It was my girlfriend and my third anniversary so we spent last weekend at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, MS. We flew into New Orleans and drove a rental car (~1.5 hour drive) to Biloxi. Checking in was a bit of a mess. At the front desk the clerk said they don't have any ocean view rooms (even though we booked one) and verified we want a non-smoking room. We make the trek up to the room and walk into what is clearly a smoking room. We go back down to the front desk and the manager gets us into a non-smoking room, and guess what now there is an ocean view available. So they set us up again and we go up to a really nice non-smoking ocean view room on the 15th floor. As I am going through the check-in documents I notice they have someone else's name on it. Back to the front desk for them to straighten it out, which only takes a few minutes.

The hotel and casino design seems to have borrowed from many of the Vegas casinos, and a lot of the design was similar to the Bellagio, albeit a slightly cheaper and more brightly colored version. One interesting tidbit of note, as we were walking by the front desk a security guy with earpiece in ear grabs me by the shoulder and says "you can't wear your hat backwards while on the property." Uh, OK. Never seen or heard of that in a Vegas casino, but whatever.

They only had one donkament going for the weekend, a $200 + 25 + $10 add on Saturday. The field of 125 was quite weak. I had 3 people totally hand me their stack, one when I had a set of 10's vs top pair no kicker and once with aces against AJ and another with AK v. A6 sooted AIPF. With the tables break down to 50 players the following hand takes place (cross posted from 2+2):

Hero has about 21k at 200/400 a50 and is probably around top 10/50 in chips and 2nd in chips at the table. Tables just consolidated and both villians in hand are new and unknown. Villian 1 is utg+1 and is CL at the table and covers by a few k. He opens to 1200 and hijack, a middle aged woman with a "WSOP Academy" visor on, shoves her 4k stack. Folds to Hero in the big blind who peels back AKo. Nothing else to do here but isolate, right?

Anyhow I don't see what else I can do but isolate the short stack so I shove and am suprised and a bit scared when the original raiser calls. Original raiser has QQ short stack has JJ and we are off to the races. The board completely blanks and I am out once again with AK vs. QQ. The almost same exact scenario happened 2 weeks ago at the Caesar's Megastack in Vegas - AK has not been good to me lately. Back to the online grind for a few months.

So I'm driving down I-45 today from Dallas to Houston and decide to stop at McD's in Madisonville to try one of their new "Southern Style" chicken sandwiches. I snack on fries for a while and take a bite of the sandwich about 10 miles down the road. I didn't notice something was very wrong until the second bite, which I spit out. One full bite was swallowed. Salmonella and e-coli ftw.

I sent an e-mail to McD's with teh pics. I bet I get a free southern style chicken sandwich out of it.

I spent a day at Winstar casino this week and although it wasn't a terribly profitable trip I was really impressed by the poker room. First of all the poker room is absolutely huge and has a nice players' lounge for players to chill out while taking breaks or whatever, along with a grill and self service refreshment center. I have played live poker at a lot of places around the country but I must say the dealers at Winstar were among the best I have seen. They were extremely quick and accurate and seemed to do everything automatically. Combined with auto shufflers at the cash tables, the pace is pretty good.

I played $1/$2 NL for a few hours and hit a nice $600 pot when our table hit the "splash pot," where a randomly selected table gets $100 dropped into a hand. When the average stack is around $200, this obviously creates crazy play. Anyway I am UTG+1 and peel up A4o and jam my $180 stack in and get 3 callers. Only 2 of the callers showed, one with 44 and one with 45(???) so 44 is drawing dead when I flop an ace and collect the pot. I chip down to about $415 by the time the tournament starts, mainly with losing what I consider a cooler with a queen high flush where villian had an ace high flush. It could have been worse as villian didn't get full value from the hand.

The tournament is a $115 freezeout with a rapidly escalating blind structure typical of low buyin tourneys. You start with 3,000 chips at 25/50 and 20 minute levels. Around 80 played. I am pretty happy with my overall tournament play but got knocked out with a close decision. At the start of the third hour at 500/1000 I had 7500 chips in the big blind where shortstack for 2000 shoves, another shortstack for 2500 shoves, and SB reshoves, who covers. It's only 6500 for me to call for 20,000 so I need 32% equity in the pot. I look down at AQ and think for a minute before calling. Initial shortstack didn't show but first reshover had 55 and sb had KK. Damn. I don't suckout and am out. In the end I'm not sure about the call but at the time I felt I had a hand with 7.5 BB, 1BB already in the pot, and a lot of dead money. I havn't taken the time to crunch the numbers but I'm fairly sure this is a call 100% of the time.


Anyway, I finished up $100 for the day, which after my fuel driving up there left me with a whopping profit of $60.

The following takes places the 2nd or 3rd hand of the final table of the Cake 30r $20k guaranteed. If I win this hand I have a sizeable chip lead and great equity in the tournament. Enough to make you cry.

Hand #1521226C98002541: Tournament Table 24
Seat 1: wida*** (99831.00 in chips)
Seat 2: mjh8*** (53490.00 in chips)
Seat 3: sryI*** (104357.00 in chips)
Seat 4: Nizz*** (121390.00 in chips)
Seat 5: fish*** (88640.00 in chips)
Seat 6: KIMB*** (92110.00 in chips)
Seat 7: Jony*** (39740.00 in chips)
Seat 8: brad2002tj (168926.00 in chips)
Seat 9: kapl*** (129802.00 in chips)
Seat 10: COWB*** (415214.00 in chips)
widave posts ante of $800
mjh8146 posts ante of $800
sryIdntrembr posts ante of $800
NizzlesSon posts ante of $800
fishfindergl posts ante of $800
KIMBO~$LICE posts ante of $800
JonyHunter posts ante of $800
brad2002tj posts ante of $800
kaplandia posts ante of $800
COWBOYKILLER posts ante of $800
sryI***: posts small blind $4,000
Nizz***: posts big blind $8,000
Dealt to brad2002tj [ Qd Qc ]
fish***: folds
KIMB***: folds
Jony***: folds
brad2002tj: raises to $24,000
kapl***: folds
COWB***: calls
wida***: is all in 99031.0000
mjh8***: folds
sryI***: folds
Nizz***: folds
brad2002tj: is all in 144126.0000
COWB***: calls
wida***: shows Ad Kc
brad2002tj: shows Qd Qc
COWB***: shows Ks Qh
@@@ F_L_O_P @@@ [ Kh 7s 2s ]
# # # TURN # # # [ 5c ]
&&& RIVER &&& [ Jd ]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
COWB*** wins $138,190 with Pair of Kings
*** SHOW DOWN ***
wida*** wins $317,093 with Pair of Kings with Ace kicker

Payouts were $5k for first and $400 for my 10th place finish :(

Took down my biggest online score today, the Cake $12.5 guarantee $20rebuy tournament, for $2900. Nice bankroll boost and changing the tide of my bad run.