Backstage Poker and midget poker cash

If there was ever a question as to why Robert's blog is one of my favorite reads, this sentence should clear that up for you -

I call because I have implied odds and by implied odds I mean a blog.

Gold, Jerry, gold.

So go on over to Guinness and Poker and congratulate Iggy on his Main Event Cash. The blogfather now finds himself in the top 8-9% of the second-largest field in WSOP history. Not a bad result for a guy who entered a qualifier on a whim! I can't think of anyone whose last name isn't Hartness and lives in a Mexican ghetto in Charlotte, NC that I'd rather take the whole thing down. But at some point he'll have to make a decision - go for the $9 Million first prize, or keep his anonymity?

Good luck, bro!

This is a little disjointed - deal with it. I'm trying to bring this back around to more poker-centric in hopes that being more focused will restore some of my lost status on certain search engines that shall remain nameless (although I am still using exclusively Yahoo! for all my searching). So if you're looking for general stories about life, theatre and other shit, head over to my other site - www.johnhartness.com. That'll be the home for all my other ramblings for the near future.

So during dress rehearsal, in the TWO HOURS that I'm hanging out backstage between the first time I die in Richard III and the time I come back as a ghost and then die as someone completely different (some of you with community theatre backgrounds will understand exactly why that sentence is funny) Joe, another actor with three costumes for four scenes on stage, remarks "duh. We've got all this time on our hands, we should break out some cards and play heads up."

See, Joe made the trek out to Vegas with $1,000 in his pocket right after he quit college a few years ago and played for a living for a little while. Then he got smart and came home before it wrecked his soul forever.

I responded with the fact that half the cast plays intermittently in my home game, so why limit it to heads-up? So last night I brought in my chips (which if you haven't seen, look a lot like this)
What can I say, I like having nice chips? By the way, photo courtesty of Aces Full on ChipTalk, the only place to go for info on poker chips and great deals on high-end poker chips.

So anyway, I brought my chips to the theatre, and we set up a little game in the scene shop as the show was going on last night. Me and Joe did indeed start off heads-up, but the Porno Imp joined in once he got offstage for a while. I was cruisin' for a while just basically bleeding Joe dry a buck or two at a time with middle pairs, then Jewart (the Porno Imp) sat down, bought in short ($15 in a .25/.50 game) and doubled up on a turned straight on his first hand. Little douche. I of course made one hideous call chasing a gutty which unbeknownst to me would only have given me a chop. Joe turned top two the same time Jewart caught his straight, so he paid the Imp off on two streets instead of one.

Jewart had to go onstage, so we went back to heads-up for a bit, and Joe turned a better two pair than me to bring himself almost back to even. I min-raised preflop with A-10 (yeah, I know, but he'd been playing pretty tight/passive, so a bigger raise and I get nothing). Flop comes out 7-7-10, and I lead out with a 1/2-pot bet. Yeah, I know, that equals $1, but it just sounds better to say 1/2 pot. Joe calls, and a 9 comes on the turn. I fire $2, and he calls. River is a blank, and he calls $3, and says "If you have an overpair, it's good." I don't so I show my A-10. He shows 10-9 for a better two pair and is close to back to even. Not terribly exciting, but we're really just trying to pass the time more than anything, and slinging a few chips around is way better than me sitting around backstage watching movies on my Macbook.

So tonight our director plans to join in, and maybe a couple other folks from the cast will sit in when not on stage. Tom and Nick, a couple of my more regular players, are on stage too much to play, but I think by the end of the run we'll end up six-handed or better. In the scene shop, trying to read out cards under the gelled light of the shop lights, because we have to leave the shop doors open to cross from stage right to left without being seen. Pretty silly, but what else is a degenerate gambler to do?