Getting a second home game in this month tomorrow!

This group will have some gamble. What are some decent flop props to run?

Picked up 15 $1 scratchers this morning. Going to put them in envelopes with corresponding numbers on them. Also going to do 2 "zonks" with a single small blind inside and 2 "whamo's" with 3 or 4 bucks inside. Once they win and show with a red king they'll draw a number and get the envelope to match. That way I can participate too. Should be a good time. Any other ideas for tonight's "break in the table" game?

Flop lottery. Players can buy a card for $X. Any time that card hits they get one point. First to five points wins the pot. Extra stipulation is that trips of your card wins instantly.

Holy crap. Breich is a mod now? Congrats, sir. We failed to renew our league this year, so I've been pretty much in non-poker mode these last 3-4 months. Haven't played since this summer (not counting the butt kickings from my kids).

Just talked to one of my key players and we are def gonna do flop lottery! Very excited.

Oh I like that. We've done something similar before. Each player takes a card and if it's the middle of the flop you collect.

Haha yep thanks. I'm not too terribly active in some of the threads because, well, some of them just never die Lol.

Sucks that you're in a poker hiatus!
Yeah I was first introduced to the game in the group I played with in Virginia last year. Great group of degens and flop lottery fit right in.

The hour or so before a home game continues to be some of the longest minutes in the existence of time.

So for the third time running, I'm missing the Cherokee WSOP stop. Being up in Cincy, though, I'm going to hit the Shoe tomorrow. My intention is to play the daily tournament and then play either 1/2 Big O or 2/5 NLHE. Looking for a HP Rungoot sighting.

For tonight's Krazy Santa game.....

Win with the red king, draw a number. That way I can play too. Got a couple of zonks and a couple of bazingas mixed in. I'm.pumped!

Love love love this game, though I've never put my envelopes on a Christmas tree before. I may have to steal this from you...

Last night's session in Daytona was a prime example of why table selection is a good thing. It's something that home game players don't often think about since it's usually not an option for us, but getting at the right table can have a huge effect on session and long-term results.

Table 1: Not much action and I was card dead. Lost a few small pots, then the rest of my first BI with KK vs AA. This table was pretty tight with no obvious weak spots and mostly playing very small pots, so I requested a table change. Immediately before getting called to my new table, I picked up my first good pot of the night with AA. Sorry for going south, guys.

Table 2: Big stacks, lots of action, but mostly solid players including several regs I'd played with before. This was not the kind of table I expected on a holiday weekend. I had QQ cracked, ran JJ into shortstacked QQ, and a lot of whiffing and folding just crushed me here. I didn't stack off completely, but went into the wallet again when I got low. I was about to request a table change again when I finally saw a ray of light: KK vs QQ (I had the good one this time), then AA twice and both held up. With the second aces, I got in the way of two of the big stacks trying to engage each other and took down a decent pot. However, they both decided to get up after that hand and ended up breaking the table. The other games were one seat shy, I drew a deuce and went back on the list for about 10 minutes.

Table 3: THIS is where I should have been all night. Loose party game, great action, and decent stacks. I was playing TAG and joking about how tight I was, but also showed a couple of stupid hands that were cheap to play. I don't think it works on more sophisticated players, but at this kind of table these hands help me get action; even the drunks remember that the "tight" guy played 69s two hours ago, and he might be doing it again.

This last table not only helped me crawl out of the hole, but allowed me to book a solid profit on a night when I thought it was going to be my first losing session at Daytona in a while. At my worst I was -180bb, but ended the ten hour session +130bb. I also had a six-denom stack for the first time ever. A crazy-loose player to my right had been on a heater, got part of his stack colored up to a lavender, and utterly loved that chip. He eventually gave back all of his stack except the $500, and finally had to sell it to me for change:

Blues ($1) and yellows ($2) on a 2-5 table?

I don't think my 'home' casino even has $2 chips.

Yes, the $2 chips have always annoyed me, but they keep them. At 2/5 the $1 and $2 chips only play preflop or when all in, so at least there are no flop bets like $42 in all yellow and blue.

The $2 chips can kick rocks. They already have $1 chips. Boo to 2× denominations.

Yay to that lavender chip on top of your stack, though.

When Horseshoe Hammond first put $2's on the table, they used them for $1/2 NLHE. Gah! Haven't been there since early 2009 so I don't know whether they still do that. Even one day was too long, IMO.

See that purple chip? Take that, put it in a safe deposit box, and remove it from the bank in February. Then, cash it, go to southwest.com, and purchase a round trip to Chicago.

NO MORE EXCUSES, SIR

Yeah their still around....

So the trip to the Horseshoe today was educational if not profitable.

Tournament: This did not go well for me. I lasted all of three levels before I got A/A cracked twice back to back to knock me out of the tournament. The first time was someone hitting a gutter ball on me on a four straight card board. The last one was me all in pre-flop with A/A vs Q/Q. Q/x/Q on the flop, A on the turn, and a brick on the river. So long. Off to the cash games for you.

Cash Games:
With no open seats immediately, I signed up for 1/2 NLHE, 2/5 NLHE, and 1/2 PLO. It was 1/2 PLO that got called first. We started 5 handed, went to 6, and then went up to 9 for most of the game. I lost my first bullet when my A/A/K/5 double suited lost to 9/9/x/x who flopped a boat. The rest of the time, I got my stack back up to even and never much above it, cashing out down about 50BB.

Observations:
1) The Horseshoe in Cincinnati is a very nice casino. Ample parking, not terribly hard to get to from the interstate, and no smoking in the casino. That last bit is a HUGE selling point for me. Not only is the poker room non-smoking, the entire casino is.
2) 1/2 PLO in that environment puts me in a place where I think about the money if I lose the first bullet. This is a problem, and I need to get my head away from that if I'm going to do it again.
3) There were a number of people buying in for less than the max buy-in in a PLO game. Given how big the pots get, this confused me. It was clear some of them were sticking in short stacks pre-flop to bingo their way back up. While I wasn't the worst player at the table, it was clear there were some who were way out of my league, notably regularly who obviously play on a regular basis. I lost value on one hand against one of them when I raised him on a flop where I'd flopped a boat and he had trips. I need to work on this.
4) I want to come back to this casino for a longer session. Due to the trip we were up here for, I wasn't able to stay more than 5-6 hours, part of which was taken up by the tournament.
5) I am still obviously a cash game player rather than a tournament player. I should have followed my gut and skipped the tournament because I was doing stupid stuff about an hour into the tournament.

All in all, it was a good learning experience and worth the trip over there.

Oh, and apparently the Cincy Shoe had the $2 chips like Hammond, but have since done away with them.

I have this thought almost every time I play a tournament, larger MTTs in particular. I know what I'm doing, and I tend to go deep most of the time, but I don't usually enjoy them very much.

I play specifically poker because I like poker. Poker tournaments don't just add tournament structure to a poker game. They replace a lot of the elements I like about the game with tournament-specific concerns and high-variance gambling. I can see the merit in that, since it attracts low-skill players, but personally, it drives me away.

Also just earned to put it out there that Jeff on CT has scheduled his WCB for the weekend that would typically be in contention for HPI (July 23-25) and needs to be considered when planning for HPI III.