Badger's Midsummer Night's Dream (1 of 4--Vegas cash games)

I shall begin by chastising myself for the absence--it's not as if I haven't been playing poker (but just than I have been too lazy to blog!)

I headed back to Vegas for 10 days at the end of June. The reason for the trip was my buddy's 40th birthday. We had a lot of great meals and some big nights out, but I still managed to log a lot of hours at the tables.

This was my first materially lucrative trip to Vegas--I ended up $600 to the good. While that is a nice sum, it of course pales in comparison to my spending away from the table.

A very interesting (and in retrospect, painfully obvious) revelation ensued: my play is getting to the stage that it is quite profitable when sober--and quite unprofitable when I'm in party-mode ("any two cards, let's see a flop baby!").

My swings in Vegas were massive, and revealed near-perfect correlation: over my first few days, before the bulk of the gang showed up, I was making great money--anywhere from $20-100 an hour (and this was at $1/$3 tables!!!)

All Hell broke loose (as did my play) over the weekend. I pissed away my profits from the previous days--and more! One night I played until 2:30 pm the next afternoon. Don't even ask.

In the final trimester of my trip, after the gang had left and I was left entirely to my own devices, I had another massive, sober run. Tight-aggressive. Pot-odds-oriented. Very positional. In short, very by-the-(Sklansky/Harrington)-book.

I was able to end erase the weekend's stupidity and end up +$600, thanks to a $1,000+ run in those past 48-hours, for an insane hourly rate (clearly, I wasn't playing the full 48 hours). Now, I will be the first to admit that there is a big component of luck in the magnitude of the results but not, I feel, in the direction.

In fact, the session that I am most proud of (and, quite possibly a real turning point in my evolution as a player) was proving to be insanely, unapologetically brutal. I was felted twice (a fairly rare occurrence, as I am quite a tight player, and rarely get all-in as the dog), and in rapid succession.

The first occurred when I was dealt pocket kings. I got all-in on a benign flop (no Ace, no made straights or flushes). Perusing these back (electronic) pages, I am starting to fear that I have misplayed cowboys more frequently than any other player in the history of the game. Anyway, when we get all-in on the flop, we show our cards. He has bullets. Needless to say, they hold up.

"That's fine," I say. "Great hand. Heck, I'm just surprised we didn't get all-in before the flop."

I re-buy and a dozen hands later am dealt 10,10. I put in a healthy raise and get 2 pre-flop callers. The board comes 10,6,6--two hearts. I hear Doyle whispering to me "you have the deck crippled--you have to give them a chance to catch up." I check the flop. So do the others. I am praying for a heart or an Ace so that someone possibly chasing gets hit. The turn is a blank. I throw a couple bucks into the pot--simply to build it, not to scare anyone away. Finally, the heart comes on the river. The gent to my right makes a pot-sized bet. My only decision is whether to min-raise or push. I min-raise, figuring that he will have to call--and that the pair on the board will dissuade him from calling an all-in bet (he is a tightish, competent player).

And then I salivate as the gent to my left pushes. The poor sap on my right folds. I snap-call, and am treated to the spirit-crushing sight of my opponent's 6,6. Not even a Badger can sniff out quads! He'd flopped a behemoth to my monster, a King Kong to my sasquatch. And all the while I was slow-playing him, he was slow-playing me.

But this is not a bad-beat story. This is a story of redemption. I sat out two or three hands, and then got right back in there. I won a lot of small pots and a few big ones. And two hours later I finished the session. In the black. I thought (and still do) that it was the most amazing session of poker I've experienced. A few months earlier, I would have gone either full-bore tilt and emptied my pockets or (more likely) stormed away from that table. But I felt it was a table I could beat. And I felt that I had suffered two improbable beats in succession, and that it wasn't poor play.

I felt it was a massive victory to turn around what was one of the harshest sessions in my experience of the game. It has helped me suffer through subsequent bad beats. And it was good for the wallet!

More on Vegas--and my game up here in Canada--to follow soon!