Mad Money
I’m suddenly unemployed again. Part of me feels like I have only myself to blame. Just the other day, I was thinking “awww man, the Patriots’ season opener is on Monday Night! I’m going to be up watching the game and then depending on the outcome I’ll be up tweeting “fuck yous” or “so’s your faces” all night… I so don’t want to go to work on Tuesday!
Welp. Now, I don’t have to.
(Yes, I’ve tried this kind of mind control on the lottery and Zac Efron/Ryan Reynolds…no success.)
Anyway, so back to the tables for Dawn Summers. I haven’t played poker since I last blogged…which for those of you keeping score at home, is STILL more recently than my co-blogger has blogged. Geez, if I’d known he wasn’t going to do it anyway, I would have officially released him from the obligations to blog about my trip to Buffalo and just made him blog about the male Thai prostitute in Indiana…oops, was that private?
I drove down by myself the Friday before labor day weekend. Mary had already been in AC for three days and Alceste and his girlfriend had gone down separately that morning…er…#noporno. Alceste gave me a fake room key, so I was all locked out and trying to convince the Harrah’s front desk that “Alceste could be a girl’s name,” when they repeatedly told me that only Alceste could get a new key. I finally just took Alceste’s key from him with the power of my whining and pouty girl face.
I bought in for a hundo at 1/2 and almost doubled up in the span of three hands. With 99, I raised, got four callers and then when QQT flops, one dude goes all-in for $23 and I call him. I win.
Then, with pocket threes, after everyone checks the J27 flop, I bet out when a second deuce hits on the turn and take it down.
I lost ten bucks taking a stupid flyer with 8s9s (Dawn, you’re not that kind of player.)
Finally, I raised to $11 with AQ and heads up see a flop with AJ5 and my $20 continuation bet sealed the deal.
And there my notes on the evening come to a screeching halt…why? Because I decided to bring a book with me to the poker table. A book by Joan Didion called “The year of magical thinking.” I must have been doing some magical thinking of my own because I don’t know why I would choose a book about a widow recounting the year following her husband’s death and her only child’s hospitalization for my “vacation reading.” It was a quick, heartbreaking read and I was practically in tears at the felt. (There’s no crying in poker, Dawn! Shut up! HE JUST DIED AND THEN SHE COULDN’T GIVE AWAY HIS SHOES AND HER DAUGHTER HAD A BRAIN HEMATOMA! WAAAA!)
Wayans was randomly in AC too and got a seat at my table with Mary; he was trying to talk to me, but I was so verklempt from the book, I knew if I opened my mouth, I was just going to start bawling. Plus, I started losing like nobody’s business. My pocket tens were rundown by pocket nines on a 943 flop which looks totally safe, so you call the offing minraise… then my pocket sevens ran into pocket jacks or aces or something bad and I just wanted to go to the room and cry. Instead, I ordered a glass of white wine and halfway through face planted at the table. Can we just call that “Dawn kryptonite” from now on?
Oh my gosh! I had a hilarious text exchange with Grange at the table. (Backstory: I met Grange in Iowa, almost exactly a year ago today! We had drinks at this bar and at some point, a guy with one leg sat down at the table. A few drinks in, I asked said one-legged guy “Yo, so…what happened to your leg?” Apparently, this was poor form and one is not ask one-legged people what happened to said missing limbs. So, ever since, whenever I have the overwhelming desire to ask some disfigured or missing-limbed person about their deformity, I text Grange to ask for permission.) This particular night, I was sitting next to a dude with like dinosaur scale skin. I texted Grange to find out if a) I could ask if that shit was contagious b) find out what the hell it was or c) snap a picture, so I could twit pic.)
So, the next day…
I was back at the table bright and early. I was playing with men who had been there all night and my stack was by far the smallest…it would only get smaller. I missed a draw to half the deck for $60 and rebought. UGH, then this offing luck box called with a weaker king and spiked the two pair on the turn. I didn’t feel good about calling when he lead out on the turn (I had raised his bet on the flop and he made a fishy face before flicking in a last-minute call.) And I REALLY didn’t feel good about calling his river bet which was annoyingly exactly the amount of a “damn-I-missed-my-draw” bet AND a “what-will-this-idiot-girl-call-with-her-top-pair” bet. #Newark
So, I reached into my pocket and threw another wad of bills at the dealer. She laughed and said “whoa. I guess this is your mad money!”
“Huh?”
“It’s all crinkled and wadded up! Mad money, you know!”
I didn’t know, but I smiled anyway. The universe must have noticed how calm and polite I was to the dealer even though I wanted to smash that idiot guy’s face in, because shortly after I rebought, I got aces.
Now, the night before I got aces, UTG and decided to limp/reraise. Only problem? No one raised after I limped, so when the board came out 567, and a guy bet the pot, I minraised him. He called. I bet $30 on the blank turn and he “thought about it” and called. Eyeroll. He checks to me and I wanted to literally roll my eyes at him and say “bet your own fucking hand.” Instead, I just turned over my cracked aces and he showed the 89. The next morning Mary was all “what were you thinking?” I glared and said “shut up, Mary!” However, I had a huge towel turban on my head, that she had already been laughing her ass off watching Dawn 2 show me how the white girls wrap up their hair, so she just kept laughing. With the sound of her evil, mocking laughter echoing in my head, I did NOT fuck around with my new universe given aces:
“$21″ (I was UTG + 1, so it was $1, $2, $2, $21)
Mary reraises to $66, it folds back to me and I sigh because I assume she has aces too, but I shove my stack across the line. She snap calls and turns over QQ.
I double up. Mad money, indeed. (See what I did there?) I then went on a nice little heater, getting Kings (again raising huge) and a call/fold to my continuation bet. THEN I took down a monster pot when my nut flush got there on the turn but one idiot kept bluffing into me and the other idiot kept calling with his top two “with the Jack of diamonds.” (He kept repeating that he had the jack of diamonds as the dealer kept pushing all the monies to me! Wheeeee!)
Alceste came by and called me “stacks!” Woo. Dawn plays poker good.
The table started to get insane. One dude would do that “raise” and make it four dollars, just to be annoying; then another dude would be all “$6″ just to be MORE annoying. In this fashion, a guy in a fedora hat (who I think was a hit man) won a $700 pot from a guy who was bluffing because he thought Fedora hat was bluffing. But no. Fedora hat had “the nuts. It’s like a sore dick: can’t be beat.”
Awesome.
Then Mary had an ugly ugly set over set when she shoved with a set of nines and got called by a fairly deep guy who had the set of aces. She left and I ended up getting into a verbal fight with the set of aces guy, who thankfully, did not look like a hit man. But, when he threatened to drop trou, it was time for me to rack up and go.
But the poker pro career will continue…
For the record, your question a year ago was, “So how did you lose your leg?” That would have been less rude if asked after you drank your Tangermeister shot.
However, sounds like my Tweet to you about Dinosaur Skin Man was correct:
“Anyway, don’t worry. The odds of you contracting a rare skin disease are roughly the same as you hitting a flush draw.”
So, have you started shopping for your prosthetic nose?
(Made you touch your nose, didn’t I?)
Awesome! Continue the Amusement! Did that guy have psoriasis? I went out with a girl who had that on her elbow. Hey, beggars can’t be choosers! I love how you harass handicapped people. I knew there was a reason I liked you.
Wait a sec, is the moral of this post that you learned to NOT slowplay AA? You just now learned that?!?!?!?
Le Sigh. Le Sigh, indeed….
That was NOT the moral! NOT! The moral was Dawn needs to quit white wine…or that VinNay needs to write about how Dawn OWNS him at poker even on his birthday.