Kinder, Louisiana Dreamin’
When you travel the world playing poker tournaments, sometimes you find yourself in cool places like Dublin, London, or on a Mediterranean cruise ship. Other times, you find yourself in places like Biloxi, Mississippi; Tulsa, Oklahoma; or Kinder, Louisiana. I spent part of this past weekend at the latter location, a puny town in a god-forsaken part of a god-forsaken state. To win money playing live tournaments, you have to be willing to go places that no one else wants to go. What poker player would say no to heading to Monte Carlo or the Bahamas for a tournament? No one. But Kinder, Louisiana? That’s where you get a lot of people to have second thoughts. In general, the fewer out-of-towners there are in a tournament, the softer the competition.
With that in mind, I made the three hour drive from Houston to Kinder last weekend for Coushatta Casino and Resort’s “7 Clans Poker Tournament”. The Main Event? A $1k buy-in scheduled to span over the course of three days. “Just please let me bust out right away or win the whole damn thing,” I said to myself on the draining drive over.
The competition was about what I was expecting: absolutely awful. Let me illustrate just how awful I mean. During 400/800, I raised Jack-Jack under-the-gun to 2,200. Five players called to see a flop of King-Jack-Ten. After it checked to me, I bet 4,100. It folded around to the big blind who popped it to 15,000. “Great,” I thought to myself, “he probably has Ace-Queen here but even if there’s the slightest chance he doesn’t, I can never fold.” I re-raised enough to put him all-in and he called off his remaining 30,000 fairly quickly with King-Ten. If you examine the line he took in that hand, you can see what I mean when I say the competition is just awful.
I made day two with 135,000 from a starting stack of 20,000. Sixty of the original 196 players returned with an average stack of 65,000. I was definitely sitting pretty heading into day two, but I was also primed quite nicely to face the worst possible outcome from my perspective: a day two washout. Since just 20 players would make the money, I knew there was a lot of work left to be done before I’d be willing to admit that I was glad I came on this trip.
I had a couple of interesting encounters with the tournament staff. One dealer said “not really” when asked if she wanted to count down a player’s stack after he doubled-up on an all-in. I told her, “it’s your job.” She again said, “not really.” So I said, “is that a fact? Maybe we should call your boss over here to see if he thinks it’s your job.”
Later, I had a dispute with the aforementioned “boss”. When we bagged up our chips for day two, the tournament staff put the chips in the bag, wrote the seat and table number for day two on the bag, and asked us to sign our name on the bag. Then, they gave us a placard with our day two table draw on it and told us, “don’t lose this, it’s the only way you can play tomorrow.” I was horrified at how disorganized and exploitable this set-up was. At the WSOP, you fill out a triplicate paper with your name, hometown, chip count, day two table draw, and signature. One copy of this goes directly into your sealed bag of chips. Another copy is retained for your records while the third copy is given to the dealer who I’m sure passes it along to the floor staff. So when you show up on day two of a WSOP event, you have a piece of paper that matches the piece of paper in the bag of chips you are alleging are yours. And in case you are not who you say you are, the dealer verifies your ID to make sure your name matches up with the name inside the bag of chips.
That system is basically fool-proof. By comparison, Coushatta’s system was a train-wreck. When I pointed out to the tournament director the flaws in their system, that, “all it takes is someone dropping their placard on the floor and anyone can show up to play for them tomorrow,” and how, “this opens the door to cheating and collusion since weaker players could hand their placard to their savvy friend to handle day two for them,” her reply was, “oh, well just keep the placard in your pocket so you don’t lose it.”
Thanks for the tip, lady.
I took my seat on day two to find one of the few players in the entire tournament with more chips than myself, who was also one of the few “good” players left in the tournament, a young guy with 190k, sitting across from me. As he stacked his chips, he told one of his neighbors that he’ll, “probably blow up the whole stack within 15 minutes.” That comment was something I replayed in my head when faced with a tough decision on just the second hand of the day.
The young guy raised to 5,600 from middle position during 1,200/2,400. I called with Ace-Eight of hearts on the button and the big blind came along as well. The flop was Eight-Deuce-Deuce. Action checked to me and I bet 9,000. The big blind got out of the way. The young guy check-raised to 22,000. My initial thought was that he probably figured that board couldn’t have really hit me in any way and that I was just betting to try to take down the pot. But since I actually had something, I called. The turn was another Deuce. He led out for 28,000. I called. The river was harmless, a Six, which prompted him to bet 48,000. This brought me some pause, but I kept thinking of his speech from a few minutes ago about how he might blow up his whole stack in the first 15 minutes. I knew I was beating any bluff and based on his line, I figured a bluff was likely enough that I just didn’t see how I could fold. I called, he showed Aces, and like that 2/3rds of my stack was gone. To his credit, he played the hand masterfully and won the stone cold maximum off of me.
After an hour of being card dead, I re-raised all-in with Ace-King suited and was called by pocket Kings. Three minutes later, I was on the road back to Houston.
In poker, sometimes you’re winning six figures on a cruise ship while watching the sun set over the distant Turkish coast. Other times, you’re spending two nights in Louisiana only to wash out of a poker tournament held in a location so dreadful that you drove 45 minutes to the nearest “major” city each evening just so you could eat at a Chili’s and pick up a few things from a Wal-Mart.
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