(Editor’s Note: This son of a whore is going live a whole week after the last Poker Report, but it was ready to go the very next day. I figured that perhaps whatever readers I have left after my website went down in July of 2007 [as far as I can figure, there are about no readers left] just needed a break after all of the Poker Report that I posted in the first nine days of June. You're welcome.)

7 September 2007

Heavy Green: By the end of the night, with all of the buy-ins and massive amount of rebuys, we ended up with $1,235 in play. Keep that in mind.

Eleven Burritos: I don’t really eat food. It’s just a lifestyle choice. The closest that I come is on Fridays when I stop by a fast food place and get down on burgers or some such product.

The second closest that I get is when, near my big bro’s house, I stop at the grocery store that has one of those half-assed/semi-tragic delis. The poker game started at 8:00 p.m., and I got to the grocery store at about sevenish, later, I guess than most people get there when they’re looking for food to go. At that point, it turns out, they’re just looking to get rid of whatever’s left.

And that was how I got eleven burritos for $3. At first, I was overjoyed: so much food for so little money. Then, when I got to my big bro’s house, I bit into one of the burritos.

Apparently, when a burrito sits under a heat lamp all day and into the evening, it begins to take on the properties of a small and deadly projectile. The tortilla had lost all of its delicious tortilla-ness and had instead become, tactilely speaking, like a weird combination of good linen paper and very thinly sliced beef jerky. And the filling, supposedly a combination of beans and shredded beef, more closely resembled the remains of the dark-blooded and bloody innards of some strange and frightening beast that had died in the desert and had then been opened up by a stranger and more frightening beast with what I would imagine would have to be its claws.

At the end, it wasn’t so much that I was eating these burritos; it was that I had entered into a joyless battle, and there could only be one victor, and the odds were, at best, fifty-fifty, that I’d win and choke a few of those bastards down.

King Bert: We were five-handed to start, and Bert was killing everybody. In no time, he was up a lot, close to $250. Pretty soon, we’re up to a nine-handed game.

That’s right, nine-handed. The only semi-regular player who was missing was Oscar, but it would have been hard to squeeze him in at a table that’s only really designed for eight players. It sure would have been cool, though.

But even when we went nine, Bert still had his game running. Even though our game had just become the toughest game that we had ever had, Bert didn’t give any of that money back; in fact, he got his total up to $300.50, one of the all-time great totals at our game.

The Night of Excess: Originally, we had said that 2:30 a.m. was the hard end time, but there was so much action and so much money in play, that I knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t end on time, just like it’s hard to leave a party if everybody’s having a great time or if there’s a chance that something truly awful is going to happen; you just don’t want to miss out.

So we ended up playing until three in the morning, although I had said that I was down to play much later. Even though I had to work the next day, I would have been willing to caffeine out and go to work without sleeping. I figure that the irresponsibility of playing all night when I had to work early the next morning would be balanced out by my being responsible enough to at least try to get to work.

I’m Like a Bank: On a night with so much action and with a couple of big winners, it’s relatively easy to burn through your first buy in. And you may not have brought enough green with which to reload at a reasonable level.

That’s where I come in. I keep a lot of cash on me at all times, the theory being that you just never know when a poker game might break out, which is the same reason that I used to drive around with a case of poker chips in the trunk of my car. Another reason to maintain instantly available liquidity is that you might also have to run from the man.

So I kicked down $100 to one player to start because he didn’t have a chance to get to a bank. I loaned $40 to one player when he was nearly down to felt, and $40 to another for the same reason. But one player, who shall remain nameless because there’s a good-to-great chance that he’d be pulling months of Couch Time™ if he were ever found out, ended up borrowing exactly $180. Counting the money with which he arrived, he must have lost close to $300.

Forget Couch Time™; he probably would have been pulling Garage Floor Duty™.

Oh yeah, counting my own $100 buy in, $460 of the $1,235 in play had come from me.

