Two Free Lessons
By Two lessons were learned this weekend at Running Aces and neither one had to do with playing a wrap draw with heavy betting behind and one card to come.
The first lesson was freeroll players do not all fit the stereotype. They come to play and play hard, especially when some awesome prizes waited at the final table of the 2009 Desert Heat Shootout courtesy of the Minnesota Poker League held at the convention room at Running Aces. The players all had stickers with their names and the bar/VFW/freeroll site they qualified from that gave them entry into this tournament.
The prizes?
Nine entries into a $2,000 buy-in tourney at Red Rock Casino with accommodations paid for. The field would start around 140ish for these players playing down to 20. Once at 20 players their chip stacks would be bagged up and given fresh stacks and blinds, then the tourney resumed to play down to the nine players who would get those excellent poker trips to one of the best off-strip casinos in Vegas. Call it a double satellite if you will since the strategy wasn’t to bludgeon the table and risk your stack on a coin flip because finishing 20th was just as good as finishing as the chip leader.
The play was a mixed bag at my table as players started with 100BBs holding 10,000 chips at 50/100 blinds and 25 minute gradual levels. All of them played vastly more live poker than yours truly, and the mood around the table was lighter than what I’m grown accustom to. Then again, I usually play with players twice my age who tell me to get off their lawn. Willmar, Hutchingson, Park Rapids, all vying for those seats as the cards I shuffled would ultimately determine how these players would start their journey in the tournament.
Yep. I was the dealer.
Lesson number two, it’s definitely not as easy as it looked in the box when you’re the one washing and shuffling the cards. Now the players were kind enough to put up with my virgin journey as a card-thrower, as I hoped to run a tight game and give the players as many hands as possible so skill would prevail and not have it come down to getting AA vs. KK (which happened, and resulted in the only bust-out at my table for the first four levels).
No bridging the cards, thumbs up, clean cut, remind the players of the blinds, announcing raising, calculating the to-call amounts all needed with every hand even when folded around to the big blind. Those who know me know that if I wasn’t a database/accounting monkey I’d love to hop behind the box and deal for a living. Just being in the cardroom with fellow degenerates for hours would complete my day as with being a father and a husband the swings of playing Omaha professionally would be too much for them and my psyche (as seen by my *ahem* run into variance this week).
Time to go get a Cap’n Coke and fire up another round of low limit tourneys to get over those bad afternoon rivers 
Leave a Reply