As you may
remember, last year at this exact time I was finishing 2nd in the Seminole Hard
Rock Casino Lucky Hearts $1100 tournament netting me $20,000 (US), my best
result ever in a live tournament (up to now anyway). So why wouldn’t I return
to the scene of the crime a year later? After all there’s only one way I can
improve on that result – and that’s to play in it again!

I’m writing
this blog from the Fort Lauderdale airport while waiting for my return flight
to Toronto, so I have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Let me cut to the chase.
There was no love for Old Virgil in the poker room this year. I have no good
news to report.

This is long,
so if you read it at all, I recommend compact digestible portions.

Friday Jan.
18

Early morning
flight. I brought the average age onboard the plane to Fort Lauderdale lower.
Considerably. That doesn’t happen too often anymore.

I was at the
pool at the Hard Rock by noon, and by 4 PM I was in a little $140 satellite to
the main event. I played too much on the attack, got in my own way, and lost.
No excuses, but if I’m going to lose, better it be via aggression as opposed to
timidity.

I called my
brother and we went for a late dinner to Cappriccio’s, an Italian place that
got stuck in a Sicilian time warp somewhere around 1972. The owner (loudly) sings
old Italian songs (Amore!) accompanied by a three-piece band including a
keyboard, a violin, and an accordion. You heard me, a fucking accordion. My
brother’s been going here for close to 30 years and always has the same waiter.
You know this place.

Saturday
Jan. 19

In the $1100
main event on Saturday I was alive and doing reasonably well toward the end of
the first day. With a stack of about 44K and the Big Blind at 1600, I looked
down to find 99. The player to my right, fairly tight and with a stack similar
to mine, raises to 4100. I decide to call and maybe do some set mining. Two
others come along for the ride. Flop comes 9,T,Q with two diamonds. Eureka,
finally my big hand! Villain (that’s him) comes out betting about half the pot
at 6500.

I really only
have one play here. I can’t fold (obviously) and I can’t flat and let someone
behind me (or even the villain himself) catch a draw. With this live board, I’m
pretty happy to take this down right now. I’m never getting away from this hand
anyway so why pussyfoot around?

Can I still
say “pussyfoot” or has PETA banned that one as well?

Anyway, I
shove just under 40K, and the two players behind surrender without a struggle.
Villain goes into the tank. This is good news I figure. I mean in the unlikely
scenario that he flopped the straight, he would’ve snap-called, right? So, the
fact that he’s thinking assures me that I have him beat for the moment. Now I’m
actually hoping he’ll call. At this point, I put him on AA or KK and of course
I’d prefer AA which has fewer outs. Four minutes. He’s in the think-tank for
four full minutes. Now I put him on JJ for the up-and-down straight draw. But
really, I’m thinking the same thing everyone else at the table is. Call or
fold, but just put us out of our misery already, dude! Finally, he takes a deep
dramatic breath and declares “I can’t fold middle set. I call.” And he turns
over a pair of tens. COME ON, MAN! On what planet were you EVER going to fold
that hand?! Wasting our time like that. Such douchebaggery.

So, I’m out of
the main event, set-over-set. No matter how I play that hand, the result’s
going to be the same.

Saturday
Jan. 19 (still)

The next
tournament holds a poker experience that really should’ve put me off the game
for life. Spoiler alert – it didn’t. But it should’ve.

It’s 8:00 PM
so I go into a $275 satellite for a seat in the $2500 tourney on Sunday. It’s a
small field of 44 players with 5 guaranteed seats so there’s a bit of an
overlay which is nice.

5 hours later
we’ve played down to six players and I am very much alive. With five seats
guaranteed, we just need to eliminate one more player, and the tournament will
be over with the five remaining players moving on to the big $2500 tournament
the next day. I’m itchin’ to play in that tournament! But I’m not eager to pay
for it out of my pocket. All I have to do is be one of the survivors and not
the dreaded bubble boy.

All the stacks
are relatively even. We play six-handed for over an hour and a half.
It’s unheard of. On at least eight occasions a shorter stack, with an inferior
hand, gets all-in against a bigger stack, and miraculously, eight times out of
eight, the weaker hand sucks out and we are forced to continue.

You know what the odds of that are? Probably not, so let me help you out. Say the average winning expectation of those eight hands was 30% which I think is rather generous. The odds of a 30% happenstance happenstancing eight times in a row calculates out to approximately a .006% chance. That’s 6 one thousandths of one per cent. There’s a better chance of Roger Stone meeting Josef Mengele in heaven. We’re all dumbfounded.
In the meantime, blinds are building fast.