We All Know What Ice Is: I look down at A-10. I make it $5 to run and Ice calls. The flop, thank Christ, is A-10-Q, with the first two cards being spades. Now, unless Ice had A-Q or played K-J, I’m golden. He may have slow-played wired queens, but, as he would have wanted to give them some pre-flop protection, that’s unlikely.

I lead out with the $5, Ice calls, and the turn is a blank. The river is a king and Ice now decides to lead out. Since he knows that there’s no way that I can fold because of the money already in the pot, I know that he doesn’t care if I call or not, which means that he’s not on a bluff.

I know that he’s hit a straight with that rivered bullshit king, but there was $35 in the pot, and I have to see his cards. I expect A-J, which is the only even barely sensible hand that he could have had.

Instead, he turns over J-7 of hearts. He had flopped a four outer for a straight. And he has to be concerned that the king of spades might not help him because that king will make a flush a good possibility; realistically, then, he has to put himself on a three-outer, which makes him roughly 14% to catch by the river: a 7-1 shot for which he isn’t getting anywhere near the right price after the flop.

It was a completely ridiculous call, but it was the beginning of his comeback, and Ice ended up making $80 for the night.

The Fourth Row of Green: After all of the huge pots and the brutal beats and the movement of chips toward the few players who were consistently winning and the re-buys of those who were consistently or sporadically losing, the entirety of the three rows of green $5 chips were gone (which, there being fifty chips in each row, means that there was $750 just in green chips in play), as were most of the $1 chips.

I had to go to one of the backup cases (between my brother and me, we have six cases of poker chips) for a new row of green chips: The Fourth Row™. Which means that we can now have $1,000 in play in just green chips.

Which must have been nice for the backup case because this case had hardly even been opened since its purchase because the green chips were brand new and the case nearly so.

That was when I made a wildly vulgar joke. I apologize in advance, especially to those of delicate constitutions. I said, heaven forgive me, “This case is so new that I’m going to take it to the back yard and €‡$% it.” (Yes, I realize that I just chickened out back there, but I couldn’t go through with actually typing that word into that sentence; I’m not proud, but the joke’s still pretty clear.)

I then rubbed one of the new green chips on all of the players or told them to touch it, but not in an erotic manner; just because the chip still had a slightly rough surface, unlike the rubbed-smooth surface of the chips that had been in play for nearly thirty-three months.

The Wasp: I’m trying to figure out if I should call a bet from Bert when Arizona dropped a hot simile into the action. I had just made one of my stock comments, that I couldn’t tell if I were “the spider or the fly,” when Arizona said that I was “like a wasp at a barbecue."

I wasn’t sure what he meant then, and I’m still not sure what he meant now, but he had been trying to riff off of my spider/fly bit, and he had used figurative language to do it. I stopped my deliberations to note, “as a poet,” the beauty of Arizona’s simile. I also applauded.

Also Deserving of Some Applause: Was the fact that at this knife-fight of a game, a game to which all the heavy hitters came, a game in which we got over $1,200 into action, a game in which it was quite possible to lose quite a bit of money, I managed to make $88 straight. I moved the YTD up to +$325.75 and the overall to 21-17.


14 September 2007

(Editor’s Note, 9 June 2008: Okay, this next section’s going to be a bit thin. Apparently, I didn’t take very many post-game notes and/or get much into the computer from those notes.)

Streets and Real: Are my new nicknames for some of the players, mostly Jesse and Arizona.

I like Streets just because it sounds street, and, while most of us may have come up the hard way—poor, and such—none of us are or were ever actually street.

Don’t get me wrong: I got into a few punch-ups when I was a kid, though my overall record wasn’t that solid. The worst defeat was when I fought Paul Baze in sixth grade while defending the honor of my good buddy, Kenny Gonzales. We walked down to the river, a great location for a fight because there’re no adults around and you get a lovely view of the trees and the grass and the river and the sky, and Paul proceeded to beat my ass.

