How bout a revolution?
For some reason there has been a ton of references in my life about poker these days. There was a time, you see, when I was a legitimate poker player. A rounder, a true grinder, a shark in sheep’s clothing. Poker as an acceptable hobby was still in its infancy and I was part of it. I had been playing cards since I was 20 years old, I started playing legally in casinos a year after that and I was good. In my hay day I played in underground tournaments three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights. The weekends I would play in the casinos, Friday nights I would skim money off of the drunks stumbling in off of Bourbon Street, Sunday nights were spent with grandmothers looking to blow their grandchildren’s inheritance. I called my Sunday sessions the Social Security game. Considering the fact that I had a full time job and that by all estimates the money I am currently putting into Social Security I am never going to see back, I would justify my check raises by collecting back the money that afforded a 78 year old woman the luxury of spending her last days at a poker table.
Poker players are just like fishermen in the fact that each of us has a good story. We all have a tale about that huge fish that got away or the time we landed our prize and it was as big as your head. Let’s face it; part of the appeal of poker is seeing just how much bullshit you can pipe into somebody before they call you out on it. This of course is a huge part of the reason I was successful. To me, life, like poker, is made up of moments when you decide; how beneficial is it going to be for my success to completely and utterly lie to someone with a straight face. It is one of my tragic skills. It is one I have perfected. Thanks mom and dad for that divorce, who knew that me pretending to be okay with that would benefit me so well.
Now, there was a particular evening that still sticks out in my mind as one of the most memorable evening s of poker I have ever played. As cliché and awful as it is, I feel like I have to quote O.A.R. on this one and tell you that, it was a crazy game of poker.
It was my Thursday night tournament that I was becoming a regular at. It was at a bar in my town and it usually started around 7 in the evening and had to be done by 2 in the morning for the bar to close. It wasn’t a very exclusive tournament, but people wouldn’t just open up to you for a while. When you play poker with the same group of people over an extended period of time the only thing that will get you from one week to the next is your reputation. Everyone there called me the kid. At the age of 22 I was at least 15 years younger than the next oldest person at the tables. The other players constanlty made fun of my age. Asking if it was alright if I stayed up past my bed time or if my mom was going to pick me up after they won my money. I usually just sat there in silence, occasionalling retorting something about my mom being asleep, but their wife said she would be by to pick me up. My reputation was that of a very solid player who rarely would bluff, or do anything fancy. I was vanilla; I was the egg shell white on the walls of your new house, unthreatening, easy to get along with and boring. This was an act that I had built over the course of many weeks. Walking into the bar people would acknowledge my presence and then go back to doing whatever else they were up to. I would pull a chair up to the bar waiting for the game to start and the bar keep would have a cherry coke waiting for me. Still to this day I get a rush from the smell of cigarettes and cherry sodas. Those two things just feel like poker to me.
In this particular game there were 40 players, 5 tables and it only cost 30 dollars to play. The winner of the tournament got 800 bucks, second place got 200 bucks and the remaining cash went to the others in the top 6. Now I can’t tell you anything about this game up until the final table. I am sure there were hands that I played very well and there were some hands that I absolutely mis-played, but somehow when it got down to the final 6 I had the most chips out of everyone and it looked like it was going to be a very profitable night for me. Two players were knocked out and things were pretty getting pretty close between three of us. I knocked the 4th player out and going heading into the final 3 I was the chip leader again. Now, for those of you who play poker can attest to, when you have been playing poker for over 5 hours straight and it is getting late into a tournament and early into the mornings the size of your stack is more important than any other factor. I was happy with where I was and I began analyzing the remaining two players. One player was a young Hispanic kid. He knew the strategy, he knew the math, his judgment was off at times and I knew that it would take a solid hand for me to take him down. The other man was Mickie. Now, Mickie is exactly the type of guy that his name implies. Mickie was way past three sheets to the wind. His head was bobbing at the table trying to half stay awake and half try to keep the bar on a level plane in his mind. His words were slurring and you could see sweat pouring out of his floral shirt. His chest hair poking through the unbuttoned top 3 buttons were like wet vines trying so desperately to escape the jungle he was wearing. His gold chains were able to suppress some of them, but others were not so lucky. Mickie was my mark. He was my ticket to the 800 dollar pot that night. But there was the 2 o’clock deadline looming out there and Mickie was setting up for a war of attrition. You see, if it came to be 2 before there was a winner, the remaining players would just divide the money evenly. This meant that each of us would win a little over 300 bucks, which was fine with Mickie, who had the least amount of chips, but for me, was unacceptable. There was an hour and half left and we would need every second of it.
