Every once in a while you hear these strange stories coming out of casinos. Some are so outrageous and fanciful that by the time they reach the ears of the outside world it’s just assumed that they have been over exaggerated and details have been drastically skewed as would be expected when playing a bad game of Telephone. They range from people dressed in funny costumes to serious medical emergencies happening at the tables. Even though everyone has stories like this it’s just human nature to assume that the whole truth isn’t being told and that while a person may have had a clown nose on while grinding out a session, he wasn’t an exact replica of Ronald McDonald as the story will surely state. With that in mind, I’m going to do my best to give this tale its due justice. I was witness to a medical emergency down at Foxwoods last week.

Let me set the scene a bit. Monday afternoon I arrived at the casino to do my usual grinding. Normally I cap off my session around midnight and begin my trek home. On this particular night there was a pretty bad snowstorm and the roads were just awful, so rather than take a risk driving home while half asleep behind the wheel I opted to get a room and stay the night. Tuesday was a big day for me, I found myself at a very live table right out of the gate. One player seemed to be driving the action, I would later find out he was stuck for around $3,000 at this 1/2NL table. I managed to pick up about $450 off of the game and when the villain left, I cashed in my chips and grabbed myself some dinner. I came back to another table and found the exact opposite dynamic, namely people weren’t putting hardly any money in pre-flop. The game was still pretty weak so I bided my time and got into some decent pots with people who were just overplaying their hands. I had managed about a $270ish profit when things went all crazy in the poker room.

I had my headphones in at the time and was sitting in the main section of the Foxwoods cash game room. For those who have been there before, I was a table or two to the left of the skylight. At about 9:15PM EST a few of my table mates started pointing over towards the 5th Street Café. I looked over and saw a woman being restrained by a couple of security guards. My first reaction was that some kind of fight broke out, we are in a casino after all and tempers can flare up. I took my headphones out and heard this woman wailing at the top of her lungs and suddenly the fight theory seemed to melt away. Right about then one of my table mates noticed that there was a body down on the ground over by one of the tables. The person down on the ground appeared to be motionless. About 8 security guards at this point came out with bed sheets, large white ones, and began holding them up around where this guy was at the table. The floor came over to talk with the tables in my section and just remarked, “When they put those sheets up, it’s not a good sign.” Many thought this player had died right there.

I can say for sure that as the gentleman was being carted out, he was alive. I could see small movements and heard him moaning in pain a few times before making it to the ambulance. The player I’m told is a regular at Foxwoods, in his mid-50s, and has been on and off chemotherapy for some time now. The woman crying out was his wife. After this mess was all sorted out I just felt completely unnerved. I cashed in my chips and called my mother on the phone to tell her what I had just witnessed. I don’t know this person but to have an experience like that was just too unsettling for me to keep playing that day. I’ve read about stories where players have had medical emergencies at the table during long sessions, but I never really gave it much thought. It’s one of those things you just never expect to see. We all have heard crazy stories before. Many of us are now familiar with the gentleman who was playing World of Warcraft, thought he had super powers, and jumped out of this 80th floor of his building. Seeing this unfold at Foxwoods was like being in the living room when the dude jumps. You never expect to see something like that happen on just another lazy Tuesday. So much for a normal day.

This weekend marked my return to the felt as a full time grinder again. Right now I’m more in a 6 week trial period. Keep winning and I keep playing, lose and I just head to get another job, which I have connections to so I’m safe as far as that’s concerned. It’s a bit of a gamble to do this but now seems as good a time as any to try and build myself back up. That was of course before I hit some pretty solid short term variance this past weekend.

I found myself after my first session stuck a little more than $100, which is nothing to be too concerned over. I made a mistake and ended up tanking the $100 but outside of that I was playing pretty well. My original table was pretty wild. There were a ton of callers for every open at the table. Even though I was more or less nut peddling for a couple of hours I still managed to get calls from hands like Q8s when I woke up with KK. I had one interesting hand turn up. I had $97 in front of me and woke up with AKo in the SB. Middle position opened to $17 and it folded around to me. I made it $45 to go and got a tank call from the villain. The board ran 763 with two hearts and I went all in for my last $47. For those of you wondering, this was my plan whether I hit a pair or not. I’m not going to put in half my stack pre only to check/fold the flop. If I wasn’t comfortable shoving this board, then I can’t make the play I made pre. The villain calls and the board runs A of hearts K of diamonds. I table my AK and the villain just looks off in disgust. He shows the 6 of spades and mucks his hand, and then complained to his neighbors about how he knew I had AK and how unlucky he just got. I just chuckled to myself while he continued to complain to his neighbors for a little while longer.

After the table broke I took my dinner break and headed to a fresh table. This one was a bit livelier and had a ton more money at the table. There were a few $400-$500 stacks, two of them directly to my right. I lost a flip with AK on my very first hand at the table and reloaded. I never really got a great feel for the original group of players I was playing against, and we rotated about 5 players in and out during my time there, but there were a couple of epic pots pushed around, some in the ballpark of $800. I was able to run my stack up to about $175 when I got involved in what would be the biggest hand of the night for me.

One of the original big stacks at the table made it $10 from the CO. He had about $900 behind and had shown he could make this move as wide as 87s. I had KJs in the SB so I opted to make the call, there was a limper in UTG+2 that also called. The flop came down AKJ all hearts. My train of thought here was if either of these guys has a heart, I’m not going to chase them away. I also don’t want to build a huge pot here since I have a hand that could very easily turn up no good by the river. I opted to check my bottom two pair and the action checked around. The turn came the K of spades, my gin card. I suddenly went from no chance to all but a lock on the hand. Going with my earlier logic I figured a heart would still play given the action on the flop so I bet $12 to try and build some value for myself and keep both players drawing. Both called and the river came a T of clubs. I have $152 behind at this point and I think at least one of these guys is going to pay me off with something marginal. I make a $40 bet into the around $60 pot. The original limper folds and then it’s back to the big stack in the cutoff. He asks for a count of my stack, and then jams all in. I snap call and turn over my KJ, only to find he had flopped a royal flush with his QT of hearts. I mucked my hand and quietly packed up my stuff. That one hurt more than a little, so I just decided to call my session at that point and not start chasing my losses.

