A Good Night at The Bike

Posted by amarillosb

August 25, 2009

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Two of my San Diego poker buddies and I had a great night up at the Bicycle Casino in LA this week. My friend, Jake (who goes by chilidog on 2+2), finished 5th in the Legends of Poker plo tournament while Chris and I ran over the cash games. We were playing 1/3 NL Omaha High only with a $80 buy in, which went up by $40 every time you rebought. This is a very strange game to find in a casino, which meant that few of the people at the table knew how to play it well. I invested that initial $80 in the game and left with $1480.

Chris and I won all our chips from the seat 1, who has his hand on his head in the photo. Seat 1 won all the chips that he later gave to us from the guy with his hands covering his face. Those two got it all in at least six times. Seat 1 was the best kind of maniac, and most of the time he got all his money in dark. Not surprisingly seat 1 was behind in all of these face offs, but he somehow managed to suck out and win every single one against hands-covering-face guy. This made Chris and me very happy because the more money Seat 1 had, the more money we would eventually be getting. In one of these blind face offs, they had all their money in and Seat 1 revealed 2227 in his hand. Then, we all cringed in disbelief as the dealer flashed a deuce in the window! In another hand, Seat 1 got it all in with 3489 rainbow (after looking, lol) and the flop came 343. Of course the guy with his hands on his face had big aces that time. Chris took the photo of them right after that hand happened. Isn’t body language fascinating?

The table was so crazy that people were standing around watching our game, we had to call the floor over to get more all-in buttons, and there was constantly a chip runner exchanging racks of 1s that started taking over the table for 100s. Dealers were talking to other tables about how insane our game was, which made the action junkies at other tables fill the empty seats in our game, even though most of them had never played Omaha before. Some people just love action, I guess. It was really a perfect storm sent from the Omaha Gods. I just kept wishing I cold somehow triple the stakes of the game. My husband and I have been trying to start a family for over a year now, and at one point I thought to myself, “That pot was huge! I can buy like 4 viles of follistim with that!” I bet I am the only poker player in the world who calculates pots in terms of fertility med costs.

I had a fan club of old Asian men standing behind me saying things like, “She super conservative, but she good!” One guy asked me, “Want to be my daughter?” Another didn’t understand him because of his thick accent and because he didn’t speak English all that well himself, and he said, “Ha! He wants you to be his doctor! I need doctor too!” Then he urgently shook my shoulders and said, “Doctor, I have empty pockets, please help!”

Jake came over to play after busting out of the tournament and quadrupled up in the first twenty minutes he was at the table. We had such a great time. It was one of the craziest/most fun nights of poker I have ever had in my life. I left at 5 a.m. so that I would miss LA rush hour traffic on my drive back to San Diego, and I am still wondering how much I could have won if I stayed longer. Before this week, games that good only existed in my fantasies.

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