Daily Archives: February 21, 2007

so this is the (chinese) new year


Posted by avoque

In celebration of Chinese New Year I spent as much time as possible with as many Chinese people as I could. No, I didn’t go to the festivities in chinatown. It’s stinky down there and the only thing worse than being around a bunch of smelly Chinese people is being around a bunch of smelly Chinese fish markets. Yuck. I went to Atlantic City, where my mother assures me all the Chinese people will be, since they are all addicted to gambling.

Atlantic City knows that all of China is going to be there too, which is why all the AC hotel rooms were either already booked, or more expensive than I was willing to pay. Which is why I made this my first hit-and-run trip. No hotel, no luggage, just my jacket and the money in my pocket. In the end, it really wasn’t much different than normal, only instead of going back to my hotel room at 8am, I got something to eat and caught the bus out of there by 10:30am. I got just about the same amount of sleep on the bus that I would have gotten in the hotel, and when I woke up, I was almost home. Really not so bad. Though I do think I should start eating earlier. It seems that I get really caught up in the drinking and gambling and skip dinner every time I go. Maybe this is why I get uncontrollably drunk? Naw, it’s probably just all the Jack Daniels.


how stella got her groove back


Posted by avoque

I’ve had this post in my phone for a while, but apparently my grasp of technology is not yet good enough to actually get it back out in a timely fashion.

AC – Round 2
After my first successful AC trip, I decided that going right back the following weekend would be a good idea. Once again, I pricelined the sheraton for a reasonable $100 Saturday night stay. This trip was going to be different though, I was determined to both visit different casinos and play some good poker.

Cue the violins
I’ve been a real funk with online poker, really since PartyPoker dumped their US customers. My game has been terrible: pushing with hands where I know I’m behind, straight calling with losers, ignoring starting hand value – you know the business. I was really in need of a pokertracker plugin that could just look at my stats and say, “gus, what the fuck? You used to be good at this. You’re terrible now, go do something else.”

Repeat performance
My second trip to AC was the first time in a long while that I have gotten up from the table feeling good about my play. Tight, aggressive, smart = money in my pocket. I played for two hours and was basically card dead for the majority of it. It didn’t distract me. I play three good hands and I capitalized on them as best I could for $100 in winnings. But more importantly, I left the table feeling like a good player again.

Other AC notes
Caesar’s is an awesome casino but their poker room sucked. The tables and dealers were fine, but the management left a little to be desired. My table was down to four players before the floor manager said anything about moving us to another table. And even then, immediately after he told us it was going to take time to move us, he seated a new player at the table we were waiting to join. Lame-o.

Resorts is a fucking terrible casino. They’re like the Delta Airlines of casinos. I will never set foot in that place again. I spent over half an hour getting a players card and the woman working not only spelled my name wrong, she got the order wrong too, and she did it all in just under 30 minutes. I should have known right then that it was time to go, but it apparently takes me too long to learn my lesson.

I headed to the poker “room”, which was really a roped off area in the main floor. In the middle of the afternoon there were only two tables running and no one there to seat me at any of them. I quickly gave up on that idea and headed to the craps table. That was my third and final mistake. It was either my dealer’s first day, or he is just an incompetent fuck. Either way, he tried to give my payouts to the people standing next to me and most times calculated the odds payout wrong. After 10 minutes of this I was ready to go. This is when I looked up and noticed the 45+ minute line waiting at the cashier. Resorts was having some stupid event and didn’t have enough employees working to deal with the crowds. I dumped the rest of my buy-in and left Resorts forever. I should have set my player card on fire outside the door. They would have never caught “Enriqe Gunzales”.