Getting a Taste of the Nevada DMV

...and it tastes like shit.

400th Session Milestone

So on or about 10/8/2004 I got a call from a friend of mine. He asked me if I wanted to go play some poker in an underground game in Richardson, TX. 1/2 Pot Limit Hold'em was the game; minimum buy-in: $100. I agreed. It seemed so cool -- so bad-boyish -- so illegal. I went to the ATM, held my breath and timidly withdrew $500 from my checking account. I knew if I lost this $500, it would probably be a while before I felt comfortable dumping more cash into live poker.

He got me in and in that first live session ever for me, I won $22 over 8 hours.

My second session was the next day where I won $417 over 4.5 hours....I was hooked.

That was seven years ago. Today, I hit a milestone. I've booked my 400th session -- 400 times, I've either walked or driven to a table somewhere and sat down and played -- seems like a lot.

I'm still playing off that same $500.

Bigger Stakes

I moved up in stakes. I was at 1/2NL and now I play 2/5NL. I’ve only been doing it in November and I’ve logged around 31 hrs at 2/5NL -- and 11 hrs at 1/2NL

As I was returning to the table from a break yesterday, one of the four or five best players in the room stopped me to ask how it was up at 2/5. I told him, “[I’m doing ok, but at 30 hrs or so, it’s a pretty small sample size.]” He then told me that he thought I was the best 1/2NL player in the room. There are usually 120 people in that room on the weekends. It was quite a compliment coming from him.

Anyway, just felt like sharing that….made me feel pretty good -- just gotta keep it from going to my head. Heh.

All-in, the gentle method.

I have an “ALL IN” button. I don’t like to speak when I’m in a hand. One way to go all-in is to say “All in”. The only other commonly-recognized way to go all in is to shove all your chips across the line simultaneously. But doing that means you have to spend time gathering them up on the outside of the line then push them all across. Since I buy in for the maximum amount of chips, I often have too many chips to make that an easy thing to do, so I use this button that I bought days ago. I just flip it over –I keep it by my stack on the “CALL” side – and push it across the bet line to declare an all-in.

Well, I used it last night. I decided all-in was right, so I delicately flipped it over and flicked it across the line. You might not have even noticed I’d done it unless you were looking down. One of the people at the table rhetorically exclaimed “Wow, he’s got his own all-in button. Where can I get one of those?” He then said something about it being like a “Jedi All-in” (I had earphones in my earholes so I couldn’t hear much more.) but I got this mental picture of a Jedi going all in…sitting back, arms crossed and the chips just start moving by themselves towards the center of the table. It made me laugh inside my poker head. Here’s the button – both sides. End of story.

Wally World

What exactly does Wal-mart mean by this?

The Move: The Sequel

Moved to a new apartment on Halloween. It's about the same size, but $200 cheaper per month and 30% closer to work. I think it was a good move.

In Vegas

So I made the move to Las Vegas back in April 2011. The drive took me three days with a UHaul trailer in tow. If I had known it would be this easy, I might have kept a few more of the items I sold off on eBay and Craigslist. Nah...I don't want more stuff. I'm tired of owning stuff.

Once I arrived, one of the things I noticed was that the games seemed a little harder than before -- it stands to reason. Fish stop playing once they realize how much it's costing them (I assume). And those left behind are the strong ones. It's just plain Darwinism. I've made some adjustments to my play lately and I'm feeling good about it, but time will tell. The sample size is too small to come to any decent conclusion.

My apartment lease is up at the end of October. I need to move closer to the strip. I'm seven miles away from it now and I don't like the drive.