said he did pretty well in Mississippi…followed with, “Speaking of sharing. If I had to share a good looking woman with someone else, I’d get the half that eats!”

He’s a grand man in the grand game of poker! And if he would ever share even 10 years of his poker stories and games with us, we’d be armed with tales worth telling.

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It’s gloomy and rainy in Vegas…swollen rivers race along the strip and force pedestrians to take cover away from the curb…they’d either drown in the tidal waves created by passing motorists or need a change of clothing and blow dryer.

There are too many accidents to mention (someone said they’d heard that number was close to 200 by 6 p.m. tonight) and when swing shift was leaving the building, the report was that Highway 15 and 95 North were snarled and jammed because of more accidents. Rain here creates very treacherous driving conditions, exercise caution and slow down…maybe you’ll save the life of a poker player/dealer. Thanks in advance.

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There’s a certain type of player that always fine tunes my ‘irritation meter’ and sends it skyrocketing over the top. He plays the low limit games at Bellagio. His name’s R. W. and he’s a ‘good old boy’ from down South. He really doesn’t mean any harm, he’s just trying to mold the game to suit him. You’ll see him in a lot of players though, they just have different names and shapes and play different limits.

His routine goes like this. Two games running of the same limit, his game has six players, yours has five. You happen to like short handed games and just got this one where you want it when R. W. yells at the players in your game, “Hey, why don’t you guys draw and come over here? No sense in playing short.”

His braying is like the jackal that’s found the scent of a wounded animal. Within a few minutes he does it again and soon another player in his game picks up on it and makes the same braying noise.

No one at your table even knew it was short handed until he started the wheels in motion and now they want to draw. You just give up and go home because he broke up your game and you really don’t want to draw and be shut out of a seat and you really don’t want to play in a game with him.

He also likes to bet when he knows he’s got you but when he thinks you might have the best hand or he’s on a draw, he looks at you and queries, “Just you and me in the hand?”…he gently pats the table like he’s sincerely interested in your welfare…”I’ll check to you.” He’s stroking you while he’s trying to beat you.

Another move he likes to make on a newcomer, that’s sitting by him in the game, that’s new to ‘chopping’ and doesn’t understand what it means, gets it explained to him like this. “Well if it comes down to you and me in the blinds, we just chop. We don’t want the house to get any more money from us. It’s a gentlemen’s agreement between the two of us, we just take our money back.”

He pulled a classic tonight. He left his $4-$8 Holdem game to visit another $4-$8 game and inform a ‘live one’ that a seat was open in his game and the ‘live one’ could just come over and join them now. With that said, R. W. ambled back to his game.

Lobbying is a huge taboo in poker. It’s tacky to try to take a player out of one game and get them into another one but that’s the way R. W. is. And his play is tighter than Bull’s Butt in fly time too. He could win a Zillion $$$, 25 way action pot and the dealer is guaranteed a 50c tip with an explanation of how poor ‘ol R. W. needs to win when he plays.

R. W. always looks for the best game but he’s never the reason it’s the best game. He can change it from ‘live’ to ‘dead’ in a heartbeat. Irritation meter? FULL TILT!

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This post is done by Chanzes – during the time period that I took a break from posting in the Diary.