I had thought that this was going to be a typical sixth-grade fight: we’d grab each other, roll around for a little bit, and then it would somehow just be over. But Paul immediately got into a boxer’s stance and shortly thereafter gave me a bloody nose.

It was all downhill from there, but, thankfully, Paul let me live.

(And, strange and lovely world that we live in, Paul and I eventually became friends.)

And I like Real because, as far as I know, I’m the only person in the world that’s currently using Real as a noun and not as an adjective.

But I kept switching them. First, Arizona would be Streets and then Jesse would be Streets. There wasn’t a reason for my switching the names back and forth; I just sort of trusted the flow and went by what I felt at the time.

But I guess that people quickly take ownership of their nicknames because Jesse said, after having gone from Real to Streets and back again, “I thought that I was Streets.”

The human heart is a mystery, as all of us who have had it stomped know, so to expect me to not switch nicknames as my heart commands would be to deny that which fundamentally makes us human.

So I kept switching nicknames.

Quality Versus Price: Last week, I got eleven burritos for $3, but they were nasty: they were more like sculptures than food. Or door stops. This week, they were $1 each, and they were much better.
In fact, they were so good that I probably would have paid more per burrito. But how much more?

So now we have a classic economic dilemma: figuring out the price point that will both maximize profit for the grocery store and still make it feel like I’m not getting shafted as I pay.

I think that I’d happily go as high as $1.50, go grudgingly to $1.75, but that’d be it. It seems, then, that The Ranchos Market is leaving money on the table every time that I go in there.

Speaking of Money: I made $66.75, moved the YTD to +$392.50, but the overall—22-17—still isn't looking very impressive.

(Editor’s Note, 18 June 2008: Okay, this is embarrassing. It turns out that I did have more notes than just the ones that I had used to write the above section of the September 2007 Poker Report.

Apparently, I just never got to rough drafting from the second half of the first page of notes or at all from the second and third pages of notes, even though I had fully intended to draft from them at some point. Those pages sat on a shelf at the factory from 14 September 2007 all the way through the first part of June of 2008, and some point never came. Then I took those notes to my place and taped them to a wall in front of my letter desk, thinking that they were notes for one of the October 2007 games.

At some point, I must have drafted from the first page of notes, gotten busy with the million things to do on the factory floor, and never finished drafting. Then I put the notes away. As the factory was closing up for the summer, I e-mailed whatever drafts I had completed to my editor’s place [since I’m my own editor, that would be my place] and took the rest of the notes home, thinking that I’d work on them in the following weeks.

When I saw how little that I had written for the 14 September 2007 section, I had just assumed that I had done a lousy job of taking notes at the conclusion of that night’s game. I felt bad, but there was nothing to do except finish a final draft of the September 2007 Poker Report and move on.

But I've been at the nine-week summer place for two weeks, writing like mad, and, about a week ago, I was ready to start final drafting the October 2007 Poker Report when I realized that, like a nitwit, I had left some October 2007 notes taped to the wall at my other place.

To the other place I drive this past Sunday, retrieve those notes, tape them to the wall here at my summer place this past Monday, and, just a few minutes ago, realize that those supposed October notes are actually the missing 14 September 2007 notes.

[I don’t know, was the above at all interesting? I thought that it was important to record what had happened, and it was sure fun to write. I really like writing.]

So, below, you will find the missing sections of what should originally have been in the September 2007 Poker Report.)

(Editor’s Note on the 18 June 2008 Editor’s Note, 26 June 2008: Okay, I wrote the above explanation, thinking that I’d have that revised section up in no time, but then I finished writing and revising a six-thousand-word story [which is either a rather brilliant game changer {in terms of the world of contemporary fiction} or an incredibly serious misfire; time will tell], took a three-day trip to Santa Barbara [which was pretty nice, except for the sunburn], and just this afternoon finished a quite thorough revision (essentially, a rewrite) of a nearly twelve-thousand-word story that I had thought was finished [and pretty damned good, if I may be the one to say]. but that, upon further review, was just this side of embarrassing in general and mean-spirited to one character in particular.

