On my last trip to AC (and by last I mean probably three trips ago) I was determined to get some poker in at the Borgata. After three hours at the craps table at Caesar’s, they raised the limit to $25 signalling that it was time for me to leave. I cabbed it over to the borgata and immediately got seated at a $6/$12 limit table. I had originally signed up for the $1/$2 NL list, but once I sat down, I wasn’t interested in moving. There was simply too much dead money on the table. I was card dead most of the night, so I didn’t win any money, but I did have one interesting hand.

With five callers in front of me, I called on the button with J7s. The flop came out QJJ and I was instantly excited. Someone bet out of early position and everyone in front of me called, so I called behind. Turn brought an offsuit 7 giving me the boat. First position bets out again, two callers, I raise, first position re-raises and one other person calls. River is an offsuit 9. First position bets out again. I just call here, but I think I should have raised. Original bettor shows J4o and as I flip my hand over I say I have the jackson family.

That isn’t the interesting part. I always make up stupid names for my hands The interesting part was the conversation I had with one of the other players. Calling my hand the Jackson Family was a mistake, because there were seven kids, right (jackson 5 plus Latoya and Janet)? Two parents would have made the J9 the “Jackson family”. The other player told me that he thought there actually nine kids and two of them weren’t involved in music because they had some kind of deformity or were deaf or something like that. I wiki search cleared it all up – there really are 9 jackson kids and all of them had music careers. I really just can’t get over the idea of there being non-musically inclined Jackson kids. And the idea of a deaf Jackson kid is just hilarious. I bet he would get picked on all the time. I mean really, seven brothers and sisters all in the music business and you don’t make it?

Kat and I made it out to Katitude’s inagural blogger event in Toronto a few weeks ago, so I figured I should throw in my two cents.

It was really cool meeting all the bloggers: Jules, Graham, Guin, Astin, and Iakaris.

Kat and I went out on Thursday, flying on a Delta voucher that Kat picked up when she was forcibly bumped from a flight. She’s always hated Delta and now I know why. They are seriously the worst airline I’ve ever flown. I remember a while back there was a big scandal at Delta because some flight attendant took naked pictures of herself in her Delta uniform. That explains a lot about the airline. Rather than focusing on running a good airline, they’ve got the whole fucking company looking for Delta porn. Their argument was that it was bad for their image. Are you kidding me? You’re telling me that skeezy male business travelers are going to purposely stay away from the airline where the flight attendants get naked? Right.

Thanks to Delta’s incompetence we arrived to Toronto late on Thursday, so we just had a couple drinks with Katitude and called it a night. Before parting ways though, she gave us all the details for how to take the tai-pan (chinatown) bus to Casino Rama.

Casin-o-rama
Having already been to Toronto before, I wasn’t particularly concerned with seeing all the sights, and honestly it was too cold to be walking around a lot anyway, so going to Rama seemed like a good idea. I also wanted to get an idea of how long it really takes to get there, which I didn’t find out because the Tai-Pan bus stopped all over Toronto (3 Chinatowns!). Rama was fairly uneventful; we played 2-5 limit HE and came out slightly ahead, which is always good. No craps, no blackjack, just poker (that’s a first in a long time for Kat and I).

After we finally made it back to Toronto, we caught up with Katitude, Jules, Graham, Astin, and Guin in the Distillery district. Dinner was delicious and after drinking roughly a bottle of wine it was time to hit the club for some poker action. This was one of the first times I’ve gone to a poker room specifically to play NL. Thankfully, the deck was hitting me like crazy, so I didn’t get into many situations where I really had to rethink my play. At one point I think I was up around $600, but my luck started to run out and I doubled up Katitude (I think twice) and Astin. I believe all of those times my trips TK got the smackdown from flopped full houses. That doesn’t feel good.

The Tournament
The next day was a hungover day for most everyone and Kat and I spent the majority of it going to Niagara Falls with some Austin friends. We made it back just in time to wrap up dinner and head to the club for the tournament. A random player from the club asked to join in our tournament since there was no game running. I don’t think he knew what he was signing himself up for. Three hammer drops and this guy had no idea what was going on. It was no surprise when he busted first. There were really only a couple noteworthy hands: Astin’s quads over Katitude’s boat and Iak’s pocket jacks holding up against Jules’ AK in dramatic fashion, with the king coming on the turn and the 2-outer jack hitting on the river. After dropping Jules, Iak probably had 80% of the chips and gave us a lesson in playing the big stack, pushing us off of pots over and over again. The race for 2nd between Astin and I just came down to who could luck out. Astin had one bad all-in against Iak and put me into the money. It probably took all of three hands for the game to end.

We immediately jumped over to the cash game afterward and my luck was really starting to run out. I think I had to rebuy on the first hand when my TPTK got destroyed by 2-pair. Really just a horrible read on my part, I interpreted his overbet to be a steal and it wasn’t. Ouch. There were also a number of other situations where I showed my inexperience with playing NL cash games, but such is life. I did, however, get the chance to drop the hammer. I think I showed it down three times, much to the dismay of the table. Overall I ended the cash game down about a buy-in which put me up for the trip. No complaints here.

Overall it was a really good trip. Katitude is a fantastic host and took care of everything we needed. Now if only she could control the weather.