The Sun Setting on an Old Pro
I was playing at the Wynn’s 1/3 No Limit game last Thursday night when an interesting player came into our game.
“Is this seat taken?” A gentleman asked in a Forrest Gump-esque Southern drawl. Curly grey hair, a boyish grin, and a slightly receding hairline, the man peeled off a couple of hundreds from a stack in his pocket. The face looked familiar, but where had I seen it?
Then it hit me. Sam Grizzle! Since I moved to Vegas a few months ago, I had seen Sam in some truly bizarre games; usually lounging around the Bellagio, I’d witnessed him playing games from $15/30 stud heads-up to various Hold’em games of all sorts of different stakes. This was definitely a new one though, as he found himself alongside the degenerates at the lowest limit that the Wynn had to offer. His presence there screamed one word; BUSTO.
Sam has been on television numerous times, getting featured on ESPN for supposedly knocking Phil Hellmuth out in a fight and more recently treating viewers to some old-school stories on NBC’s Poker After Dark. He is also slated to make an appearance on this season’s NBC Heads Up Championship.
To give you an idea of how much gamble Sam has in him, Todd Brunson recently wrote an article in which he recalled Sam coming to the casino with $2 in his pocket, turning it into $160,000, and going broke before he left!
Sam was about what you would expect, playfully giving me some expert commentary on my play on numerous occasions. “You didn’t raise with that hand? Wow. You’re an idiot.”
Sam took a lot of bad beats that night from a lot of “idiots”, and as they began accumulating, you could see the frustration build. After each bad beat, he would methodically bury his face in his large, weathered hands and shake his head from side to side. His eyes would remain closed for half a minute before he took his hands directly from his face to his wad of cash, pulling out a few more hundreds and looking up at the ceiling as if praying for some divine intervention. “All I want to do is get unstuck,” he told me. This coming from a man who had won hundreds of thousands in his life, only to be sitting at a 1/3, stuck four buyins.
I got my bad beat story of the day when I raised 1/4 of Sam’s stack with Aces in the straddle and he ended up cracking me with a 5 9 suited. Sam started to speak, and I just smiled and told him, “I know Sam, I’m a dummy.”
For the most part, though, Sam was definitely on the short end of the luck stick, getting rivered multiple times for his stack. Refusing to quit, Sam kept on rebuying through the night until the sun began to rise. Although he was easily the oldest player at the table, Sam was still chugging along, not showing any signs of fatigue while drinking coffees with splenda and rolling his eyes or muttering at the plays of some of our table-mates.
Sam ended up outlasting me, a 23-year old grinder, when I finally decided to call it quits around 8 am, over 14 hours after I had started playing. Stumbling into the sun-drenched parking lot and trying to remember where I parked my car after digesting 8 rum and cokes and playing all night for a pittance, I realized that maybe Sam was right. I am an idiot.
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But you are an idiot having fun and racking up some sweet stories! I only wish I could have 10 years back to be in your 23 year old shoes living it up in Vegas!