Friday Night Poker at Dan and Tim's

The Coralville crew have graciously invited me to play poker on several occasions. I finally had a night I could make it, and I'm not sure how many more chances I'll get to hang with those guys, so I decided to go. It was also a nice chance to run out the set of poker chips I bought on ebay, which I haven't used yet. I'm pretty terrible at poker, and I wasn't sure who would be there, so I was a little worried that I might be home early. That wouldn't have been too much of a bad thing, either, as Kristin and I were planning on watching England vs. Paraguay the next morning.

Well, there was a pretty big crowd. Twelve people to start. Dan made some tasty punch, which was deceptively strong. I put down my twenty bucks and was sat at a table with Josh, Tim, Eric, and Noah (later on we were joined by Peter). This was a nice, casual, conversational table, and we had a fairly good time for two and a half or three hours. The other table had Andy and Dan, and so was very loud, and, apparently, having lots of fun.

Pretty much all my experience from poker is with no limit hold 'em, and Friday's game was limit, which is very very different. I tried to learn a little something about betting strategy, but really all I could come up with is that you should play a hand that has a chance of becoming something, and then get out if it doesn't hit. For a quarter, people weren't getting out of hands, and good starting hands have a totally different expectation. I definitely messed up a couple times, especially folding too early. There were hands that I didn't think I had the odds on, and if we were playing no limit I wouldn't have... but for fifty cents I really should have stuck around. I went up two or three bucks in the first ten hands or so, and then hit a steady, slow, battling decline for the next few hours. A little after eleven, I was down to a little over ten, and we had a weird hand where Josh started to muck my cards and his, while I was still in, and then, when I protested, he realized one of Peter's cards had gotten mixed in... It's not really anything that's a big deal, but it's just one of those things that my card game annoyance muscels start to tighten on, as it's the sort of situation where, in Magic, you start to think someone's cheating. I'm not trying to say that in this situation Josh was cheating, in fact, I'm absolutely positive he wasn't. What I'm trying to chronicle, I guess, is my tendency to get my head a little worked up/annoyed, if even mostly subconsciously, when situations like this arise. That the pump was primed, so to speak, for me to get a little angry. Right after that, I had a pretty good hand, Ace Queen, and pre-flop raised. Josh was in on the ante, and stayed in. I bet to open each round, and he called, but never raised. The flop, turn, and river were all non-face cards. When we showed our hands, it turned out Josh had stayed in with Jack deuce, pairing the two on the flop. I was pretty amazed that he had continued to bet with that hand, and said "I guess your two beats me." Honestly, I just kind of figured he had something better. Josh then decided to give me a lecture, which, if I correctly understood the words coming out of his mouth, basically amounted to the idea that in limit hold-em', people will stay in with anything, so you should expect to get beat by everything. I don't know, perhaps I just don't get it, but it didn't make any sense to me, and I told him so, but he wouldn't drop it. I was getting angry, at this point, and told him so. The next hand, I got Ace Jack, didn't hit a flop, and folded, as I was so frustrated. I can recognize when I'm tilting, so I took the opportunity to take off. When I left, Eric was winning big at our table, and Noah was just hanging on, with the other three doing all right. They were just about to combine tables, and I'm anxious to hear how it turned out.

I ended up leaving with eight bucks, and maybe a little more knowledge about limit hold-'em. It's so unfortunate that I got pissed off and left angry, because it really put a damper on an otherwise quite enjoyable evening.

GG, GL