LUCK DON'T HURT

sometimes it helps to get a little lucky in poker: i raised from late position with AQ suited and am called in two places, bb and one other. flop comes A 4 5 with two diamonds which is not my suit. bb, who i know to be a very good player, bets 20 dollars into me, other guy folds and i raise to 40 dollars. bb says, "do you have a set of aces?", not really expecting me to answer, more just thinking out loud and calls. hmmmm. damn. what does he have? AK? a set of 4's, a set of 5's, a straight??? the last of which is unlikely since he would have had to called with 2-3 but... the turn is the Ace of diamonds putting a pair on board and the diamond flush possibility. bb checks and i check. the last card is the 5c double pairing the board and giving me a full house. BB shows his set of 4's before i can bet and throws them away. he was full on turn but failed to bet, hoping to trap me as he told me later but i didn't go for it. i figured, correctly as it turns out, that i was beat at that time. (granted, he could have had something like ace jack or even a pair of kings or queens and had bet just to see if i did indeed have the ace and took off a card to see if he hits his big pair but in my mind that was unlikely.) the 5 gave me a bigger FH. i knew when he called the raise on the flop that i was beat. he asked me later if i would have laid it down when the second ace came and i assured him that i would have because i knew him to be a good player and not a fool, if he had pushed instead of trying to trap the pot would have been his. thank you, poker gods.

incidentally i have made 1095 dollars in the first 5 days of play this year. nice start, now let's see if i can continue to play at my top level.

one of the things that i am attracted to in poker is that the game lends itself to constant evaluation and, like baseball, you can talk about at great length, there are so many variables and possibilities and different ways to play certain hands that you can analyze to your heart's content. being a talker and thinker and analyzer it is right up my alley.

one of the mistakes, in my mind, that las vegas has made over the past decade is the change from coin machines to paper machines in the slots. on top of that, the strip casinos have cut their payouts way back. greedy corporate bastards. now, though, this has come back to bite them in the ass. slot play is waaaay down and that means a smaller bottom line for the casinos. by cutting out coins they were able to get rid of x amount of employees but what has happened is that people walking through the casino will not put a couple of quarters in a machine because a. they aren't going to win and b. if they do win, say a dollar, they have to take a piece of paper and put it in another machine to get that dollar. too much trouble, they save their quarters and the casino loses. greedy but stupid corporate bastards. in a way, vegas was more fun when the mob ran it. oh, you would get cheated here and there but the slots were loose and you were treated with a certain amount of respect and pizzaz.

saw in paper today that a isreali investment company plans on building the world's largest hotel here. as if we didn't have enough hotel rooms as it is. another one of our problems is that vegas has overbuilt, there are already too many rooms for rent here. greed got 'em here. same as in the country as a whole. greed. thinking home values would go up 20 percent per year forever. what a crock of you know what.

oh well, gotta go.
rock and roll

peace to all of us.