Incomplete but concluded, or so I hope...aka Did ya meet anyone interesting?...aka Vegas Baby! Part 2

So I got the poker play out of the way in Part One, which for anyone new here is found a couple of PageDowns below this. I should point out the disclaimer is still in full effect, as I didn’t hit on Articles 2 and 4 first time out.

Now on to what really made Vegas worthwhile.

It was not the MGM’s bathtub, which insisted on pitstopping my shower drain for twenty minutes each morning before adding a tubfull of agua to the disturbing equation that is the Nevada Water Crisis. Each day I had to find creative ways to solve ring-around-the-shins.

Nope, as Falstaff and Wolf predicted, the trip turns more on the people you get to know. I know Hack, as far as truths go, that’s a regrettably sentimental one, but it’s also unavoidable, even for someone as malicious and cynical as I. If you’re looking for something more salacious, I recommend you ask D or Waffles about Princess JelloShot; some stories should be told by a third party for credibility’s sake.

Sitting here at my desk in the study, the best bits of Vegas are brought easily to mind with the agreeable chaos card shufflers are more than comfortable with:

Working back to front I recall Jules, D, Static (first time meeting an LA poker blogger – you did your kind proud BM), Kat, Waffles and I near the end of a great day at Red Rock chowing down and mulling over just how weakly I played a hand where I held AKs. What’s that? You want me to review the hand in exacting detail, so you can offer your opinion or commiserate? Well, I don’t normally go for that sort of thing – some consider it gauche - but since ya asked:

RedRock (and boy does she rock) ½ NL: Yours truly with intermittent focus primarily because the augmented cocktail waitresses alternate between ignoring and molesting me. Well, mostly ignoring me, but distracting nonetheless. Plus I spent a few hours with the big boys the night before.

Hero in BB dealt AKs, looking with relief at $390 after a set of 8s trapped AA two hands ago. Villain UTG is a decrepit, almost cadaveric, octagenerian with the dour odor only the truly despondent can aquire after years of Vegas inspired soul-erosion. This is the cowboy whose bullets backfired for a rack. He’s reloaded though and has $200 to play with.

UTG to 7$ and finds a caller 2 spots down the ring. Folded around to Kal-El who believing AKs has to be good raises it up to $15. Insta-called by UTG, but squeeze out our partner to make it HU. Flop is KT7, the pot has $40 in it and I bet $25 at it. Quickly, and I mean instantly, he is putting chips out and raises to 50. I look at him for a bit, without trying to be a prick. He doesn’t seem upset or looking like he’s trying to show me up for cracking aces. QQ? KK? Bullets again? AK, AT? I call, reluctantly. Turn is another T, and now I take a good long think. I can’t put a finger on it, but I feel like I am behind. I got the feeling the second he called my pre-flop raise. That sense may be wrong, and Waffles at my immediate right is telepathically begging me to call, but I just don’t have a good feeling. I check and he again bets into the cards 50 more into a $140 pot. I saw him play enough to know he’s not a maniac, and he has a full rack beside him. It looks as though he is aiming to get every chip into the middle, one round at a time. I am looking damn good with my hand. I should be in love with her, since I have 2 pair with an A kicker.

But I lay it down.

In retrospect, I played it too weak and never knew where I was in this hand. I wish I had raised bigger preflop and post-flop, so I could better understand him. My flop bet was small not because I was feeling scared or cheap, but because I didn’t have a computer to tell me what the pot size was, and I grossly underestimated what a 75% pot bet would be. He mucked of course. I would’ve too. When I tried to quietly compliment him on the hand, he turned to me and nearly shouted, “WHAT’s that, NOW?” Deaf as my leg. Sheesh.

