I’ve been trying to set regular goals for myself. Laying out milestones for me to achieve has allowed me to keep focused on the task at hand. Having a laid out track helps greatly. The problem is the nature of poker doesn’t really lend itself to being restricted to a straight and narrow path. There are probably dozens of ways to get to a particular milestone, each one of them valid in its own way. This is also a business where just getting over a milestone doesn’t mean you’ve beaten it for good. You can set a bankroll milestone to hit X dollars, spend 3 weeks grinding 10 hour days to get there, sail hundreds or even thousands of dollars past your goal, and then in the following two session hit a brick wall of variance and be right back to where you started. I’m not suggesting you just rip up all the hopes and dreams you have to be a poker player, but setting goals has to be done differently than in any other arena of competition.

Poker is a very open ended game, particularly when talking about cash game play. Not only do you need to play the game itself well, but you must also have a solid grasp of the outside factors affecting your play. You have to evaluate how each of your opponents are playing, if they seem tilted or fatigued, are you tilted or fatigued, do your opponents overplay hands, are they nits and easy to push off of flops and turns? A big part of being a professional is evaluating whether or not a table is a “good game” or not but that is a huge judgment call. As with most questions in this business, the answer is more than likely going to be “it depends.”

I bring this topic up this week because the month of May is going to be a long month of grinding for me. May has 31 days in it, and my plan at time of writing is to spend 26 of them at the casino and roughly 12 hours each day. I feel like this is the best opportunity I’ll have to reach some of my financial goals. I’m sick of coming up short of the marks that I have set for myself. My bankroll needs a serious boost, and I think this is going to be the best way to inject a little life into my career.

I love playing poker for a living. I feel better about myself and the direction my life is going in when I’m sitting at the tables as opposed to being another cog in a machine working away the prime of my life in a cube. The downside is that I’m flirting with the poverty line on a monthly basis. Now that’s not to say I was living high on the hog at my last job, my income really hasn’t changed since returning to action, but there will come a day when eating Ramen for two meals a day just isn’t going to cut it. I’m very confident in my abilities to play this game. I feel like I have evolved as a player these past 15 weeks. I am seeing the ball well, making some timely plays and reads, and now I feel like it’s time to put myself to the test. Win lose or draw, I just want there to be no doubt that I did everything I could to succeed. If I fail despite my efforts, then at least I’ll know for sure this life just isn’t for me. Until then, it’s off to my arena of competition in southern CT.

Spending a lot of time in the casino you tend to see the same types of people. There are the guy who’re doing the same thing you are, putting in hours upon hours at the tables. You’ll see the “after work crowd” who like to come to the casino to get drunk during happy hour rather than head to the bar across the street from the office. My personal favorite is the couple. Yes the couple, usually consisting of a guy who is very into poker and a woman who is very into her man. Together they make for endless entertainment, and just to illustrate my point I brought some examples with me to share.

Couple number one is more or less the cookie cutter example of what you’ll see. The guy is taking poker seriously. He may not be the best, but he watches poker on TV so he thinks he can handle the casino environment. He’s decked out in his finest “cool clothes.” It could be a button down shirt with some graphics on it, could be his most baller T-shirt, the point is he’s peacocking for the night. His significant other however is less than enthused about the entire process. To her poker is just some silly game that’s played in a casino. It’s all just gambling anyway. She sits behind her man and pulls out either her iPhone or iPad and starts playing games and texting friends.

An example of this couple sat down at one of my tables a few weeks ago. Long story short, the gentleman got his money in on the flop with QQ on a 6d5s3s flop. The board ran blank on the turn and a 6 on the river at which point his opponent tabled his 6s4s to win the hand. The guy just chuckled to himself and mucked his hand. Afterwards he turned to his girlfriend and asked her for more money, which made me chuckle a bit. He must have gotten some kind of look from his girl because when he turned back to the table he said, “OK guys, can you please explain to my girl what just happened and why I need to reload? She doesn’t understand poker. She doesn’t understand how unlucky I just got and how I did all I could.” No one took the bait. I seriously doubt the ride home that night was very much fun for him. If you’re going to call out your soul mate at the table, you might want to bring separate cars.

Couple number two is a younger couple. Neither of them is all that experienced at a casino and they are here sharing the moment together. Neither one really wants to wander far from the other because they are so unsure of their surroundings. As a result, they have no concept of personal space with each other. There was one such couple at one of my tables and they were sitting directly to my right. The guy was playing, the girl was watching on the rail. Normally this isn’t really a problem but this woman had three things working against her that pissed me off.

1) She decided to sit directly in between my chair and her boyfriend’s so every time I pushed my chair back to get up from the table it would bang into her chair.

