Earlier this week, I pushed into an eight handed $2,000-$4,000 Mixed Game. The only person I’m really not familiar with was in the 8s, but I’ve seen him somewhere along the green felt trail over the years. That’s an amazing limit. One pot would pay off my mortgage, my truck, all my little ‘nitty’ bills, and set me up with a savings account to boot, yet they fling those Flags, ($5,000 chips) into the pot with reckless abandon…as if they had a factory at home and produced more each time they needed them.

It’s fascinating and bizarre to watch this game – even if you’re familiar with it. This game is the one game that you never get a bunch of petty crap from players, as a dealer, unless you really aren’t paying attention or make mistakes. They just GAMBOL. The only one that is prone to act like a crybaby is Sammy F. and even he can be really quiet at times…such is the way it was in this game.

The line-up: 1s – Chip R., 2s – Lyle B., 3s – Gus H., 4s – Doyle B., 5s – Minh., 6s – Sammy., 7s – Barry G., 8s – Stranger.

The first game was Deuce to 7 Triple Draw and only 6 players are dealt in. Two players in front of the Big Blind, receive yellow buttons, and are dealt out. At the end of the hand, when the button moves, the yellow buttons are moved to the next two players. Well let’s cut to Lyle. He always brings a gold brick to the table and sets it in front of his chip stacks. It’s a standard with him. Now he has little, lumpy gold nuggets that he’s added to his collection. The nuggets are about the size of a breakfast sausage. No yellow buttons in front of the players now, just gold nuggets. Each time a hand finished, I moved the gold nuggets to the next player.

The first hand I dealt was a ‘time pot’ and the winner of the pot would pay it. Lyle had a sweater behind him and they were conversing and not paying too much attention to the game. Lyle won the pot and after I pushed it to him, he stacked it and went back to talking to his friend. I shuffled the deck and said, “Lyle, I need $80 for the time, please.”

He just kept talking.

I said again, “Lyle, the winner is supposed to pay time. $80 please.”

He waved at Gus, “Then he has to pay.”

I started laughing and I was dealing by now, “No. The winner of the first pot has to pay time.”

He threw me a Black chip and after I finished dealing the hand, I broke it down, took the time, and he said, “Keep the $20.”

Yahoo! Big bonus for me. It might be all I make out of this game.

Gus was running over everyone in the Deuce, drawing two and three cards and making the best of it each time. He ran over Doyle and then backed up and ran over him again. It’s not that Gus outplayed Doyle, he just caught what he needed on every draw.

The game was changing to Deuce to 7, single draw, $1,000 ante from each player, $2,000-$4,000 Blind, No Limit. Get real, huh? They had a short discussion on whether or not each player got dealt in, Minh took a walk, Sammy said he wouldn’t play this game, so Minh and Sammy got Missed Blind Buttons, and the talk went to Minh and how he always walked on this game; they forgave Sammy because he wasn’t familiar with it and didn’t like it, but Minh…they were talking about not letting him play the other games and forcing him to come back in on this game. Hey, they make their own rules with this type of thing…

Well back to the game. Gus was the $4,000 Blind, Doyle grabbed a stack of Flags and cut out 20 of them in front of him. Everyone folded around to Gus. Gus looked at his hand for about…say…a whole 15 seconds, and called. Apparently they had a cap on what each player could put into each hand, $100,000 as there was no more betting and they would never have checked it out.

Gus put his hand out to me and said, “Wait!”

He asked Doyle if he wanted to ‘run them twice’. Sometimes in Pot Limit Omaha and other board games, players may elect to run them twice or three times. That means that whatever action each player chose (as in drawing in this case), stood for all the ‘running of the cards’. If, on the first run, Gus won the hand, and on the second run, Doyle won the hand, they each got their money back. If Gus or Doyle won both ‘runs’, they just got the pot, nothing additional was added to it. They agreed to ‘run them twice’.

Gus drew one and made a 9 both times and Doyle had stood pat with a Jack. Grim City for Doyle.

In the midst of all of it, David G. came up and started talking to the group. They asked him why he wasn’t playing and where he’d been. His reply was something like, “I got tired of losing…”

Well, not to worry, the following night he was right in the thick of it, playing the same game with the boys, and girl, (because by now Jennifer was in action).

I got pushed. My trip through fantasy land didn’t end there, lots more games and noise followed for what seemed like days but was probably only a few hours.