It definitely wasn’t like the old Pan Game Plays Vegas days when we visited the Tuscany, but it was a lot of fun – not profitable for any of us, but fun.

They have a freeroll running right now that if you play 10 hours, you get $1K in chips in their Saturday freeroll. If you play for 20 hours, you get $2K in that same freeroll, if you play for 30 hours, you get $4k in that freeroll, and for $50, you can add $5k to your stack. W0W! The best part of it is that if you play from 2-7 p.m. and 2-7 a.m. you get double hours for the freeroll. I’ll be playing this coming Saturday if I can arrange my life long enough to allow me sleep and play time. Marie had already qualified so she should be in the $2k group.

We started playing around 2 p.m. The two gents that were on each side of the seat I chose, were overly large – one was just plain, flat out, seriously fat, and I couldn’t even get my knees under the table because guys have a tendency to sit with their legs wide open and spread apart, even if they are thin, they seem to sit this way – and then some of them bitch because the guy next to them is touching their leg, obviously if it’s a woman, they don’t say anything – especially if she’s young and busty. BUT back to the present circumstance, Marie had the 1s, I was going to sit in the 3 and requested the 2 from the dealer (yeah, the dealer looked around the table like he was trying to figure out which one was the 2s), the seriously fat guy was very quick to offer to change seats with me, NICE! I accepted.

This put Marie and I next to each other and also freed up a little table space for me. Wayne took the only other open seat, the 7s.

As is typical of a small room, if you have a couple of tourists in the game, when one leaves, another one leaves because they came together. That’s what happened here about five p.m. The game was $3-6H with a kill. I don’t have any hands to report that would go off the scale as a new thing, that doesn’t happen anymore.

There were some elderly gents in the game at different times. One of them was a real ‘live one’ and played any hand from any position. He left when his wife came to get him and he was going to look at a few more hands. I picked up 10-10 on the Button and raised it when it came to me. He called – as did another player – and we got a few bets in when the flop came 10-little-little. He checked and called me until he ran out of money for a $1 call on the turn after a raise. Amazingly, he turned over A-A. It’s the only real hand he held/showed down, after seeing him batter the pot with chips when he had 10-5 offsuit, etc. It was probably a good thing for him because with his wife watching, he could now explain that he had been beat like that all afternoon and no wonder he lost over $200.

When Wayne was in the 7s, I got this picture:

Then Wayne graciously took a picture and Marie and I:

Several people came and went, seats open, seats all filled, and Wayne managed to move down to the 4s. I had my camera out and took a couple of pictures of him – this was at least an hour and a half after I took the first one. BINGO! Security hit the room. I heard the lead guy talking into his lapel (mic, dummy) that he was coming into the poker room to handle a camera issue. I never even looked up. I waited for him to walk around behind me and step up to talk to me before i even looked up. He informed me that I couldn’t take pictures in a casino. No problem. I put the camera away. Amazingly, on the Pan Game Trip, we all took all kinds of pictures and had our cameras out on the table and no one said a word. Who cares? Not me, I got what I wanted.

The heavy gent on my left managed to get into a conversation about Chip Reese and card throwing and he said that he’d watched Johnny Chan throw a card and hit the dealer in the face and draw blood. I got lippy. The heavy gent said that he understood it because Johnny Chan was playing in a $300-600 game. I asked him, belligerently and loudly, “Are you retarded? How can it possibly be ok?”

The dealer got involved in the conversation, the heavy gent clammed up. Damn good thing, I think! He played pretty silently after that, but not unfriendly nor was he grouchy about any of it. I can’t stand that mentality though…throwing cards is ok if you miss a hand or take a beat…get the fuck out of here with that. Good thing that butchers don’t throw things when the saw makes a bad cut on a piece of beef.

Wayne cashed out and sat behind Marie and I for about an hour as we got in the last of our hourly play. We pulled a few chips out of players that remained and then it was close to 7 p.m. The 7 p.m. tournament players flooded into the room and they broke our game to run the tournament. Just as well, we were ready to go anyway.

*****

I just listened to http://www.roundersradio.com/index.php where our PokerWorks writer, Jennifer Newell, was Lou Krieger’s guest on ‘keep flopping aces’. Nice. I believe you can catch the replay of it there. Their conversation – with call in listeners – was about the latest Absolute Poker scandal.

*****

I’m off to try a tournament on PokerStars so I can write about it at the Chasing Chris project.