Wow - I thought I was a buy-in machine last Tuesday with six of them.
My holiday cash game on Thursday was a great success. I had
fourteen players sign up (a record for my game), and I had to run two tables of NLHE. Unfortunately I had two no-shows due to a miscommunication, but we still ran six and six for most of the night until a few folks left and we combined to one table.
The poker itself was largely uneventful. I ran pretty dead most of the night and basically sat on my first buy-in, just winning/stealing enough to keep from going in the hole. I eventually doubled up with AA v. KK AIPF, then gave my profit and more to a new guy who went on an unreal heater. He was playing ATC preflop and hit three boats, a couple of flushes, two sets, and a few other winning hands in about an hour. Many of these hands were against me shortly after my double up: rivered boat vs. rivered straight twice and turned top two vs. rivered straight are the three big ones I remember. I gave this guy 200bb in under two orbits. Ultimately his streak ended and he gave a good chunk of his winnings back to the table, so I ended up close to even (-12bb).
The Santa Claus game was fun as usual, and we got
loud. At my table, people weren't quite as crazy with red kings as they were in the rebuy tourney, but something was going on at the other table - hooping and hollering every time somebody won a present.
This year I had 25 gifts. Twenty of those were nice: scratch-offs, booze, gift cards, and free stack add-ons("fish food"). Five of the gifts were naughty: four gag gifts and "The Spirit of Xmas" (every player gets a card, the first ace to appear gets $1 from the recipient):
I'm not sure I liked "The Spirit of Xmas" and probably won't include it next year. The idea was a fun little needle where the recipient had to pay a random player $1 from his stack. As it worked out this year, the recipient drew the first ace and ended up paying himself, but it didn't seem to go over as well as I thought. Next year I'm going to drop that and keep the gag gifts.
On top of the Santa game, Mrs. S was killing it in the kitchen. She sent plate after plate after plate of cookies upstairs, and each was emptied in minutes.