At this point,
I painstakingly broker a deal where each of the survivors will give the bubble
boy, whoever it may be, $50 out of his pocket so that at least, after all this
time, the sixth-place finisher doesn’t go home completely empty-handed, and
finally everyone agrees to this. That negotiation alone should’ve brought me
good karma, no?

A few hands
later the player to my right with an equal stack to mine shoves all-in. I look
down at two red aces. I have to call. Blinds are soaring. If I don’t end this
now, I could be as vulnerable as anyone, very shortly. I make the call and
everyone else at the table breathes a collective sigh of relief. Finally, this debacle
of a tournament is going to be over one way or another.

The other players
shouldn’t really care which one of prevails, but I know everyone is rooting for
me, because this guy has been a royal asshat all night. And me? You know, I
don’t bother nobody. He turns over A4 off suit, and I turn over my aces.
Everyone’s happy. Everyone hates him. Everyone loves me. He has a 7% chance of
beating me. The flop come K T 4, and while this technically only raises his
chances by about 1%, as far as I was concerned, it was already over. I knew
what was going to happen.

7 on the turn,
and 4 on the river. Boom! With one gut-wrenching, soul-destroying turn of a
card, I’m out in sixth place. Bubble boy. I did get $250 though!

The entire
table came over one by one and hugged me, commiserating with lines like “That’s
just wrong, man” and “That shit is fucked up, brother”. These hardened poker
grifters somberly HUGGED me, in a receiving line! In the poker room! You’d
think my dog died choking on my baby.

I went up to
my room, and contemplatively looked out my window at the Fort Lauderdale
skyline and I silently counted all my incredible blessings that mean so much
more to me than poker ever could. And then I went to sleep. And, in case you’re
askin’, I slept pretty good.

Sunday Jan 20

A rainy Sunday.
And because it was a rainy Sunday, I decided to take one more crack at another satellite
for the $2500 tournament. It started at 9 AM, 25 people, 2 seats guaranteed
with third place getting $1800 in cash. We get down to 5 people, and my QQ runs
into AA. Five-handed, that’s pretty effing unlucky. But what can you do? Out again
on the bubble. And with that, my hopes of playing in the $2500 tourney are
dashed.

Sunday Jan. 20 (still)

It was still
raining so I signed up for a $360 tournament with $50,000 guaranteed prize
pool. It’s always fun to watch an NFL playoff game in a room full of a thousand
gamblers (even if the wrong team won on a blatant non-call). The tournament was
uneventful. Through four hours of non-aggressive play, I allowed myself to get
short-stacked enough to have to shove 66 and get called by AJ. Jack on the flop
ended my evening. I make no excuses. I could’ve run better, but I also could’ve
played better.

On the table
next to ours, there was a red-headed, red-bearded guy who wore a fuzzy lime-green
baseball cap. He literally never shut up. My son, Joey, rightfully has a pet-peeve
about people misusing the word “literally”. It really bugs him when someone says
something like “… my head literally exploded!” Uh, no, it didn’t.

So, I’m careful
about using that word. Joey, this guy LITERALLY. Never. Shut. Up. I’ve never
heard anything like it. Whenever someone new came to his table he insisted on introducing them to everyone
by name “… What’s your name? Liz? Hi Liz, I’m David 1, this is David 2, and
around the table we have Scott, Bugsy, Mort, Sheilah…” A new player comes to the
table about every twenty minutes, and I sat at the next table to him for 4
hours. You do the math. Everyone at my table knew the names of every single
person at their table by heart.

“… I come from
a small town in South Carolina you never heard of with two stoplights and 17
churches that’s a real fact last time I was back there it was 17 churches
anyway maybe the Episcopal one has shut down they’re going to put another
stoplight in just by the Piggly Wiggly but not until next year I can’t believe you
called with Queen-Ten I put you on a medium pair my mom just had her hip replaced
who’s your favorite Spiderman…” When I say literally, Joey, I mean LITERALLY.

Try a steady
diet of that for four hours, and see if you don’t shove your sixes.

The good news
is I got to watch The Chiefs-Patriots game at a cool sports bar with my brother
and my nephew. The other gooder news is it was 21 below zero in Toronto, and I
wasn’t there.

Anyway, that’s
pretty much my weekend.

Hey! I never
promised they’d all be exciting!

All in all, I get
no satisfaction from the fact that I never cashed a ticket. But as my friend
Dominic points out, it’s notable that I was able to run so deep in at least two
events. Unfortunately, there’s no glory (or money) in that.

Next stop:
February in LA, see you there!