Seattle Bound

Last night was a lot of fun. Carl got knocked out of the tournament shortly after I posted and we felt like drinking and playing like maniacs so we all got seated in a $2/4 game. Two hands from the tourney: Blinds are 100/200 and Carl opens to 600ish in middle position with AA and gets 2 callers, including the BB. The flop is 8s5s4h and Carl bets about 2000. The late position callers fold but the BB check-raises all-in for about 11K more. Carl mentioned that the guy almost folded to the preflop raise but reluctantly called so he was afraid that the guy might have 2-pair with 85, 45 or something. There's no way he had a set because any smallish pair would be an auto-call from the BB. Ultimately he decided that it was too likely that the BB had some kind of draw and was semi-bluffing. People love shoving in all their chips with flush draws. He makes the call and the BB had 6c3c for an open-ended straight draw and a 7 on the turn sends the 32K chip pot to the BB. Carl still has 8K but 40K at this point would be huge. A few orbits later, Carl has about 15K in chips when he makes a good play but picks the wrong guy to do it against. With 150/300 blinds, the villain in the above hand raises to 1000 in middle position. He has raised a lot of pots and has raised every single time that Carl has had the Big Blind. Carl has picked up a little tell on him and can tell that he isn't very strong here. The small blind calls the raise and with about 2500 in the pot Carl tries a squeeze play with 9c5c, re-raising to 4500 total, thinking that the original raiser and SB will fold. Well, the SB calls the extra 3500 pretty quickly and the SB folds. The flop comes down QJ4 with 2 clubs and Carl pushes all in, with 10K chips amounting to about a pot sized bet. The villain calls instantly with JTo and Carl can't hit his flush. Booooooooo.

At the $2/4, I lock up the leftmost seat so that I have position on Carl but he somehow maneuvers to my left when I go to get chips. Justin gets a seat directly to our left and Pauly takes a break from his crazy schedule to join us for a little while. We were raising any and all hands and ramming and jamming all flops. One old guy accused us of colluding and was clearly pissed off. I don't understand why people get so mad when we try to hand them our money. If we were going to collude, do you think we'd do it at a $2/4 game or do it so blatantly? And would we be ordering cocktails every 4 minutes and pounding them like our lives depended on it? I really wish everyone understood what was going on and could just enjoy taking our money. The only problem is that they are so bad we still always win money while playing like absolute morons. Pauly had some bad beats, like when his 27o rivered trip 2s only to lose to Justin's QQ which made a full house. I'm not sure why Justin was playing those premium cards but we all booed him for his efforts. After Pauly left we terrorized the table for a while before noticing an insanely hot girl sitting at the table next to us. I get up sneakily and ask for a table change to her table. Finally a seat opens up directly on her left and I move my mountain of chips over to her table. I post the big blind under-the-gun and raise blind with what turns out to be 64o. The flop is 667 and a 4 on the turn completes my full house. I cap it on every street but the river with the hot girl and she can only produce T7o at the final showdown. Brandon +$32, Hot chick -$32. The very next hand, I have 23o in the BB and the flop is A45 giving me the nuts, I bet out and announce, "I have the nuts, everyone should fold". No one believes me and after the enormous pot gets shipped my way, the girl turns and says, "you don't have to be so cocky". She spends te next 30 minutes mad at me about one thing or the other and my nickname is now "Lucifer". She mentions that she's a good cook and makes good Portugese food. I ask is she uses SPAM and she flips out. It's apparently a huge insult to imply that someone might use SPAM in their dishes. All I know is that when I grew up in Hawaii, there were a lot of Portugese people there and they liked to eat SPAM. She's still fuming about the comment and I say, "I'm sorry, I love traveling and I'm thinking about moving to Barcelona. I'll try to go to Portugal to get some good food." Now she flips and says, "I'M NOT FROM SPAIN" with fire in her eyes. Woah. I reply with "I know, but Spain is right next to Portugal," to which the guy on her right responds with, "No, Portugal is in Central America". And he was deadly serious. I decide to drop it and the guy on her right follows up with, "you're really hot, do you think I'd have a chance with you?" She turns her head in his direction and doesn't say anything but all of a sudden he says, "No, huh, well I had to try." I have to give the guy props because he has to have enormous balls to do something like that. The girl settles down after a while but gets bored of poker and leaves to play blackjack. I get called Lucifer a few more times but other than that I think I made a great impression. Carl, Justin and I get up to cash out and I see Greg Raymer in the cashout line and we talk for a while. The hot chick comes back into the room and freaks out when she sees Greg and comes over to get an autograph and a kiss on the cheek. I gotta win the World Series. She looks shocked that I'm talking to Greg and tells him to stay away from me. He thanks her for the warning then bends my ear for about 20 minutes about how much the Poker Superstars tournament sucked. Justin and I get back to the hotel around 3:30 and crash hard.

This morning Justin and I went to the bus terminal to get a schedule since I'm flying out of Boston tomorrow. The earliest bus leaves at 9:20 AM(yuck) and gets to Boston's South Station at 11:45. My plane is scheduled to leave at 1 PM and I silently wonder if I'm going to have another airport debacle on my hands. Justin sits in a big No Limit game and I go downstairs to see what's going on in the tournament. I run into Carl and two guys who are big in the online poker world: Nat, who runs a huge PokerStars database and an 18 year-old kid named Oz who tears up online games under the name of BigSlick789. They mention that they're headed to Boston tonight and I ask if I can tag along. I talk to Justin and he gives me the keys to his apartment and Nat, Oz and I leave around 5PM.

Nat has a GPS system in his car and it was really sick. You can type in an address and it gives you all the directions to your destination and talks to you when you need to turn or exit. It tells you what side of the freeway that exits are on and what lanes you should be in. The Magellan 760 costs about $800 but I think it's worth it, especially since I'm planning on driving 12,000 miles next Spring. The Magellan 760 comes with maps of North America AND Europe so maybe I'll head to Europe for a roadtrip someday. I think I'm going to wait until the day after Thanksgiving and head to Portland to buy the GPS system. Should be fun.

Anyway, I took them out to dinner for driving me up here and I'm writing from Justin's apartment. I'm very excited about heading to Seattle tomorrow and I'm going to try to make it to the airport with more than 15 minutes to spare. Dookie is picking me up and Jimmy is coming in 40 minutes after I arrive so we're going to Dookie's to hang out for a few days. I haven't seen Jimmy in a while and we'll have a great time. I'm going to steal a quote from Will, not the first time I've stolen one of his quotes and definitely not the last: "HIDE THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN!!! OR MAYBE JUST THE CHILDREN!!! I'M COMING HOME!!!"