We must have played through 7 hands in an hour because Mickie was acting so slowly. This had frustrated the younger guy at the table to the point that he had thrown away much of his lead over Mickie and now the three of us were sitting pretty close in the amount of chips we had. Finally the kid gave in a bet away all of his chips when he shouldn’t have and Mickie won. There were 20 minutes left before the bar closed and all of a sudden I went from being the sure winner in this, to the under-dog. Now, with 800 dollars on the horizon, Mickie was in a rush to play each hand. Seeing that he was drunk and emotional and not in any state what so ever to make any kind of decision I perked up in my chair, raised my baseball cap and spoke to him. “Mickie, there are 15 minutes left before the bar closes. The way I see it is that you have two choices right now. You can split the remaining grand with me, 500 bucks each straight up. Or you can play me for another 15 minutes, by the end of which I guarantee, I will have not only all of your chips in front of me, but also 800 bucks. This is a 300 dollar choice and I am leaving it up to you.” Everyone in the bar laughed. Hell I would have laughed too. Mickie told me he liked his chances. I looked him square in the eye, “Well, thanks for the extra money then.”
I quietly slumped back into my chair and waited. I waited and waited, I played slow, and Mickie was getting more and more angry. He let his anger control his bets. He would throw up huge bets trying to get me to fold when he had nothing. He was so drunk I knew he didn’t have an accurate count of the chips and with about 3 minutes left I did a count and realized I was slightly ahead of him in chips. He hadn’t caught onto this yet. Then I get dealt pocket 10’s and I was the first to act. I just called his big blind and of course, in typical Mickie fashion, he raised me something ridiculous like 8 times the big blind. I put him on at least on Ace and I knew that regardless of what happened on the flop this was the hand I needed to make my move on. Ace. Seven. Ten. I just flopped trip 10’s. A great hand heads up. An even greater hand heads up against a drunk Italian man who was holding an ace. I check, hoping he is going to take the bait and bet big, he doesn’t, he checks. Shit. Three. Now, most people here sitting with trips are going to put out a bet and see what happens, but I am waiting for the knock out and I know that if I slow play this he is going to try to bluff his way out of the hand. I check. He checks. Fuck. Now I have to bet the next hand. I asked how much time there was left before the last card is dealt. They bar says that the next hand has to be the last one. The last card hits the table. Ace. I looked at Mickie, “Well Mickie, looks like we are splitting that money after all. There is no way I could bet on that Ace, I check.” He is furious. His $800 payday just got reduced. In a fit of anger he yells at me, “Well I am all in.” Click. Snap. That is the sound of the trap being sprung.
I have a full house. 10s full of Aces. It isn’t the nuts, but in this case it is the better of two hands. It also wins me $800. I tell Mickie that I call and lay the two 10s in my hand down on the table. His eyes drop. “You mother fucker. You fucking piece of shit, I will fucking kill you. We still have one more hand. You think you beat me, I will get that fucking money.”
“Not tonight you won’t Mic, I have you covered. Thanks for the extra cash though.” It was smug and perfect. Everyone in the bar would be talking about this for weeks. We had to get a third person to count the chips to be sure, but at the end of the count, I was right. I had won. The entire bar of rounders came up to shake my hand and tell me congrats. Mickie was nowhere to be seen. His girlfriend at slapped him after he got up from the table. “That was rent money asshole.” I am sure he went after her somewhere to make up for his short comings as not only a man, but as a poker player. I was enjoying the attention inside the bar.
People were actually calling other players from the night at 2 in the morning to tell them about what just happened. It was a great feeling to be part of this and it was an even better feeling to know that I had just won a little less than 2 weeks salary at the job I had. Then there was the yelling.
We all thought we heard a scream at first, we weren’t sure if it was a scream or if it was just Mickie drunk accelerating out of the parking lot and screeching his tires. The sound of shattering glass a moment later confirmed this for us. We all ran outside to see what had happened. Again, in life, much like poker, assumptions can ruin your life. Mickie’s car had a broken wind shield, but was parked in the same spot. His tires were fine, it was his girl that had been screaming. She had a cut above her right eye and the blood was just starting to run down her cheek.
“What the fuck Mickie!” someone in the crowd yelled, “What the fuck did you do?” None of us saw the loaded gun in his hand yet.
