All in, all out

All this poker talk lately has stoked my desire (like I need any encouragement) to go try my luck at the Muck. That and the $100,000 the casino is giving away this week to its regular poker players.

Every hour from 7 to 10 p.m., every night this week, the poker room manager draws names from a barrel until five players receive $1,000. That's $5,000 an hour, four hours a night for five nights: $100,000. Free money. All you need to do is be present, and have played at least 25 hours of Muckleshoot poker in the past three months. Nothing to it.

Well, the more hours you play the more drawing tickets you get, and we were on Pie in the Sky for two of the three months this quarter so my chances aren't so good. Still, I've got enough hours to qualify, with three tickets in the barrel. Deal me in!

With a mix of duty and hope I trundled out to Auburn on Monday -- and Tuesday, and tonight -- to mix it up with the degenerates and, on the hour, to listen for my name. I don't mean to sound bragadocious, but I've liked my chances. Since we've been home all the bad luck and the bad play from the road have receded and I've been enjoying a nice poker-room heater. Every time I've played I've booked a win; a hundred bucks here, two hundred there, a couple of tournament cashes. I'm up about $1,000 in the past month and feeling comfortable, if not cocky.

Somehow, though, through a combination of ugly cards, unprofitable decisions and unfortuitous timing, things haven't worked out as I imagined. After pot after losing pot, I found myself rebuying chips on both Monday and Tuesday. Not to mention, my ticket wasn't drawn from the free-money barrel.

Turns out my three tickets were quite the long shot. Some players have dozens of tickets. I heard there are about 3,000 in the barrel in all, meaning I'm about a tenth of 1 percent shot to hit any time a name is called. Those odds haven't stopped several players with fewer tickets than I have from scoring a thousand bucks, and some with only a few more than I have have been called two, three, four times. Gambling's so random.

Plus, all the free money in the room has brought out every crazy, money-starved wacko gambler who ever logged two dozen hours. The action has been crazy. Raising and re-raising with nothing. Drawing to two outs, or less. Betting blind. Every goofy play you've ever seen.

On Tuesday, the poker action wasn't enough for Edmund -- "not Ed" -- a 20-something, vodka-chugging Asian kid who sat down at our table. When another young drinker joined the game, Edmund challenged him to a game of rock-paper-scissors for $20. They argued terms of the bet for half an hour. "I don't know," the newcomer said, "I like to gamble on my terms. You're coming on all like some kinda a rock-paper-scissors master."

"I've got an idea," I said. "A three-way spelling bee for a thousand bucks."

That shut them up, but only for a few minutes. Eventually they went off to the bathroom -- no joke; gambling (other than poker) isn't allowed at the poker table -- to play rock-paper-scissors for $100 a pop. Edmund took him down, or so he said.

Meanwhile the hyper atmosphere seemed to have everyone on edge. One of the dealers told a story about a guy, a couple of weeks ago, who took a bad beat and literally spit on the woman who beat him -- a mouth full of chewing tobacco. Michelle and I happened to be there that night. That story prompted one about the guy who cold-cocked another player at Diamond Lil's, knocking him out with one punch (Michelle and I were there for that one too), and then I told about the guy in L.A. who, mad about a bad beat, walked out to his car, came back to the poker room and heaved a golf ball at the offending player, hitting him in the chest and knocking him down, leading to the summoning of police.

So the dealer Mario recounted the weirdest poker-table tale he'd seen recently, about a drunk young woman in Seat 6 who pulled a breast out of her lowcut dress and then, later, leaned back and plopped her leg onto the poker table, revealing a Britneyesque lack of undergarments. The way Mario told the story, three players at the table were older gentlemen with their wives sitting behind them; they concentrated on looking at the chips directly in front of them. But the guy in Seat 5 couldn't help looking at the display on his left.

"Action's on you, sir," Mario recalled saying. And, to the woman, "Please keep both feet on the floor, ma'am."

Who knows.