But, like I said, those stories are done, and I’m going to dedicate the next couple of days to fixing the September 2007 Poker Report and to finishing the October 2007 Poker Report.)


The 14 September 2007 Poker Report Addendum:

It Was a Delight: Bert’s special lady makes some great chicken salad, which completely outclassed my burritos. The salad was rich, thanks to that miracle product—mayonnaise (for laughs, do a search on mayo sticks on my website for a truly avant-garde recipe of my own invention)—and so flavorful, thanks to the lovely chicken pieces and the vegetables (most of which, thanks to my general vegetable aversion [part of my general aversion to sensible living], I failed to recognize. I’d say onion, probably, but there was other stuff in there).

I would have eaten that salad of off of the poker table or out of a cut-open Pepsi can, it was so good.

But not only was there chicken salad, there was also Wonder Bread. I’m not going to lie, I was excited by the bread, too. I grew up poor, and we didn’t eat the deluxe bread. We got the generic store brand: Sunnyside. I’m not going to make fun of that bread, because I ate it for most of my young life, but it certainly wasn’t one of your finer grocery-stocked breads.

So now I've got this tasty-ass chicken salad and this deluxe bread in front of me. I’m about as far as you can be from believing in a soul, but there was something in me that was deeply moved by what was about to go down between me and the chicken salad and the bread.

KayJay: After last week’s $1,235 buy-in total for nine players, there was bound to be a slow down because some people had gotten brutalized and they may have wanted to take a break, but it looked for a while like the slowdown was going to be so big that we might be shorthanded.

Then KayJay showed up. In general, he’s a pain, entirely, but he’s much, much worse at a poker table.

(Editor’s Note: How much of a pain is KayJay? A few days ago, I got a congratulatory e-mail for how well I had put up with him at last week’s game.)

True to his nature, he was in full and glorious KayJay mode, and, as the official game runner and as a person who just can’t stand discourtesy, I wanted to tell him some stuff in a pointed and condemnatory manner. But I kept hearing the voice of Bert, who a while ago told me that I needed to chill out in my interactions with KayJay, so chill out I did.

But there’s only so much that I can let slide. Almost immediately, KayJay called one of the most respected players at our game a bitch, and I had to tell him to be cool. After a while, he did calm down, probably due to the fact that, after another annoying KayJay comment, I turned to Jesse and said that I didn’t see how he could put up with KayJay at their work.

When’s the Divorce?: Like I said, KayJay had made his presence felt last week and again tonight. Last week was the first time that we had seen him in months, but then he plays two in a row?

That’s usually a sign. A sign of what? Lady trouble, my man, lady trouble. That was when I said, “When’s the divorce?” All of a sudden, it’s possible to get out of the house when for years you spent your days and night handcuffed to a wall? Never a good sign.

And then Jesse told us about a great human tragedy that I can’t believe that he survived. His special lady had erased his World Series of Poker Omaha episodes from the TiVo. Jesse is an Omaha master, and part of that probably has to do with his careful study of those TiVoed episodes.

After the shock had worn off, I joked that his special lady had held them hostage in order to get Jesse to do some work around the house. Mow the lawn, or those shows are gone.

I guess that he didn’t mow the lawn.

(Editor’s Note, 27 June 2008: And that, faithful readers, is what the above two Editor’s Notes set up. Was it worth it? I don’t know. Probably not. The problem is that my head is full of language, and that I’m also a bit of a completist.)

21 September 2007

New Blood: On Wednesday, while we were celebrating a special day with a Shanghai Restaurant meal, my big bro jokingly said that we should start a list of all of the people who have played in our game once, and then never came back. He also said that we should put that list up on one of the walls of the Winter Poker Room. We started naming players, and, pretty soon, we had a pretty long list. Using all of my poetic powers, I said that we should call that mounted list The Wall of the Dead.