All in all, I’d say I played at best average. There were a few spots where I got careless and undisciplined, some of those plays worked and some didn’t. Those cost me some value in later hands and most definitely resulted in at least $100 of my $313 in losses on the day. Tis the life of a grinder, not everything will go how you want it to. I just have to keep my head up and move on.

A buddy of mine told me about a small poker room about 10mins from his house. The room is called “The River Poker Room” in Milford New Hampshire and they were running an interesting promotion for their first tournament of the year. It was an $80 event with a maximum of 2 rebuys that could be used at any time, each buy in and rebuy worth a 15,000 chip stack. Also, if you went ahead and put in for the full $240 before your first hand you were given another 10,000 chips. The winner of this event would be awarded the first place cash prize as well as entry into a promotional, “Best player in New Hampshire” tournament to be held the following weekend. Win that event, and you get a seat into the WSOP Main Event. Since I was back in the Boston area visiting my family for New Years anyway, I decided to trek up to the woods of The Granite State and take my shot against what I expected to be a soft field.

I put down $240 to start the event and right out of the gate had 55,000 in chips. With 20 minute blind levels and a very irregular structure I wasn’t really expecting to see a huge amount of play later on regardless of the grossly inflated stack sizes. Never the less if it just becomes a turbo late I should still be more experienced in proper shoving ranges, stealing, restealing, and all the other tricks that make up short stack play. As expected, the field wasn’t anything to write home about. There were players on the first level, 25/50, opening the raising for 1,000 chips, “because they didn’t want limpers.” There were players that were just limp/calling with 84o, 73s type hands for big portions of their stacks, smashing the flop, winning big pots, and then repeating the cycle until they eventually would miss and just bluff like they had it.

The dynamics of the table with that many chips in play to start I will admit through me off a bit. I was a tad uncomfortable with the stack sizes being the way they were early on in the event. Given the level of play at the table it was almost like the big stack was nothing more than insurance against bad beats, which came in handy for me a few times. Being a chip leader and having the ability to KO someone from the event is only really an edge if the other players adjust how they play because of this. If shorter stacks just keep ramming and jamming trying to play big pots then you are left to bide your time until you yourself hit something big. You can’t really out aggress an aggressive nutcase at a poker table regardless of how many chips you have. I understand there are other ways to combat these types of players, but the point still remains that having tons of chips just doesn’t make as big of a difference under those circumstances.

I didn’t play particularly well early. It took me a while to adjust to just how stubborn some of these players were. For example, I had to stop continuation betting as a bluff all together because people were calling with two overs, bottom pairs, 3 card flush draws with one over, and all sorts of hands that had they turned their cards face up I still would have bet thinking they would never be able to call anyway. Couple that with flopping trips and losing about half my stack to a turned flush I wasn’t exactly a destructive force for most of the event. That said I did manage to pick up some steam knocking out two shorter stacks, both hands sucking out with a worse hand, and as the field thinned from the starting 42 players down to two tables I was able to actually maneuver a bit. The blinds got big enough where people didn’t want to mess around anymore and the players that had just kept calling down were mostly gone by then. I was able to gather up 45,000 by the time we reached the final table of 10, with the top prize of about $1,800 looming and the top 5 players getting paid.



I didn’t really pick up any good hands or good spots for the first orbit or two. I had a solid player to my right and to my left, both of which would have made some thin call downs were I to ship or reship on one of them. Finally, at 2K/4K with a 500 ante I picked up AsKc and a favorable spot. 3 limpers come in before me and I make the trivial shove with my hand and only 35,000 chips left. Things folded around to the middle limper with a stack of around 160,000. He is a solid player and has done very little to get out of line. He tanked for about 2 minutes before finally making a call. The final limper was the solid player to my right. He started tanking as well for a solid minute and a half before shoving for 120,000 in total. At this point, I’ve been sitting here with all my chips in the middle for about 6 or 7 minutes now. It’s not normal for me to get anxious during a session but I genuinely wanted there to be some kind of resolution to this hand so we could run it out. Were I to win this hand, I’d have more than tripled up and be right back into the thick of things. Once the third player isolation shoved, I felt pretty solid my hand was good. Sure enough the first caller folded and I turned over my AsKc and was way ahead of the isolation shove with AcJd.


The flop came down JcTcXx


Oh well I thought, still two more cards to come. My buddy at the table called for a Q as the dealer burned and turned.


Turn Qc


Cool, I’m back in the driver’s seat. The dealer without really any hesitation dealt out the river.


River 7c


Without blinking my buddy went, “That’s absolutely gross.” I wasn’t exactly sure what happened at that moment, but I knew I was out. I saw the nut flush my opponent held and quietly went off to the rail. My buddy went bust in 8th and the two of us left shortly after his KO hand.



All in all, I’m impressed with The River poker room. If there was a little bit more action and some more players in the event I would highly recommend anyone within an hour’s drive to take a trip up for the special events they run. As for me, I head back to my day job for this week and next to finish out my time before I return to grinding for a living once more. I have a feeling some of the smaller rooms in the region like The River will be places I’ll be spending quite a bit of quality time in the coming months.