But I said I was done talking about the poker. And I am, because this blurb wasn’t really about the hand itself. It’s more about the great discussion at the restaurant where Jules and D took turns opining on how they would play it, what considerations I had failed to analyze, how it could be thought of, and acted on, differently. Static and Kat then shared useful stories of similar situations and their results, while Waffles argued compellingly for the fact that I am a donkey and essentially dead money walking. Good times, good times…

And really that story is also about Don, and his willingness to play host time and again that weekend. He drove the Buggy out to the Excal, picked up our merry band and tourguided us to the Rock to spend a day just enjoying each other’s company and the phonetics of incessant chip tricks. As memorable as getting deflowered at the Fish Tank was, as frustrating as getting rivah’d as the Tourney was, and as migraine-inducing as drinking through to 3 AM at the Ex’ uneven excuse for a bar was, Sunday at the Red Rock made it all okay. It was simply a great day spent playing poker with friends. What the hell did I go to Vegas for, if not that? For a change I broke even after 4 hours of play. Okay, okay, not quite even thanks to the tubesock laydown I described above. But close.

BTW for those who have never had the pleasure, Jules is the loudest table captain I have met in my limited live experience. I was at ½ with Static, Waffles and Kat and I could hear and see her holding court and seriously fucking people’s shit up from across the Rock’s highly stylized poker room. Amazing and hilarious all at the same time. Kat & I were working off headaches for the first few hours and managed to make the most of it. Static, in a truly selfless effort to make me feel better about my useless game, decided to take one for the team and beat me to the First One Stacked label. I owe ya brotha.

Our boy Waffles was on fi-yah!, and got ridiculous amounts of respect at the table, raising with nothing and looking at a table of folds, even when in EP. This was in stark contrast to your hero who was raised and re-raised by a little old lady who took the Old Guy’s chair when he finally went busto. This senior citizen was even less fond of me than the first and she would sit out everything except the hands I played in, coming 9 or 10 BB’s over my open-raises, forcing me to lay down the few marginally playable hands I was seeing. I turned to Waffles and murmured, “Fuck, old people scare me dude.” He smiled knowingly and stated for the record, “Yeah man, stay clear of her, you are her BITCH”.

Sad…emasculating…true.

At last, and with no warning, she stood with a little difficulty, got her shit together and left without a word. I so happy to see her go, I almost gave her tongue on the way out the door. With the nearly-dead out of my way, I chipped up aggressively before the dinner bell rang (ie. Jules hollered at us several times) allowing Waffles, with a truly monsterous stack, and I to make our goodbyes and join the gang.

One interesting note: we made the mistake of announcing to the table it was our last orbit (Read: Jules told us in front of everyone we were allowed one more orbit or she’d break out the paddle. Again!) So the entire table started to push back at Waffles every hand, and push heavily, knowing he wouldn’t want to take a hit when he was almost home. Happily, I got the coup de grace, when he made a pair on the flop, bet it, and I monster re-raised him holding…

[can’tcha guess?]

Five Three O.

How good a friend am I? I didn’t it show it, allowing our boy to go out in a blaze of well earned respect. All kidding aside, he dominated. Nice job, brotha. And seriously, Waffles is the kind of guy you can travel with. Anyone who likes to get out there on the open road, knows that’s just about the biggest compliment you pay someone. Great hanging with you despite your relentless observations of my inadequate understanding of NLHE.

Actually that day started well too. As I chase the staircase turns that is this recollection, I am brought to comparing my Turkey Sandwich dinner (very good) at the Rock to my Champagne Brunch Buffet at the Bellagio (fucking sumptuous). I had asked Kat the night before what she had planned Sunday and was informed she and J were going to see an Ansel Adams photography exhibit at Bellagio. That’s just my sort of thing, so I invited myself along. Kat being the total sweetheart she is called me Sunday to make sure I was still interested. I was, and on a lark got Waffles to come too. He didn’t seem all that interested, but I knew he’d be good for a story or a laugh, and he didn’t disappoint.

The Adams exhibit was well-conceived, cleanly presented, but unintentionally ironic. Some very smart people I know struggle with the concept of irony. One of my many pretensions is that I have a pretty well developed sense of it. Bellagio provided a humdinger example when they painted a quotation of Adams’ in huge letters on the greeting wall of the exhibit. The gist of the quote is that true works of Art are fundamentally independent of context. They can and should be an experience for the viewer that exists without need for an explanation.

To the right of this Insight you could pick up your handheld audio-guide. At the push of a button, it would whisper in a painfully overacted voice all sorts of mundane details related to the photograph in front of you.