You can’t really blame anyone for not coming back after having lost more than they had intended to. My sense is that what keeps these players away isn’t the money so much as it is the fact that they were probably outplayed again and again and felt as if they were in over their heads, which can indeed be a horrible feeling.

As I ruminated upon that last observation while getting down on my Mongolian beef, I also said that we could measure the character of a player by whether he came back after taking an epic beatdown at his first game with us.

Jesse dropped heavy green the first few times that he played, and now he scares the hell out of me. Oscar didn’t make a dime for a good while, but he makes money now nearly every time that he plays; I joked at the table that he only comes to play now when he has bills to pay because he knows that he can take our money. Arizona burned through his money for a while when he first started playing with us, and he had been a college student at the time, which is just hardcore. Most hardcore of all, Ice dropped a huge chunk of money (I won’t say how much, but it was an amount rarely approached at our game) the first time that he played, and I was convinced that we’d never see him again.

He’s been there almost every Friday since.

And now Ice may have found us a new player for our game. Ice has mentioned our game to one of his buddies on a number of occasions, and that buddy wants to get in on the action.

After some less-than-positive developments at our game, we’re taking new players on a one-game trial basis. If they don’t work out, they’re gone. The only way that a jerk will last at our game anymore is if he is so good a poker player that his skills compensate for his being a jerk because it’s hard to boot a solid player. Ideally, he’ll be both classy and a great player.

Small World: I used to work with a guy who bailed on the factory at the last minute, right before the start of the busy season. He was the assistant foreman, so his leaving was especially dirty. So we had to replace him, and if you’re looking for assistant foreman work at this time of the year, it’s probably a safe bet that you weren’t in much demand.

Needless to say, this former assistant foreman is not very popular around here.

In our poker game, we have players who rep from many different corporations, and our former assistant foreman went to work for one of those corporations. Sure enough, he’s met one of my poker buddies, and he’s now gotten an invite to our game, but not from me.

When I mentioned this fact to some of the workers at the factory, their faces clouded over with resentment. I was told to say “hi” to this former assistant foreman, but to also say that they were still angry with him.

I was all set to communicate exactly that, but he never showed at the game. Maybe next time.

Twenty-five Percent: I was in choir back in eighth grade. An alto, and I had an okay voice. But it was okay only for a while. Then it changed and left me stranded between being an alto and being a tenor, the next lower classification of singer.

I won’t lie, it was tragic.

(Editor’s Note: Yes, I know that I tend to use variations of the word tragic a lot. There’s a good explanation: everything’s tragic. Even the stuff that you think isn’t is because it eventually ends. Everything, then, defaults to tragedy. I’m just saying.)

(Editor’s Note on the Above Editor’s Note: And I just came up with a great title for a book: Defaulting to Tragedy.)

And I was only really in choir because I had signed up for the class under the assumption that a girl on whom I had had a crush the previous year, a girl who had been in choir during our seventh-grade year, would also be in the class. I figured that I would have the whole year to impress her with either my comedic stylings or with what I assumed would be my angelic singing voice.

But then she didn’t sign up. In fact, she sort of disappeared from school. So there I was, trapped in choir. And then my voice changed.

Hey, who cares? I certainly didn’t. I hit whatever notes that I could and didn’t worry too much about how I was probably ruining our overall sound. Our choir teacher, however, was not of the same mind.

She wanted me to not sound so awful, and she thought that the best way to do this was for me to come in for more practice. When would this practice occur? During P.E.

If you want to lose a good chunk of your cred, get pulled out of P.E. for choir practice. If you want to lose all of it, have your P.E. coach say, during roll call, “De Luna, go to Ms. Cousins for your choir practice.” It’s a miracle that I wasn’t beaten to death on the spot.

