Weekend Update

After being sick for three days this week I thought I'd better get my ass down to the Borgata and get some time in at the tables, so I headed down before noon on Saturday (a feat in and of itself). I sat immediately upon arrival in a no limit cash game and summed the table up fairly quickly. Fishy, fishy, fishy, fish! There were two other players that seemed to have a modicum of poker sense so i was careful to play pots with them, but the rest of the table was easy pickings and I quickly tripled my starting stake in under two hours. I played until about 6 and then headed over to the Pier at Caesars, initially intent on dining at Buddakhan, but ended up eating at Phillips, the seafood house from Baltimore. It was very good. While my stomach cried for steak, I instead opted for the bounties of the sea, starting with a half dozen Malpeque oysters on the half shell and then easing into my entree, which was a humongous steam pot, placed in the center of the table and overflowing with a whole lobster, mussels, king crab legs, potatoes, corn on the cob and colossal shrimp. I washed it all down with two pints of Phillip's Amber. It was a huge feast and I nearly finished it all. For dessert it was chocolate-pecan pie. Then back to Borgata where I decided to sit in a bigger game and barely avoided donking off my entire day's profit in a brutal game of raises and reraises among some seasoned pros who had the run of the table.
Sunday I took it easy, but on Monday, with the power out in half of Media for who-knew-how-long, I headed back down to my home by the shore once more. I sat in a lower stakes game and went on one of the best card runs of my career. The odds of being dealt pocket aces are 1 in 221 hands. I had them three times in one fifteen minute period alone, and a total of 8 times for the session! One of the times I was last to act and I sat in awe as the first player raised, the next player re-raised all-in, the next player called and then it was on me with pocket rockets. I had to pinch myself to make sure this wasn't some vivid erotic dream before pushing my stack in to the center of the felt. Lucky for me, one player dropped out to my re-raise, and that player showed his pocket nines when he folded. I was up against two players with all our money in the center and five cards to come. My opponents held Ace-King and Ace-Nine respectively, and were huge underdogs to my monster hand. My pair held up through the flop, the turn and the river and I took down a huge pot, but when a nine came on the flop, I knew that I had narrowly escaped execution and was happy that the other player had folded. That set the tone for the session and just a few hands later I had the aces again and built another nice pot with one opponent. I spiked an ace on the flop to make trips and took down yet another big pot. I saw more pocket pairs than I have ever been dealt before in a single session. Kings, Queens, jacks, tens, nines, eights, sevens, sixes, just about every pair possible was dealt to me. I am actually afraid of the next session because mathematically I am sure to get screwed with crappy cards! When I announced that I was playing one more hand before heading to dinner the table resounded with a sigh of relief and I was sure I would look down at two rags and get up and walk to the restaurant. No, I looked down at pocket aces and my raise was seen as a bully tactic by the others and I was called by several non-believers. A moment later I stacked my new chips and headed off to dinner laughing (dinner was prime rib and roast pork with chorizo sauce and several glasses of Bachus Cabernet).
Upon my return my first hand was pocket eights and my very next hand was pocket queens, so I quickly showed the table that my streak was far from over. In the last two hours I played after dinner I actually got aces twice more! I had played from noon until 11pm and I was ecstatic when I left. I'm going back down tonight to test the poker gods yet again!