Now I doubt any of you signed on for an Art Exhibit review, but since you might still be here: the very famous picture Aspens (thanks for the link Kat), which shows a line of light slicing along a darkened copse of trees which run away from the picture’s meridian, truly haunted me. The reproductions I have seen do not do the actual photograph justice. In presentation, it seemed a reflection on our mortality, and by extension the mortality of the very living world we occupy. It brought to mind the idea of iridescent futility; Life as beautiful and doomed. If all we can do in our limited scope is strive to make or become a beautiful thing…well, that seems like a pretty good use of any one partially lit tree standing both alone and amongst its many brethren, in a forest condemned to imminent shadow. The picture is worth looking at if you are ever afforded the opportunity.

So you can see, anyone capable of having deep thoughts like that at 10:30AM was gonna meet the Bellagio champagne brunch with a consuming passion. Or passion for consuming. And I had good company – the girls and Waffles joined me in hitting that smorgasbord at least twice, and I have to admit I may have sauntered by once more. Basic and total decadence is how to envision it; with lunch and breakfast merging into an obscene hybrid filled with cantaloupe and the like (you’d love it Marge). I had at least 4 desserts, but had become such a glutton I couldn’t even store mentally what it was I was shoveling into my…er…cake-hole. Cake, maybe? Whatevah, it tasted good, and so did its four siblings. Add four glasses of champagne to that mix and you’ve got a guy who’s going to be working off a food coma and a migraine for most of his ½ session. Fortunately, I always travel with my extremely personal physician, and he cleared me for flight in due course. Buffet goot. Indeed.

Could anyone still be reading this? The mind boggles. But there are two more things I want to put down for my own recollection years from now. These are simpler to relay and in fact are interconnected.

Saturday night, when Waffles had disappeared to do God knows what, D and I found time to shoot the shit with Hoy (God how I want to call you Hoyzano now!) for an extended period at the Ex and then up in his room. Out of all the people I met that weekend, D and Hoy came off in person exactly as I had imagined. Between them you can get a friendly but pretty robust Cash Game v. MTT debate going at the drop of a hat. So running a hand or two from the tournament by both of them was great. In addition, Hoy and I are at similar stages in terms of career and child-induced sleep deprivation, which will give any two people plenty to talk about. I’ve been a fan of his posts since before I had a blog, and getting to know him has only improved my impression of him. If more evidence was needed, I just want to say how adult I think both his and Felicia’s posts have been on the issue of their misunderstanding. The prose in both their posts is restrained yet warm and sincere. And I totally second Hoy's remarks about Felicia, for whatever that's worth. I personally have pored over her archives and learned from them on numerous occasions. I'm glad her most recent post sounds like she's recovered from having her feelings hurt by friends - isolation and alienation are exquisitely painful experiences for anyone to bear. Felicia, I for one was bummed we never got to meet. Next time, hopefully.

And in this magnanimous spirit now upon us all, I vow to think twice the next time I have the urge to call someone a taint-hound. Even if it is in jest. Ah....taint-hound. Ya know, I made that word up. It will be in the dictionary in a few years, God willing. But have to say, I got no love for giving the world this one-of-a-kind creation. Talk about blogger ingratitude... Felicia, I know you know that's a joke.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Hoy and I then proceeded to kill a fair bit of time at the Ex’ bar, neither of us really in the mood to play given our run to date. I made our boy relive his Hachem story – I told him he should’ve told the Champ when he accidentally put Hoy All-in minus one chip, “You just Me’d me.” I thought this was pretty funny, in fact it’s making me smile while I type. Hoy nodded indulgently, which was cool of him. As Peak has pointed, sometimes its possible to be too clevah.

We hung with Hoff, who is another down-to-earth awesome guy to drink and kill time with. I also gotta give props to Falstaff who looks just like I predicted, and wears a knowing, amused smile when he sits at a table. I appreciated him breaking away from the Ex’s Big Boy game to say hi – look forward to wasting more time together next time.