There I’d be, in my P.E. clothes, standing in front of Ms. Cousins, doing the little vocal exercises that would theoretically get me down to a tenor, and all that I could think about was the fact that I was missing the football game. Which is another way of saying that the extra lessons never made me better and that, if my voice did improve (and it probably didn’t), it had more to do with the passage of time than anything else. Also, it was very hard to concentrate because Ms. Cousins was incredibly hot and would stand right in front of me as I did my exercises. I could have caught on fire, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

Which is how I segue into tonight’s game. Jesse was playing one of his mix CDs, a hair metal/hard rock CD, when a particularly rocking song comes on. One key ingredient to a rocking song is a great chorus, and this chorus was awesome, as we used to say back in the '80’s, and I was so moved by it that I sang along unashamedly.

Afterward, I said, “Hey, that wasn’t too bad. I hit at least a quarter of those notes.”

I’m Classy That Way: I've been buying fried burritos for the guys lately, but those bastards are $1 each. I decided this week to game the grocery store and buy frozen burritos instead. $4 for a pack of ten of those mothers.

That’s still a huge markup because Arizona, who used to be in the grocery biz, informed me that stores pay about $1.80 per bag. Think about it: deep-fry them and they become worth $10 a bag. I think that I should probably go into the fried burrito business, because there’s a ton of money to be made.

That business endeavor will have to wait for later, however. No fried burritos tonight.

I was getting down on some burritos when the players started arriving. I was eating said burritos with a knife and fork because I hate eating with my hands like, as I said at the game, "a commoner." Jesse, street that he is, made fun of me, as was his right and duty, but I told him that I knife and fork nearly all of my meals: pizza, hamburgers, Cheetos, M&M’s, etcetera.

Also in Relation to Business: I’ve managed to make a profit for the fourth week in a row, which is as close to a miracle as this skeptic is likely to get. True, it was only $37.00 that I made, but I moved the YTD to +$429.50 and got the won-loss to 23-17.


September 28 2007

Spit Take: I try my hardest to entertain my homies at our poker game through comedic bits. It’s all part of being a good host, that along with providing the snacks and the drinks.

But comedy’s hit or miss. In baseball, if you hit a little less that one in three, you’re a star. Philip Levine, master teacher and brilliant poet, once told us in a workshop that if one in ten of your poems was any good, then you’d be fine.

What does all of that mean? That most of the time we fail, but that we’ve got to keep swinging away. To that end, I tell a billion stupid jokes a night when we play poker. With five or six different players besides me, someone is bound to think that something I said was at least a little bit funny.

And I’m willing to define funny broadly. If you barely smile, I count that as a victory. If there’s even acknowledgment on your face that a bit has been heard, I win. You don’t have to fall out of a chair for me to feel like I’m being funny. Probably, if you don’t fling your own chair at me (which is like booing, but with furniture and pain), I’ll take that as a compliment.

(One of the comedy highlights of my life didn’t even involve a laugh. A buddy of mine was driving me, a female television writer in whom he was “interested,” and himself around the Wisconsin countryside, and I was in the backseat, trying my hardest to make her laugh. I was 0-for-100 when, desperate, I made some small, funny observation.

She whipped her head around from the front seat, squinted, eyed me appraisingly, and then gave a quick head nod as she said, “That was funny” before turning back around to look at the lovely countryside through which we were driving.

She’s a pro in the biz, so, much like I can read a devastating line of poetry or look at a particularly sad picture and still keep the critical distance necessary to judge it as a construction [“That’s one of the most tragic lines that I've ever read,” I’ll say as I admiringly sip coffee.], she didn’t laugh. Still, her words, her beloved and moving words, were enough.)

A Segue: Arizona just got out of college, where one typically finds college girls. Thank God for college girls. College is a time of experimentation and abandon, generally, and of the louche and lush and debauched life particularly. Thank God for college.

So, who knows what Arizona may have picked along the way as he indulged in the indulgences in which one may indulge in one’s indulgent youth?

