One of many things my dad does for a living is accounting (such as tax and payroll related stuff). Towards the end of each tax season, he’ll come up to the Denver area for a mini-vacation to blow off some steam and to visit my sister and I. This weekend was the said trip for this year, and we went to Black Hawk and Cripple Creek for a couple of days with the intention of doing a bit of gambling. Needless to say, I finally played something for the first time besides slot machines.
We headed-up to Black Hawk on Friday evening during a pretty bad snow storm, but made it nonetheless. Once we go there at around 7 PM, we checked in to our hotel, the Isle of Capri, and grabbed a bite to eat. After eating, we headed down to the casino floor to start a bit of gambling. My goal was to play some Texas Hold ‘Em, however, they only had a couple of poker type games open-some sort of 3 card poker, and the “Let ‘Em Ride” game which I didn’t really have interest in.
Given that none of the card games there interested me, I ended-up messing around on the slots and video poker, and after several hours had pretty good luck and was only down $1 (and up a few beers and gin & tonic’s.) After an evening of messing around, I was out about $40 which was not a big deal considering I’d been gambling for almost 7 hours. My sister and I went to the free breakfast at 2 AM, and finally ended-up getting to sleep around 4 AM.
In what seemed like an early morning, I woke-up at around 10 which was totally not enough sleep considering I’d been getting about 5-6 hours of sleep all week, and we browsed around the area of Black Hawk and Cripple Creek for a bit to see what was around, and we ended-up going to the Fortune Valley Casino in Cripple Creek to eat at the Tony Roma’s contained inside.
After eating, I went to check-out what the casino had for gaming, and they had Texas Hold ‘Em! I was very excited, but a bit nervous about it, so I watched a hand to see how it worked. Essentially the game there was a 2 dollar blind for the person in front of the dealer button, the initial chip buy-in was $40, and the bet limit was $5, however you could re-raise back to $10 each turn, and that was pretty much it. Given that it was low stakes, I was very excited to play. My dad and I signed-up on a waiting list which had a few people on it, and with my dad and I, made enough people wanting to play that they opened-up another table.
I was surprisingly nervous and was a bit shaky, however my dad was pretty calm considering he’d never actually played Texas Hold ‘Em before (but always seems to win other poker games). The first hand was dealt, and I won with a full house! As the first 10 or so hands were dealt, I won a majority of them, and finally I got settled down and wasn’t so nervous. In fact, I was on fire!
At that point, one of the servers came-up for a drink order, and I ordered the usual Gin and Tonic. It was at this point that one of the people who’s money I was taking like I was a .com stock started talking smack to me. It started-out with “Are you even old enough to order a drink?” I suppose this was justified since I was wearing my Strongbad t-shirt, but it just kept going and going. It was around this time that my dad started getting good hands too, and it became pretty obvious that we were totally running the table.
During this part of the game, my dad and I went head to head a couple of times, and of course he raised the maximum each time, and had the winning hand each time. This made the dude talking smack happy to see someone beat me, but eventually we took all his money and he had to leave the table. I just let him run his mouth and outplayed him instead.
Later in the game I did a chip count, and I had somewhere around $140 in chips after starting with $60. However, not having enough sleep started to catch-up with me, and I slowly started to bleed money away on stupid hands which I thought were good, or not capitalizing on obviously good hands. As I got down on my chips, I ended-up losing the last $20 or so on a stupid hand which I thought was a straight, but I was missing a card. I was a little frustrated about that, but overall I only spent $60 (which I planned to lose) for a good 4 hours of fast-paced poker, which was definitely worth it. You have to keep in mind that the game is VERY fast paced in comparison to the weekly game I play at, as well as anything they show on TV, so it’s not too hard to find yourself getting groggy after a few hours of seat time if you’re not used to that pace.
As I walked away from the table, the smack talking dude was at another table and told me to go play against him again.. whatever. My dad was still playing and was way up on chips. He hung around for another 15 minutes or so, and then cashed out with $313 in chips after starting with $40. A pretty good run I think. It was pretty fun to watch almost everyone at the table do a second buy-in while our chips were stacking-up.
Overall, it was a fun time, and I can see myself going again in a few months with a bit more of a budget (maybe $100-200?) to play for a good 5-6 hours, unless of course I do well again and leave the table when I feel like my luck or game has run-out.
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