When I got to the Muck tonight I ran into Freddie, a 50-ish regular, who was also waiting for a game. "They draw your name yet," I asked. "Christ no," he said.

My goal, I said, was to lose less than a thousand trying to win a thousand.

"A thousand? More like two thousand," Freddie said. "I'm down 300 a night so far."

Poor bastard. At least I'm not that bad off. A couple hundred here and there, and tonight I won the first three pots I played, up a hundred-plus in half and hour. Nothing to it. But the cards turned, I yinged when I shoud have yanged, and by 8 o'clock -- the second drawing, but my fourth hour at the Muck -- I was down almost a hundred bucks, nearly $500 for the week.

Free money. But not for me. Time to go home.

A Poker Poem for You

I was up sixty but now I'm down ten
This is my usual poker mantra

When I'm up sixty, I think, get up, get up now!
Leave the table with the money in your pocket!
Buy three pizzas
and three or four cups of coffee
or one tank of gas!
You can get all the way to Park Ridge New Jersey on this

but no, I stay, and my trip kings turns into her ace high flush
and I was up sixty and now I'm down ten.
again.

and no, I don't wonder, how does this happen
It's pure hubris baby.
Hubris and that thing that always happens in the movies,
That thing that makes you yell at the TV screen,
When the protagonist says, I made a million robbing banks and I'm gonna to retire now,
And then DeNiro comes along and says,
one more, man
Just one more
Then you'll have TWO million dollars,
And won't that be a whole lot better?

And that's what it always is at the table
I'm about ready to go and I think:
Well let me win just one more pot
Let's make it an even hundred up,
and then I'll go

And I almost always end up back here,
thinking about how I was up sixty,
and truly, really, absolutely should have left right then.
Instead, I was up sixty,
And now, as you know,
I'm down ten.

The cost of free money

(Or, how to lose $500 dreaming of a thousand.)

This is a big week at the Muckleshoot Indian Casino, my card room of choice. In one of its quarterly promotions for regular poker players, the Muck is giving away $100,000 this week. On Monday through Friday nights, every hour from 7 to 10 p.m., they're drawing five names from a big barrel and giving each winner an envelope containing $1,000. They keep drawing until they get five winners an hour, so that's $5,000 an hour, $20,000 a night, $100,000 over the course of the week.

Free money!

All you had to do to qualify for the drawing was play a minimum of 25 hours over the past three months (they track your hours via credit card-type readers built in to every table). The more hours you played, the more tickets you had in the tub, but really any semi-regular had at least two tickets; I have three or four. Some wackos have dozens.

The only catch is that you have to be in the room when your name is called. What that means is that the place is packed like I've never seen it, even in the old days when they had "bad beat" jackpot promotions that sometimes topped $200,000. On Monday night, all 18 tables in the main room were full, and half of the newer "back room" was full too. There must have been 24 or 25 games going. And the excitement: It was like Christmas morning for degenerates.

I showed up on Monday night because, hey, I've got a shot, and it's free money! At 7 o'clock, the name Tuan Lee was called, and everyone cheered; they know Tuan. Except when he walked to the barrel to claim his winnings he was informed that, sorry, the winner was Tuan Ly, L-Y, a different guy. Who wasn't even there.

Two people whose tickets were drawn but who weren't present showed up half an hour later to learn their tardiness had cost them $1,000. Two other players, both present, were drawn twice over the course of the night -- two grand each for both of them.

For me, nothing, which shouldn't be a huge surprise. My paltry few tickets are a giant underdog in this promotion.

Meanwhile, in trying to pull down my share of the booty, I didn't have one of my better nights in my regular $4/8 game. Lost a hundred bucks, in fact. At this rate, I thought, I could lose $500 this week dreaming the unlikely dream of winning a thousand. Maybe I wouldn't make this a regular stop after all.

But then my friend David e-mailed me suggesting we play today (he's on vacation this week). So, good friend that I am, I trundled out there this afternoon. Always thinking of others, that's me, never ever myself.

