Campfire Stories

Video Replay for High Stakes Ro-Sham-Bo

Wednesday morning I woke up, frustrated about the fact that I had to spend a good portion of my day going and buying another cell phone to replace my recent aquatic accident. I decided that I would put the phone back together and give it one last ditch effort, and whaddya know, the damn thing worked! How does that happen? Usually if you think about water around a cell phone it stops working. But, this little piece of cellular technology spent 10-15 minutes sitting on the bottom of a lake 10-15 feet under water and ended up working 18 hours later. Wow.

I drove into the strip for a few hours of work before my softball game juvinated for a good session, having the sense that I was finally running good at life once more.

Long story short: the ever-consistent 15-30 game at the Wynn broke at 6pm on a Wednesday night and Devo was left sitting on the table putting 400 $5 chips into racks. Nice.

Thursday I headed into the Bellagio for what was looking to be a very long evening. I was planning on working all day, meeting people for dinner, going to the WPT party at Light, and then trying to find a way to get home after all that fun.

After 90 minutes I finally took a seat in a 15-30 game and basically ran great for 4.5 hours once again winning another two racks. From there I met a large party of people at Olives, some fancy schmancy restaurant at the Bellagio. My advice to y'all: don't ever eat there. The service was terrible - it literally took me 25 minutes to get a beer in hand. The food was decent, but extremely overpriced and not even close to worth what we paid for it.

Then we all wandered into Light, the nightclub at the Bellagio. Straight through the line and straight into a VIP booth. Oops... FIVE booths! The WPT was throwing this party as a thank you to us poker players with all you can drink booth and bottle service. I bet that bill was expensive! It sure was nice partying good and not having to worry about the tab at all.

The highlight of the evening was when high stakes rock paper scissors broke out. I'm not really sure how it happened, but Jon Friedberg and I decided to play for $100, best of three. Somehow the TV cameraman and reporter got wind of the match and a camera was in our face complete with microphone and really bright light. Poker players are instinctive shameless self promoters, so like moths Rick Fuller, Brandon Cantu, and Jeff Madsen, and Jim Shipley were all vying for camera time in the vicinity. I beat Jon in a good best of 3 battle and before I could even celebrate Rick Fuller wanted a piece in a best of 5 battle. The camera was queued, and Rick says to me, "I'm going to throw paper first throw."

Rick was drunk, so I actually bought it. I threw scissors, he threw rock, and gave me a huge "I got you" grin as Rick took the first trick. Slimy bastard pulls out trickery in the first set. I got back into the zone and quickly took the second set and we were tied one-one.

At this point I wanted a coach in my corner and put my arm around Madsen and tried to recruit him. Jeff deffered and went to the dark side in Fuller camp, but my good friend Brandon Cantu was there when I needed him most and jumped in my corner. Madsen and Cantu wanted in on the action and quickly had $500 side action betting their respective players.

I ask Brandon what to throw, and he responds "scissors." We win, up 2-1, celebrate, Fuller and Madsen are interviewed about what level of ro-sham-bo thinking they were stuck on, and Cantu and I return to the tank to figure out how to bring this match home.

"Throw rock every time until we win," Brandon said to me while the losers were getting their TV time.

I threw rock. Rick threw scissors. Devo and Cantu win! We started celebrating, and then Madsen, Ships, and Fuller killed the buzz by saying that we were only up 2-1. We argued about it for a while, Fuller and Cantu made a $1k bet on whether it was 2-1 or 3-1, and I declined the same bet with Ships cause $1k means a lot to me right now and, well, I was drunk too so maybe it was 2-1. The red flag was thrown.

We were going to video replay.

After about 4-5 minutes of video, the evidence was conclusive that I did in fact win 3-1 and the money was shipped. $100 to me, $1500 to Cantu.

Sometime later Gavin Smith and I had a go at it and I beat him 2-0 for another $100. After that he said to me, "I'd better make the blog for this."

Really? Gavin reads my blog? I was honestly flattered. I see the traffic that I get but it never really crosses my mind who's reading these words right here. So, what up Gav! Glad you enjoy the ramblings.

The night pretty much fades into a blur after that. But for now I'm going back to the grind and hopefully I can bang out another win!

Peace and good luck,

Devo

posted by Devo @ 2:23 PM |