Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

Are you listening to me yet? If not, fuck you. If so, you get a handful of Teddy Grahams. YAY!

Annnnnnyhow, I'm back at work today after a 9 hour session--my first ever--at Canterbury Park. If you re-read the first sentence in this post, and then the 2nd, that sums up the trip. And if you spell it backwards, what does it spell?

woW.

For as long as I was there, you can bet that I had my fair share of good hands to recount. To save you, dear reader, I won't. That's boring. The only hand of interest that I would like to briefly mention is the following.

I flopped quad queens and still had two people call my turn and river bets down to the river. Hello? What did you think I had? In keeping with the gunslinger theme from my last post, what I will do is give you the rundown on the Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good:

• +26BB--I was only playing 2/4, but that still comes to close to 3BB/hr. That's not bad, right? Right? I wasn't even expecting to come out ahead, but I realized that I am not a 2/4 player. Even a monkey with it's brain scooped out, a la 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' is better than every 2/4 player I sat with yesterday. Well, save for one, but I never got in a pot with him.

• De-virginized--Similar to Chris's first session, I was a little nervous. Now that I know how everything works, it's safe to say that I just might become a B&M whore. Ah, who am I kidding? Once a floozy, always a floozy.

• Getting past 'The Jitters---I wasn't so nervous while betting or raising, but when I won my first pot, my hands were shaking so bad that I could barely stack my chips. Oh it was awful. After my 4th or 5th pot, I could stack them without looking like Michael J. Fox's poker playing twin. Oooh, low blow on Marty McFly. By the end of the night, I was tossing raises in like I'd been doing it all my life. Or, at least longer than a few hours.

The Bad:

• Smelly people--When I first sat down, 1/3 of the people at my table smelled of funk. Not George Clinton funky, just funky. As in "I just sucked down a carton of heaters and a gallon of coffee while on my third day without a shower" funky. By the end of my session, I'm sure I didn't smell much different.

• Raped by the rake--Online, you don't really notice the rake because hands are dealt so quickly and the digital cents are whisked off the table faster than you can count it. In a B&M, it's easy to see just how much the dealer is stealing for the rake and the jackpot drop. I finally understand what it feels like to be financially raped outside of by credit card companies.

• Missed bets--I can goddamn guarantee that I missed more bets than I paid in rake for the whole session. A scare card would come out, and I'd check thinking that one of the 18 people in the hand had to have hit their flush, only to find out that everyone had bottom pair. Who knew that a normal deck had 18 2's?

• Paying for drinks--Actually, considering that the card room is out in the middle of nowhere, it's better that drinks are expensive, otherwise I'd be liable to be in a world of hurt and end up sleeping in my car at least once in the next year. But come on, we're not at the Metrodome, are we?

• Tipping--I am not a tight-assed tipper. I'm not against tipping someone that I know makes their living from my generosity. But, it wasn't until 6 hours into my session that I realized you could chop a $1 chip. I won a shitload of hands, and every time I tipped a dollar, even on the small pots. Is it normal to chop a chip for a tip? Say that 5 times fast.

• My pot counting skills-- By the end of the session I was accurately counting pot sizes in terms of big bets, but it's just so much easier when it's calculated for you online. I was a little shaky at first, and there are so many distractions in the card room for a person like me. The waitresses, other players, beer--they all try to sneak into my peripheral vision and hinder my abiliity to count the pot. Fucking jerks.

The Ugly:

• The players--The same old guy that cracked my aces with his two paired 2-5o also cold-called three bets and then called the cap with his J-8 of clubs, only to hit his inside straight draw on the turn. He would've won more money, but he was all-in on a 4 bet flop. Oh, and did I mention that all this action was 5-way? Jumping Jesus Christ, where's the ACHE when you need 'em? Where do they get these people? Enough about that, because anyone that's played B&M poker knows what I'm talking about.

I am going to add one more section here, called "The Funny".

The Funny:

The one good thing about this is that I did get an exceptional lesson in The Laws of Thermodynamics, and specifically Zero-Sum Games. (Of course, this isn't putting the rake, jackpot and tipping into the equation.)

An old couple sat down immediately at my start up table, both buying in for $100. By the end of their session, he had more than tripled up, and she had lost nearly, if not more, than that much. The two would always be heads-up by the turn and the river, where he'd pair his king or some other shit like that, while she missed her draw to nothing. No, seriously. She was sitting directly to my right, and would hold her cards in such a way that I could clearly see what she had. Now, I was never in a pot with her when I would notice her cards, and if I had been, I wouldn't have been looking over there in the first place. I have some morals, damn it. Each time I saw what she held, it was never more than bottom pair, and most of the time she was calling "just to keep 'em honest".

If passing chips to your husband is all you're going to do, why even come to the B&M at all? It can't be good on the ol' Social Security check.