Hugo's Blogspotting: 26 October

Poker in Portugal

Roy Houghton has been on holiday in Portugal and managed to find a poker game in a local casino. Usually when Brits are abroad they find plenty of things to moan about – the food’s greasy, the beer’s horrible and so on. Basically, they’ve gone away, but they’re annoyed because everything is different. Well, Roy managed to find himself a different way of playing Holdem, that’s for sure:

“The button is the small blind - and if you decide to raise, you are not allowed to look at your cards for the rest of the hand?!”

I dunno Roy, it doesn’t sound too far removed from some of the games you tried to introduce to players at the Barracuda or the Stakis back in the day when you managed the card rooms at said places. Anyway, Roy being the gent and the good sport that he is doesn’t question their strange rules and sits down to play:

“The play was very unusual in that there was a lot of pre-flop action, but very little after the cards were out. It was almost as if they were playing poker lotto.”

Hmmm, sounds pretty good, who cares about their weird rules, put me on the list! I suspect that these boys have learnt their Holdem from watching WPT final tables or something similar. So how does Roy make out in this south-western European “berry patch”?

“…..I find a reasonable looking Q-5 suited on the button, only to be pushed off it by the big blind’s 50 euro pump. Of course I got to see the board fill out with Q-5-J-4-Q. Arrghh!”

Oh dear, I’m sensing a little bit of steam or did Roy maintain the sort of discipline he has seen from the many pros who have passed through his card rooms down the years?

“I see an A-3 suited (hearts) which you must note is the first Ace I’ve seen all night. I fancy this one……Then the turn is another 3, I have trips and try to look unmoved by the fourth card. He moves all-in and of course I call like a shot. He flips a pair of tens and gives me the thumbs up when he sees my 3. The pot is over 600 euros!
The river, of course, is a ten.”

Hold on, Roy’s blog is just a bad beat story! I guess when you’ve heard millions of them you can’t help telling the odd one yourself.

Me and My Bankroll

Talking of bad beats Lucky Jim has put up a blog which probably mirrors many a poker player's experience. Essentially Jim has written a long list of the numerous times he has spun up a grub stake to something decent and then managed to lose it all. No surprise there except Jim is one of the few players to actually admit it.

“I only seem to win and play well when I start with a small sum. I can't play the same game when I have a lot of money available. So should I quickly spend as much as I can so it isn't there to lose? Perhaps, at heart, I've always lost heavily after a win simply because I lacked the imagination to find anything better to do with the money.”

That’s an interesting observation. Let’s face it, what do most of us do with our winnings? (those of us that win, that is) Buy our loved ones nice presents? Invest the money sensibly? Pay back some of the poor fools who lent us the money to play poker with in the first place? Of course not, we just play more poker, usually for bigger stakes. Stuey said it best when he was asked what he’d do with the money after one of the times when he won the WSOP, “Blow it”, was his honest and accurate reply.

Down Under

Maybe where Lucky Jim is going wrong is that he plays too much online and should give the live games a chance. However, if he reads Bond18’s latest blog he might be a bit put off. Bond18 is Down Under at the moment at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. Sounds glamorous right? If you’ve ever spent any time in casinos you’ll realize that’s a trick question. You can guess what Bond18 thinks:

“When I was much younger I thought casinos were glamorous and interesting places like in the Bond movies, and gangsters were subtle and well dressed like the Godfather. Now I know casinos are depressing shit holes packed with angle shooters and gangsters are mostly annoying fucking drug peddlers in stained pants who spend all their time either gambling or whoring.”

Say what you mean Bond18, say what you mean! Bond18 then imagines he’s a teacher that takes his class to the casino and writes a funny list of assignments he would give to his students. Number four on the list is a toughie:

“Go to the poker room and ask everyone you meet if they’re winning. Then write me an equation of how it’s possible that 95% of players are up.”

Bond18 goes on to say that he thinks that taking a bunch of kids to a casino would probably serve them a better learning experience than the sort of rubbish they try to ram down your throats at school, and who is to say he is wrong? There are many lessons to be learnt from gambling and many a pro will tell you they are still “learning” themselves.

Lesson from the Pool Hall

One such pro would be Grapsfan over at Always Bluff who writes about an interesting experience playing pool many years ago when he was a hard-up student. It seems that one night him and a rich friend of his started playing pool and the game got out of hand with his wealthy buddy going on tilt. Naturally, Grapsfan felt uneasy and tried to end the match:

“It was 1 AM, I had a class in 7 hours, and since I knew this was completely surreal, I wanted to end it. I said, “Pete, you’re my friend, and I don’t like where this is going. You can pay me $1000 right now and I’ll buy the drinks the next time we go out.”

In a scene reminiscent of seminal gambling film The Hustler our narrator’s feelings of pity for his opponent backfires on him. The upshot of his friendly suggestion?

“Big mistake. HUGE. I had turned my engine off the moment the sentence left my mouth. Pete knew I was done, and more importantly, that I wouldn’t walk out the door. “Paul, what do I owe you, five grand? C’mon, let’s play a set for four.” He won the set by a couple of games, won a few more games at $200 per, and paid me off for the rest.”

If you’re planning on gambling for a living there’s a valuable lesson in there somewhere.

Wicked Chops Addresses the Burning Issue

Finally Wicked Chops Poker has teamed up with Raw Vegas.tv to finally put to rest the most important question in poker. Just who is the hottest babe playing the game these days? I don’t know about you, but I like their criteria for what is a highly polarized issue in poker these days:

“1) The girl must have a cash in a major event (WSOP bracelet tourney, WPT, NBC National Heads-Up, etc.),
2) The girl must be hot, and
3) The girl must be hot.”

Thank God for Wicked Chops, submit your choices now!

Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

To view the best poker blogs around check out our Blog Directory here