The only thing I like about Las Vegas is playing poker. The rest of it sucks.
Everything is expensive and almost all of it is mediocre. The only thing that wasn’t inconvenient was to waste money gambling in the casino of your hotel.
I only enjoyed the poker because it is a fun game that is complicated and involves fighting other people. When I arrived in Las Vegas I had only a skeletal knowledge of Poker (Texas Hold’em [no limit]) but no real experience playing it. My first tuition was running through a $300 cash game in under an hour at a junky poker room in the Excalibur. Adam and Matt were aghast and it looked like we all wouldn’t be playing as much poker as we’d anticipated.
Then we discovered you can play tournaments instead. Tournaments are clearly the best way for a new player to practice his game. For a fixed fee (in our case, $65) you enter a tournament of twenty to fifty people. They play until the last guy is eliminated. The winner (and maybe some of the runner-ups if there were enough participants) receives some percentage of all the entrance fees. The rest get nothing. But it’s small and entirely limited downside, which is perfect when you don’t know what you’re doing. At least some money needs to be at stake, or else no one will play like they care.
Matt had the same bona fides I did. That is, none. Despite that, in his first tournament he managed to place fifth out of approximately fifty players. (In retrospect, this is even more amazing given how exceptionally tight we started out trying to play) Matt enjoyed a golden hand throughout his stay. He won money from a variety of ridiculous games (some stupid wheel straight from Price-Is-Right and, of all things, slot machines.)
We all played in a few tournaments. In my first two games, I accidentally played too loose — playing junk cards but with no confidence. In the next several games (including a 2am yawner) I played too tight and conservatively. Although it stretches out your time at the table, it dooms you — you’ll never have enough chips to kill others, which is, ultimately, the point of the game.
Resolving for the final tournament to play more than just good hands, I started off wretchedly, blew up in short order, but bought back in, where I played considerably better. Of course the flip side of mild pleasure from a good hand is lingering, brooding disgust with myself over a misplayed hand. I’d taken three largeish pots in row, quintupling my money. In the fourth hand I held A8o. I played it strong and everyone folded except one guy who I had a particular loathing of. He was the table’s resident big-mouth, There was junk on the flop. We called and raised each other a few times and the pot was decent sized. Then he raised again, out-of-proportion to the pot size. I considered if for a long time. There didn’t seem to be much potential in the flop. No obvious straights or flushes available. I felt like he was likely not holding anything useful, but I had just enough worry about a flush plus I had just come off a good run, so I folded. He’s a tosser, right, so of course he crows about having bluffed me out with a junk hand (J2o I think). The acting-out is more important to him than actually winning. If he was smart, he should have fucking kept it to himself and left me always wondering. I was and still am totally disgusted with myself. I could and should have broken that guy’s back decisively. I should have called, gone for the draw, where I would have won. The best lesson out of all this was to be fearless and try to destroy people, not last as long as I can on the table.
Before leaving, we visited Gambler’s Bookstore, ‘The World’s Largest Gambling Bookstore’. I picked up two Texas Hold’Em books and met the colorful owner, Howard Schwarzt. He entertained us (me? Adam found him tedious I think) with Las Vegas anecdotes for twenty minutes until it was closing time then Howard was ready to slide down the brontosaurus’s neck.
My self-assessment? I’m ready to read real texts on poker. I need to get games in. I’d prefer to play physical games, not electronically. I’ll have to dig around and see what I can organize or join. I’m not ready for cash games yet, I need tournaments. Hopefully I won’t need to go back to Las Vegas, as the Singapore casinos are coming online in a few years.
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Aces and eights.