Foxwoods

Part two of my trip across the pond

I’m pretty sure I jumped a red light in my excitement to turn off the highway towards its magnetic glow. I also missed the sign to the self-park garage and ended up at the goods delivery depot. More haste less speed required. Finally I found the parking, dropped the car in the first space, and made a dash through the snow to the elevator. It occurred to me as I was zooming up to the casino that leaving the van parked on the roof level when it was snowing so heavily probably wasn’t the smartest move. I cursed my degenerate poker-playing alter ego for devising such a cunning plan to trap me here until the thaw came.

In terms of square feet of gaming space, Foxwoods is supposed to be the largest casino in the world. I’d checked out a floor plan on their website previously and the poker area seemed pretty insignificant. Their poker area was not insignificant. I didn’t wander around much of the rest of the casino, but remembering back to the floor plan I’d seen, it must have been pretty freaking huge.

It was now about 1:30am and there were about 30 tables or so on the go. I’d never playing live limit poker before and I also felt that my limit game was still a bit rusty so I enquired about their NL games. Their structure wasn’t ideal. They had a $1-2 game with buy-ins between $40 and $100 (too small compared to the sizes of the blinds). The next level up was a $5-5 game with no maximum buy-in. Since the $5-5 game was way above my bankroll I’d plumped for the $1-2 game. I’d read some other guy's Foxwoods trip report on ITH a while back where they were able to sit down with more than the allowed maximum of $100. You initially site down with the minimum $40, immediately tip the dealer $1 and then once you’re below $40 you can rebuy for an addition $100. By this means I was sat with $139 and I liked the look of the table...

I was in the 4 seat. There was a very drunk mother in her 40s in the 2 seat. She was giving it plenty of chat and trying to flirt with everyone. She made me feel quite nauseous, but I overcame my desire to smack her in the face by assuring myself that I would takeher last $ before the night was out. To that effect I praised her every bad beat and sympathised every time her middle pair got crushed. It took me until 6am to win a pot of her. Now that’s what I call a serious investment of one’s time. The rest of the table was pretty good too. There were two or three good players including a young guy in the 6s who must have had about $1500 in front of him and an older guy in the 10s who was moaning slightly more than I would have liked at the drunken woman. The rest of the table was pretty juicy. Mostly younger people who’d watched poker on TV, played with their buddies, but really had little clue about what was going on.

Now, this is the point where I wished I’d taken some notes at the table. This was all about 2 weeks ago now and I’ll be damned if I can remember any interesting hands. It’s possibly because thee weren’t any. I don’t even remember ending up all-in at any point, although I’m sure I did. I don’t think my stack ever dropped below $120 and I just gradually added to it all night till I was up to about $500 without any major upswings or down swings. Can't complain

After a couple of hours the 3 seat freed up and the drunk woman slid over and took it. Freaking marvellous. Luckily she’d sobered up just enough to realise that I wasn’t going to be reciprocating her flirting, but not enough to actually fold her hands. She could be read like a book. If she was betting then she had a hand. If she was calling then you were almost certainly ahead. Unfortunately it took me all night before I took any chips off her; fortunately she hadn’t gone broke in the mean time.

At about 5am I went for a wander to grab some breakfast. When I came back it looked as thought our table was about to break up. Those of us remaining got split between the two other $1-2 tables and I managed to get with the drunk woman again. The rest of the table was horrible, however. Two really old grumpy guys sat to my right and pretty much killed any action there might have been just by being old and grumpy. I took a nice pot from one of them with JJ when I rivered a flush (although I’m pretty sure I was winning throughout the hand), which made me feel a lot better. Then to make matters worse the next dealer, who could barely fit in his chair because he was so fat, started criticising the play of the drunk woman. I nearly threw him a couple of dollars to shut the hell up, but couldn’t find an opportunity to do it when the drunk woman (incidentally, she probably wasn’t drunk any more since she’d stopped drinking about 4 hours earlier) wouldn’t have heard.

Once I’d finally taken some cash from her – I seem to remember that she called a large re-raise that I made preflop with AA and then folded on the flop – I decided that it was probably time to head back to Providence, since the other Goyles would probably want to rehearse at some point during the day and I also had some friends from Brown that I needed to catch up with. So I resolved to head back to the parking lot and dig the van out of the snow.

To be continued…