2) After the first time I banged into her chair I looked over at her, she was one of those girls who wasn’t attractive but had that “hot bitch” attitude because she had a man.

3) She kept bouncing her hoof up and down next to me and poking her boyfriend with it.

I was on the tail end of my session anyway so I left without saying anything.

Bottom line, I don’t understand how either the guy or the girl can be enjoying themselves. Guys, at some point it’s ok to have a life outside your relationship. Ladies, your man is considering this “quality time” so don’t be shocked when you want to do something the next day and he says, “We just spent all day yesterday together.” Not all couples are like this either. There are the occasional couples they get it right, and each play poker, at different tables, on different sides of the room, and reconvene 4 hours later to get some food together and talk about their luck. Eh, whatever works I suppose.

So karma has a funny way of working sometimes. When I started this blog the original conception was to tell funny stories that happened to me on both the virtual and brick and mortar felt. As I began the ritual typing of my keyboard again last week it seemed like the crazy people started coming out of the woodwork at Foxwoods. Maybe I’m just more used to it but I’m very rarely surprised by anything I see in the poker room anymore. It wasn’t until this past week that something completely unique happened.

So I was grinding Thursday night in a 1/2NL game. The game was a little on the crazy side. People were showing big time bluffs, pushing action very heavily, and chirping at each other. One player in particular was trying to take on the role of table captain and in doing so had built up a nice winning session for himself. He did seem to be a little on the aggressive side as far as personality goes. I’m sure we’ve all sat with guys like this before. Everything he says and does is great poker, “I lost the pot because the donkey made a bad call.” He was that guy.

It was getting a bit later in the evening, around 11:30PM and moods were shifting a bit. What were once smart ass quips meant to entertain and slightly annoy were now grenades being launched from the trenches of war intended to destroy a player’s psyche. The table got quiet due to mutual fatigue, then banter quickly turned ugly, then another quiet lull before the fireworks would start again. Emotions were running a little high for some players more than others. In my experience, this is when the really good stories are born. These are the conditions where once a spark lights the fuse there is nothing left to do but sit back and watch the mushroom cloud expand and take shape. This night was no exception.

So our table captain, who was sitting in the 10 seat to the right of the dealer, ordered himself a fruit juice from the waitress during one of the table’s lulls in badinage. As it turned out this drink would be this gentleman’s unintended exit strategy. A minute or two after the gentleman put the drink down, he exclaimed to us all, “What the fuck, my pant are wet.” Not really sure how to respond the table just remained in our conversation rut and waited for the player to continue his rant. “Seriously what the fuck is going on my pants are wet.” The dealer would be the first player to break the tension of the moment.

Dealer: “Well did you piss yourself?”
Player: “No I didn’t my cup holder is wet or something. Put your hand right here.”
The cup holder is about 10 inches away from the player’s crotch.
Dealer: “Yeah…that’s not happening.”

As this was going on the cards continued to fly, I for one started laughing my ass off at the ridiculousness of the situation. Did I think this guy really pissed himself? Probably not, however I did find his overreaction to the situation quite hilarious. With another hand having been dealt the rest of the players remained focused on the task at hand but our table captain just couldn’t get his mind past the complexity of his dilemma.

Player: “Seriously, look at my pants they’re wet. My crotch is wet.”
Dealer: “I’m really not sure what you want me to do. Is your cup leaking?”

The cup holders at Foxwoods for the record are made of metal and are therefore not easily punctured, just as a heads up to provide some context to this matter of bladder security. Eventually the dealer called the floor over.

Player: “It’s not that big a deal.” Just as a side bar from me, no one at the table except for this player has been making a scene about anything that’s been going on. So for him to now say it’s not a big deal got me chuckling again.
Dealer: “It’s not a problem sir, the floor will take care of you, that’s his job.”

Two separate floor managers were called over, both of them rendered speechless at the situation. By this time the river card had been dealt out and the board was 6J8J9. Our table captain minraised a river value bet and lost another $80 to one of the loose cannons at the table when his rivered straight fell to the cannon’s J6 boat. Our table captain had had enough at this point. He got up from the table a furiously stormed off to get himself a chip rack. We all watched as he made a lap clean around the poker room, walked up to the cage behind our table, grabbed a rack, then racked up and left. As he was parting for the night he kept making cracks about how the dealer was trying to “embarrass him” in front of the table. Once he left the floor managers just looked at each other and shrugged the whole situation off.

No one is quite sure where this phantom fluid came from. Could it have been from his drink? Maybe he was just getting a little sweaty and it was starting to turn up on his clothes. He could have just had a few too many exciting hands for the night. Sadly like an opponent’s hand folded before showdown, we will never really know for sure. Some people just do a better job at tilting themselves than you or I ever could.

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