Sadly, the scene and the results were similar. A lot of degenerates, a lot of oohs and ahs as familiar names were called, and even one "Mark" but, alas, not me. And I lost another hundred bucks. Poop.

David, playing at my same table, was on fire and won several hundred. Poker's dumb.

I got up to leave after the 8 p.m. drawing. The dealer at our table, Vinh, protested: "The drawing's not over yet," he said. "Two more hours."

Yeah, I said, but I can't afford to stick around and see if I win.

Blurry vision?

The next time my trusty nurse practitioner Jennifer asks at our monthly appointment whether I'm having blurry vision maybe I should say yes. At least that's the excuse I'm trying to allow myself for a huge blunder in my afternoon poker session at the Muck. I misread the board -- a rookie mistake that I haven't made in a very long time -- and it cost me a lot of chips.

I was playing with the hole cards K-Q, a pretty good starting hand that, at this loose table, stood to drag a good pot if it hit. The flop brought scary but potentially lucrative cards -- 10, 9, 3, but with two clubs. That meant I had an inside straight draw but was vulnerable if someone else were drawing to a flush.

Six people were in the pot and somehow it checked around without a bet on the flop. This was doubly good, I thought -- a free card for me, and diminishing pot odds for the flush-drawers if I wanted to bet or raise to go for a steal on the next street.

Beautifully, the turn brought the jack of diamonds, completing my straight and missing the flush-drawers. A tough, aggressive player in Seat 7, two seats to my right, bet out in early position, which again was perfect for me. Now I was able to raise, forcing the players behind me to fold or call $16 for one chance at catching their flush card in what was now a $48 pot. That would be an error if they did so, and if they were calling with one pair they were probably drawing dead, unable to catch a card that would win them the pot.

Predictably, and happily, everyone laid down until it got back to the original bettor, who just called. Any non-club on the river, I figured, and I was good. The final card was a red queen, which I took as probably good news with an asterisk. It wasn't a club -- nice! -- but now the board included 9-10-J-Q. If Seat 7 had any king I'd split the pot with him instead of hogging it, and on the off chance that he had ace-king I'd be toast. Otherwise, though, I was golden.

Again he bet! What? A-K, really?

That holding didn't make sense to me, though, given the way he'd played the hand. I thought it was much more likely he had K-J, which would have explained the turn bet and call and would have made him think he'd pulled ahead with a straight on the end. My thinking at this point was that unless he has the unlikely A-K, I had no worse than a tie for the pot. So I raised, only to be reraised (!) for my last eight chips.

My opponent turned over A-Q for top pair with top kicker, but nothing close to my straight.

"That's a good hand," Dave the dealer said.

Me, snarkily: "Not good enough," and I flipped over my king-queen and started reaching for the chips.

Nope, Dave said. Nut flush.

I looked again. Yike! The flop -- the original three common cards -- included three clubs, not two, and Seat 7's hand was the ace and queen of clubs. He'd flopped it -- the nuts, the best possible hand -- and then played me for a chump, extracting the maximum possible from my dwindling stack.

Argh, how could I have overlooked that? It happens, but it hasn't happened to me in a long time.

Embarrassed, I bought another rack of chips, refocused, and resolved to study the board -- twice -- before raising again.

Luckily, the patience and resolve paid off, or I just caught a little lucky streak, and by the time I got up to leave a couple hours later I had recovered the hundred bucks I lost and added another $130 to boot. Nice comeback to cash out a winner, but I know that my bankroll's about $40 lighter than it should have been if I were paying attention.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on playing again with my friend David. Since there won't be time to get fitted for glasses between now and then, I'm going to have to sit up close and squint.

Today's word is... le indicazioni

That means directions, or information.

As in, "can you give me directions to a casino that is not full of idiots who call three bets cold and catch impossible cards on the river, and take all of your money?"

Mom, can you translate that for me?