Normally, who cares? That’s between him and his god, and maybe between him and his health care provider.

We ended up having to care, though, when Arizona spit all over some of us.

And We’re Back: What’s with the spitting? you may be wondering. I had made some small joke that was a bit on the suggestive side. It was subtle and funny mostly by implication. Not obvious, but solid.

And here comes the flood. Arizona had taken a pull of his water just as I told the joke, and he proceeded to immediately spit it in my direction as he started to laugh. Thankfully the table and some chips and the cards took the brunt, but I got hit, as did Jesse, as did Jesse’s can of Diet Pepsi.

We had to take a time out in order to pat-dry the poker table, wipe down the cards, and for Jesse and me (but mostly for Jesse) to dry ourselves off. I held up my freshly sprayed hands, surgeon-style, and stood up as I said, “Bio-hazard. Coming through.” I then noticed Jesse’s Diet Pepsi, and I asked him if he wanted me to throw it out. He said yes, so I grabbed it on my way to the kitchen.

Arizona then said that we were acting like he was going to kill us with his expectoration.

So I then said, “Dude, you just got out of college. There’s no telling what kind of nasty stuff you’ve been involved in,” which, if you think about it, is a pretty nice compliment.

But not as nice as the one that he had given me.

I have made people bend over backward in their chairs with laughter. I have made people double over with laughter. Hell, I've even made people cry. But I’d never gotten the classic spit take. It may have been the greatest compliment that anyone has ever paid me.

What Do I Know?: We’re listening to the “Classic Rock,” as one is wont to do at a poker game among manly men, when Kansas’s “Carry On, My Wayward Son,” starts playing.

That’s when, moved by inspiration, I say, “Little known fact: Kansas is actually from Alabama.” And then, to work the bit, I said, “And Alabama is actually from Missouri.” That got some laughs, but only because the guys thought that I was serious and was just offering a funny curious fact.

That’s when I told them that I had made the whole thing up.

One Thing That I Know to Be True: Rush sucks. When one of Rush’s songs started to play, I went into an invective-laced attack. Ice jumped right in with some powerful and profane observations of his own. Geddy Lee has got to be kidding. If America ever needs a reason to invade Canada, the fact that it's the birthplace of Rush is enough. How can you be that awful and not know?

It Was a Bloodbath: Well, the winning streak was bound to end, and it did so, in spectacular fashion. I dropped $175.75, which is my biggest loss for the year. I also boned the YTD down to +$253.75 and the overall also took a boning, arriving at 23-18.

I had been close to even for most of the night, but then I was nearly done with my First Hundred™. I bought the Second Hundred™, hoping that I could use it to start some type of comeback.

I was about ten minutes from having to leave when I flopped two pair in a game of Omaha High-Low, $20 each went in on that round. I made a full house on the turn, and much money got in then, too. On the river my boat got counterfeited by a Jesse’s better boat, and I lost over $35 on that hand. Needless to say, I nearly burned through the entirety of the Second Hundred™ in almost no time at all.

And then, in the last few minutes before my departure time, I finally flopped a dead solid hand that couldn’t be put in any jeopardy by what fell on the turn or the river. I had flopped a set and then turned a boat, but I didn’t get much action and didn’t make much money. That was my night.

It’s Embarrassing: After having three solid, if not exactly spectacular, games, I gave away nearly all of the money that I had made in September. I did manage to make $16 straight for the month, but anybody can make that on one medium-sized hand.

Goddamn it.

(Editor’s Note, 16 June 2008: This Poker Report's title comes from Gillian Welch's song, Revelator. [I'm going to link to the video, but I should warn you that a poor lens choice was made and everything looks unpleasantly distorted.] Ms. Welch has a lovely voice and the lyrics are pretty incredible, even though it took me forever to figure out what a katy is.

Think I’ll go back to Cali where I can sleep out every night
And watch the waves and move the faders

I'm not sure what she means by faders, but it sounds so beautiful that I don't care.)