For those of you who read the end of my last blog entry and were bored/confused, this entry is not for you. One of the coolest things ever to happen to me occurred this past Friday. As I mentioned last week, I went to Atlantic City this weekend with my friends. We were entered in a Poker Tournament at the Sands. It is an invitation only tournament that every one of us got in because my friend Mike loses/wins a ton of money in this casino. There were 200+ people registered in this tourney and first prize was $15K.
I won it.
You read that correctly.
I would gladly go through the entire tournament hand-by-hand, but in a nutshell these were the worst players I ever encountered in a casino tournament. Basically I waited until I had a premium hand, bet way more than I normally would pre-flop and watched a minimum of two people call every time. I was able to basically triple up every time I woke up with a hand. I got ''lucky'' twice. At one point I was on a short stack and needed to pick one of the next two hands to push. I did with Kd Td and turned a flush to triple up. The very next hand I had pocket aces and some poor bastard with basically the same amount of chips had pocket Kings. This put me at about $200K and either first or a very close second in chips at the final table.
By the time it got down to the final two players I had the other guy about 9:1 in chips. He went all in blind on the first hand and I called blind. He flipped over 9c5s, I flipped AsTc.
The flop came Kc 5h 2s......turn Qs......river Ts.
I swear you would have thought I just won the Superbowl. My friends went apeshit and, honestly, so did I.
I met some pretty cool people. One guy named Scott had a set cracked by my buddy Mike with a two outer on the river for all his chips. He was pretty happy. Here's the look Mike got.
Not too scary. Actually, this guy was really cool. Obviously, since he let me take his picture after losing $300 in the first 3 minutes after sitting down.
My favorite thing was walking around a casino, in one of this country's shadiest places, with $15K in my pockets. Especially since everyone was pointing at me saying, ''There's the guy who won!'' I made it home with about $14K after tipping out, meals and losses.
I've told you guys on two occasions about my friend Tim's gambling prowess. I haven't any great stories on this specific trip, but here's a picture of Tim moments before passing out from extreme intoxication.
Tim, as usual, played like an idiot and lost a lot of money. I don't believe it is appropriate to say how much money he lost, but it rhymes with moo mousand mollars. Interestingly, Tim would have to have won the tournament twice just to break even on the year.
I have some cool shows coming up. Tonight, I'll be at Aroma in Cleveland Park with Doug Powell, Rory Scovel, Kojo Mante, Rob Maher, Jessica Paquin, Seaton Smith, Andy Haynes, Jeff Maurer and Diana Saez. Come to this show. If you don't laugh, kill yourself.