Reno: Days 1-5
Good blog, long read Alrighty...First things first. We need USC to beat Kansas State. And, while we're at it... how bout Duke, Washington State, and Texas A&M. That would push us to a perfect 12 and 12 thus far in my $100 bracket pool. Gogogogo...
I figure that I have some run good in something due to come soon. Since my fantastic week in the middle of February I've lost like 30k straight or something gross like that. Maybe even 40k. Sunday was the worst Sunday I've had in a looooong time, cashing in nothing and going off in the 100r's. I was done so early that I decided to head to downtown Reno, a place that I have not been since I was 16.
My family and I used to travel up here every August to spend time with my grandpa, who lives in Carson City. Ten years later I returned as an adult, and lemme tell you - the nostalgia just poured over me. I started at Fitzgeralds, drank a green beer, and played poker at this table in the pit. It was pretty hilarious really. Only reason that I sat in the game is that I collect chips from places that I've played poker - but my rule to myself is that I must play at least one orbit to add the chip to my collection. So, that was my mission this evening. Wander around downtown, play poker at every place possible, and drink my way into forgetfulness of the brutal day. It turend out to be an extremely pleasant night. I made it back and got 8 hours of sleep before the 11am 100r.
Monday started off just how Sunday ended. I just got brutalized. I was planning on playing through all day, but at 3pm when I was busted out of everything, I decided I needed a break to aboid tilting my brains out. I went downstairs to the arcade level of the Grand Sierra Resort to whack some balls at the driving range. Well, this is by far the coolest driving range I've ever been to. Hitting off mats into a huge lake. I don't know why it's so much more fun to hit golf balls into water than it is onto grass, but it holds true for me at the river and ends up being true on the golf course (for me anyways). So, an hour and a Port of Subs sandwich later, I'm back in the room and ready to go.
Final table 100r, 5th place, $7400. Sweet. Even for Sunday and Monday. Obv won zero key races, didn't suck out, and lost a race to bust. Whatevs can't complain.
Tuesday I sleep in. Shaun Deeb shows up and we grind from 4pm through midnight. I play super high volume. One cash. Min cash in $10r. Sigh. Fuller shows up also and begins to own my soul at everything, specifically Chinese that night after griding. Devo loses $500 at a game that started $1/point, and only had a dozen $5 hands and 1 $10 hand. Deeb, Evan, and Fuller win, Devo donates.
Wednesday I decide to play the $500 PLO rebuy live here. The field size was ridic, but I knew the field and liked the spot a lot. So, in for $550, insta-re-buy for $500 more, lose all pots first hour, rebuy $500 more to get back to 10k, Build to 15k, get it in with a set vs. a naked (just, no other outs) flush draw coughcoughshaundeebcough, lose obv, ship another $1k to get back to 10k, win no more pots, ship another $1k to add-on 10k in chips, and I have 400 chips less and am in for $1500 more than if I would have walked up 1:59 into the tourney and bought in. Sigh.
So, I go about crushing, get unlucky, and then get Fullered with 12 left. Oh yeah, the total prize pool is $33k. I could min cash (5th) and lose $250. Lovely. Rick opens, I re-pot KK2 5 for about 40% of my stack, rick calls with the fabulous K Q89 , knowing that he's getting the whole pile shoved in on any flop, it comes A 4 X, I jam, he laughs, and I miss my one outer. GG me.
In time to play online, but I'm tilting pretty good. I get a text message from my mother nagging me to get in contact with my grandfather.
It's been on the back of my mind ever since I considered coming to reno. I had not seen him since my father's funeral, and in the last ten years I've had one awkward phone conversation and one awkward e-mail of communication. My contact has been more than either of my siblings or my mother. It has always been a sore subject for me, and I have held some resentment against my grandfather for excommunicating himself from the family that reminded him of his son's suicide. I felt like he should have manned up, stepped in, and been there for me in the years of young adulthood where I really needed the guidance and wisdom of a father figure. Instead the only message I got, from my father and grandfather, was "We don't care about you." As a teenage boy that is so brutal.
However, as I have grown up I have been able to understand why he hasn't wanted to talk to us, and I cannot blame him for how he has responded. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for a parent to have one of their children die before them, and then to have it happen in the manner that it did. Ouch. It's a natural human defense mechanism to flee from pain, and this is a pretty painful memory. Just like I don't want to be around anything that reminds me of my father, because it hurts, I am sure that he feels the same. It's scary. It hurts. It sucks. It's not fun. It's not fair.
I have been afraid to contact my grandfather for fear of being rejected. But, with my mothers urging, I realized that at least making an attempt was what I needed to be doing, as I may never have an opportunity like this again. So, I found the phone number, made a phone call, and was walking to my truck to drive to Carson City five minutes later.
Wow. That went way better than I expected.
So I drive down, wondering what I'm going to say, what we're going to talk about, and before I know it I'm pulling up to the curb in front of his house.
He looks the same, ten years older, but good as ever. Betty (his wife) looks great also, and I sit down on the couch. We talk the past, catching up on ten years of estrangement. He wastes no time asking what happened to my marriage, and is impressed with my answer of "I made mistakes." We chat family, what everybody's up to and all that good stuff. I tell him about poker, about my successes, the fluctuation, the ups and downs, and he receives it much better than I thought. "As long as you're making living," Betty interjects, "And you like it," "Then I have no problem with it."
Cool.
So we head down to their locals casino to have some breakfast/lunch/dinner, I pick up the tab, and we hit the slots for a little while. Betty plays Keno and wins a few bucks, Grandpa and I chase down a few slots and just chat. It was fantastic, and everything I could have hoped for. I said to him at one point something like this. "I can remember years ago when I would come in these things with you and everybody else, and you adults would go gamble while us kids had to do kid things, and I dreamt of the day that I would be able to join you. This is really cool for me."
