Hey look, two posts in one day! Both regarding B&M poker, and not silly-ass Doyle's Room! Please take away my coffee before I hurt myself or break the exclamation point key! MASH!

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It's likely that you'll never see that sort of long-shot on this blog again, but for today, I rule harder than O'Doyle.

As we all have read, I'm quite new at this live poker thing. I've only been playing online for the past few years, and if it weren't the impending doom of the WPBT, it's quite possible that I wouldn't have taken the plunge and spent one hungover Wednesday at the cardroom back in April. Thank you Alcohol for telling me to call in sick.

Players that have been around the game for years have probably seen, heard and been in almost every situation there is to be at while sitting at a table. Is it possible to be fazed by anything after ten years squeezing cards? After only three mediocre trips to Canterbury, there are certain things that leave me utterly dumbfounded.

I'll never understand the way certain people play the way do. What's even worse is when they try to justify a certain play by saying "It was suited, I had to play it", or "I had reverse-double-implied, second-nature purple monkey retard bus odds to call that all-in with 3 high! Gotta keep ya honest, there, SonnyBoy." As a small aside, "keeping someone honest" is just another way to say "I'm a fucking moron" without actually saying "I'm a fucking moron". Say what you mean what you say.

No, none of that will make sense. That's not what I want to talk about, though.

Friday was the first day that I sat at a table with an automatic shuffler installed in it. The previous two times it was always wash-riffle-hokey-pokey-turn yourself around and deal, which tends to take a little bit of time. I happen to like the auto-shuffler because it keeps the game moving smoothly and gives me more hands/hour. More hands means more potential profit for me. Nah Doi! It also takes the dealer's potential laziness out of the equation. Senor AutoShufflerez can't, on a whim, decide to only riffle 4 times on any given hand, because he's thinking more about getting laid after work, than he is about dealing a fair game. I, for one, welcome our electronic shuffling overlords.

No, I didn't just type that. LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!

Sucker.

7 hours into my session, after a few beers, a redbull-like drink that tasted akin to Robotussin, and 35 trips to the bathroom, a new guy sat down in the 8 seat, replacing a guy that left the table with a stack of 10 $25 chips. He still had two full racks of $1 chips to cash in, too. Immediately the new guy--whom I'll affectionately refer to as "Toolbag"--starts in on a discussion with the only girl at the table about how he'd just got up from a 7-Stud table that completely crushed him. The girl, with her boobs just about hanging out of her low-cut shirt, and a mouth full of rotten teeth, looked away from him with a huge level of disinterest. Nice combo: great cleavage, horrendous teeth. She was a solid player, though, and I'm fine with that as long as she doesn't decided to chew on the cards.

With the table not being able to care less about this man's bad beat life, he started talking about how he hated automatic shufflers. Whoa, hold on, Toolbag. You best stop talking about my friend like that. He said that he hated my low-wage, Mexican compadre because it "always deals out low cards". I didn't care to prod him into elaborating on this hypothesis, but 7 of the other people at the table agreed with him. And they weren't just agreeing with him just to make him feel like less of a shmuck. They all honestly believed that all of the low cards, somehow, in some un-fucking-believable way, migrated their way to the top of the deck while in that little black box in the table.

The next hand I won, I slapped my pocket aces(the hand that wasn't cracked) on the table and exclaimed "Unless you're counting these as lows, you're full of shit." Well, the shit was replaced with "it", but the message was the same. I don't want to be vulgar at a the table now, do I?

Everybody has their own beliefs and conspiracy theories. Online poker is rigged; the Holocaust never happened; the first walk on the moon was really on a sound stage in Hollywood; auto-shufflers have a nasty low-card fetish. I wanted to ask him why he continued to sit a table with a crooked Mexican running the game, but I feared the answer would cause my brain to explode.

Instead, I got up, shook my head, muttered "You might be on to something, Toolbag" and headed for the bathroom.