After an extended tour cycling drinks, Hoff and then Hoy decided to call it a night. Because I had crashed the night before, I was still going strong at 1AM, but was now out of people I knew to talk and drink with. What to do? Well Hoy had wandered over to say GN to Iggy and Pauly who were at the middle of the bar holding court. Why not? I wandered over and introduced myself while Hoy was still taking his leave. Gotta say, the guys whose party this was were very cool hosts. Iggy bought us a drink and told stories about what it used to look like at these things. There was an interesting discussion of something Jordan wrote before I started reading blogs concerning unmentioned A-Lists, B-Lists and the likes…I had to keep from smiling at the idea that there were some of us new enough to the thing to have not even registered in anyone’s head as an entity, let alone having their blog making the lowest rung of such lists! I have to look that post up one of these days. Jordan, I’m not sure if you stop by here, but if you do and can point me in the right direction, I’d be curious to read it. Your ideas were much discussed in a wholly positive way.

So Hoy and I had a very memorable time shootin’ the shit with the BlogFather, and whatever expectations I had, they were certainly turned on their head by the reality of meeting this particular Wee Folk. To anyone who has never been to one of these things, meeting Iggy is an experience that will probably make the trip worth your while all by itself. The Rooster also drank with us before getting back to work. In a nutshell, he is the mothafuckin’ man. He’s got the Phil Ivey eyes of a table-slayer, and the kind of smile you see when you’re watching your stack move south for the winter. It was very cool meeting him, and trying to get my head around the limits he plays. Someday? Probably not, but let’s delay rationality for another day.

While Iggy had to tend the flock of people who were dying to get a word in with him, I got the chance to spend some quality time with the man some call the Bracelet. Bobby and I both work in the same field, on different sides of the ball, so that gave us a fair bit to shoot the shit about. He is also another great guy, with an excellent sense of humour - no surprise to any Diary readers out there. I tortured him into retelling his personal Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, which he did so patiently and with good humour. The fact that he had to do it twice more for newcomers, and did so with the same aplomb says a lot about him. Please do not ask him the story if you meet him. It must be murder to keep going over it. Learn from my drunken insensitivity. He also tells the story about ForPeyton with a quiet selflessness that is very impressive. It’s an example of doing good for its own sake, which is rare enough these days. If you haven’t supported the cause, and I haven’t yet either, but will today – consider it. As Kurt Vonnegut once observed, whatever this thing is, we’re in it together. I also told him I am going to photoshop my head onto that picture with Ava Fabian, but then I remembered I am a moron and don’t know shit about photoshop. I guess depending on how you worded it that could be ironic too. Close at any rate.

Now if meeting Iggy and Bobby didn’t make the trip +EV, meeting Pauly definitely would. I’ll try to tread a careful line and avoid fawning or sounding like a fanboy. But the fact of the matter is that Pauly is about as cool as anyone should be, but very few would be in the position he’s in. He was just slightly more blasted than I was at the time I met him, but he was engaging, friendly and made sure everyone present was having a good time, feeling like part of the party. Frankly, I was a little surprised. Back when he was recovering from being sick and had moved out to LA for a break, his writing read a little bitter and cynical. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have been shocked if he came off like one of those newly famous idiots the Travel Channel is minting with regularity. Instead, he was better than advertised. I get why everybody raves about this guy now. What’s not to like about somebody tough enough to make their living doing what they love, and smart enough to enjoy it? Now here’s hoping he can really crush the PLO field.

And what else? Too much by far. I haven’t sung Carmen’s praises nearly enough, but fortunately I have Waffles for that task. We divide praising D & C between us, ya see. Yeah, yeah, he got the better looking one…what can ya do?

Now I know this has been long, and essentially written for my own benefit. I know I met people I really enjoyed meeting that I haven’t written about here. Believe me when I say without a doubt that was one of the best parties I have evah been to. In three days I didn’t meet one person I wouldn’t be happy to spend time with. Yeah, I passed on JelloShot - a man has to know how to stay out of trouble – but aside from her, no exceptions. Forgive my omissions, exaggerations and don’t hold my exhausted fingers against me.

Okay, I am all typed out. I’ll put links in another time. It may be a while before I post again, I am spuh-hent!

Cya.