Day off (already)

After one day back I am scheduled for a day off. What does a rookie dealer do on his day off? Play Poker of course!

Seeing that it was Monday, I figured I wouldn't get hold of Shawn at my club and he wouldn't be able to contact the Golf Pro at the club in Vegas that I was hoping to be able to play while I was here. Monday is the traditional day off for Golf Pros.

I slept in, fixed myself breakfast (having slept through the meal provided by my B&B host), did laundry and studied another chapter on pre-flop play in the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide - Tournament Edition. Then I decided to get some excercise by taking the 1.5 mile hike to the Stratosphere Casino.

After I got there, I thought I would drop into the Poker Room and see if I could play a little $3-$6 Hold'em but there were no cash games going on. The entire room was tournament tables. This was their Monday tournament and they were already at the third level. I checked with the desk and discovered that I could still get in but the late buy-in period would end in 10 minutes. Buy in was only $60 and there were no other games so I figured I should give it a shot.

The $60 bought me $4000 in tournament chips and I was able to play about 2 hands before the break. After we came back from the break, The blinds were $200 and $400. Hmmm. I was already short stacked and I had only seen three hands! I played by the book and just looked for good cards and when they came declared, "All In!" Soon I had doubled up and could play a more normal game of raising two to four times the size of the Big Blind when I wanted to enter a pot. Most of my raises got respect. When I was in the Big Blind, the Small Blind made a small raise, to $800. I looked down at A-J, looked at his stack which was less than half of mine and declared, "All in!" He hemmed and hawed and struggled with his decision, looked at me staring at the center of the table with my flip-up sunglasses now flipped down and asked, 'Can you beat Ace - Jack?" I just stared at the pot and didn't respond. He folded and pushed the chips toward me. "Ace - Jack, you say? That was really impressive. Take a look." I flipped my hand face up so he could see that I had precisely the Ace-Jack that he had called.

Many pundits recommend not showing an uncalled hand ever but I thought the coincidence of his calling out Ace-Jack was too special not to show. If his statement was truthful, we would have most likely split the pot with both of us holding the same hand. And I didn't mind showing the table that when I raise I have some power to back it up. I'm not just trying to steal pots by bluffing every time.

I worked my starting chips into a stack of about $50,000 by the time we got down to the final table. Because there were over ninety entrants, the tournament would pay nine places, one for every ten paid entries. After tenth place busted out there was talk of a nine way chop i.e. split the prize money nine ways, about $500 each but a few players weren't interested just yet. Ninth place busted out. Eighth place busts and now a chop would be $718 for each of us. We call the supervisor over for a review of the payouts according to the tournament sheet. The payout is very top-heavy for first place. Second place only pays $680. In order to do better than chopping the money seven ways a player would have to win the tournament outright. The last holdout finally realized that because he doesn't have a dominating chip lead, in fact he is only about third in chips, his is better off chopping. That is how it ended. A seven way chop and a nice profit for my day off.

I left a $60 tip for the dealers to split and headed back out for the mile and a half walk back to the house.