And it was. A dream come true really. People have asked me the classic question of if I could have five minutes of my life back, besides the 37 seconds that I was on the phone with my stock broker on March 10, 2000 when I decided not to sell $197,000 worth of stock that I had earned 7000% on in the last year, I would spend the time with my father. I don't know what four minutes and twenty-three seconds I would re-live, but it probably would have something to do with baseball, or shooting, or something that Dad and I did together often. Spending that half an hour with my grandfather, just the two of us, was the closest that I can come to that dream in this lifetime and was a moment that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
Oh yeah, I broke even. Running good vs. the slots IMO :-).
So, we went home, and we continued our converstation from the casino about ghost towns and rockhounding and all that stuff that a 11 year old boy just soaks in from his grandfather. This 26 year old boy soaked it in with even more fervor than that 11 year old boy. On his bookshelf he had two display cases of indian arrowheads. It came up in conversation that he had found every single one of then in the past dozen years or so.
Our last year or so of heading up to Grandpa's in August was his first year in his retirement home. He bought a few acres outside of Dayton, NV on this hill overlooking the Carson river. Absolutely fantastic place. I can remember driving stakes with my father and grandfather, defining his property line way back in the day. Turns out that his property has been an migratory camp for American Indians for millenia. Recently, like the last few thousand years, it was the perfect place for a camp in that valley, so naturally the Indian's chose it. However, thousands of years ago the area was a lake, and the Dayton area was the beach for this huge lake, and thus had artificts around that dated back as long as Indians have been in the area. He said after a good rain or wind storm, he would go out and just find em everywhere. Seriously, his collection of artifacts was so impressive that it was difficult for me to believe that he found them all. Very cool. It was also fun chatting because I gathered sufficient information to begin searching for arrowheads down by Vegas. It has always been a dream of Jared's to pick up a real arrowhead in the boonies somewhere, and we're going to be able to make that happen.
So, from there we talked about WWII. This hour of conversation was fantastic. I got all the stories of my grandfather's time serving in the war that I had never heard before (or been old enough to understand/remember). That got us talking politics, vietnam, the gulf war, the war on terror, etc, and I found it quite errie how much I agreed with every one of my grandfather's stances. I came across my.
Hold on. WTF Duke. Losing with two minutes?
I came across my libertarian views while in Colorado, mostly through my roommate Travis. I wonder if the seeds for my beliefs were planted by my father and grandfather and thus why I took so strongly to them when I discovered them? I wonder.
So, the part of the night that meant the most to me is when Grandpa looked at me and said, "Bryan, you've grown up. And I'm proud of how you've grown up."
Wow. Something I've needed to hear for twelve years.
That afternoon was worth all the money in the world, and I will take losing every tournament for the rest of my life to have that afternoon in my memories.
So, I came back around 10:30, grabbed Rick Fuller, and had an opportunity to kick his butt at something. Naturally there was no money on this ass kicking, but it was a great time nonetheless. We went downstairs to the same arcade level with my same golf clubs, this time with the intention of playing Pebble Beach.
They have this bar called "Bunkers" with all the standard stuff, pool, darts, shuffleboard, ground shuffleboard, and the coolest golf simulator machines ever. Take an indoor golf hitting cage, add a computer with the software, and an intricate array of sensors that detect ball speed, vector, ball spin, slices and hooks, and does it with 90-95% accuracy (see Daniel's blog... he has one in his house). So, computer feeds a signal to a projection unit over our heads, projects an image of the first hole at Pebble beach onto the wall in front of us, and it looks exactly like you're standing in the tee box of the first hole at pebble beach. The work that went into this program is ridiculous. They have hundreds to thousands of video and images from every hole from every angle they could possibly think of. They have audio recordings from different spots on the hole and it plays in the sound system above your head. That sick famous par three there? Hole 6 or 7 or something? You can hear seagulls, the crashing of waves, and the occassional passing helicopter in perfect stereo sound overhead. It was sick.
The place closed at midnight. We had so much fun that Rick bribed the guy to stay open another hour so we could finish and play a couple of more holes. I ended up hitting a 26 over par I believe, which is an excellent 98 for me, and really excellent for pebble beach. I was helped a little by having the wind turned off and the putting, as the system can only record putts outside of six feet, therefore anything within six feet is a gimmie. Six footers are not even close to gimme's for me. However, the chipping and putting took some time getting used to so that cost me some strokes also.
Oh yeah, Rick scored +44.
Sadly though, Rick would get me again today. Busting me out of two live tournaments in two days. Now, not only does he have the lead (2-1), but he has that to hold over my head for the rest of forever. Siiiiigh. I played really well today but ran really poorly in all-in pre-flop situations. I got it in 7 times, winning once. I was ahead twice lost, racing twice lost, and behind three times, winning one.
TY for coming back Duke.
The bustout hand was fine I think. Rick had a stack and was active, and I restole with A5o for his late position raise. He said, "Uh oh, I've only looked at one, an ace." I'm liking this though, and even though he knows I resteal light, I don't think he thought I was re-stealing light here. Finds a Q and I whiff the suck-out. 35th or something, 18 pay. Ugggh... win just my expectation of all-in situations and I don't even find myself in this spot (cause I would have had chips) and would have been able to play the game that I want to play, not the shove/fold game that I had to play.
Oh well. GL Rick - I'm rooting for you 100% now.
1500 tomorrow, 2k saturday, online sunday, online monday, and 7700 main on tuesday.
Peace and good luck,
Devo
posted by Devo @ 7:28 PM
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