Saturday at the Shoe

Above: The Horseshoe Tunica (we call it the Shoe) has the largest poker room in the Tunica area.

I had to bring mom back north from Florida. I brought her to Memphis, and my brother and sister came and picked her up for the rest of the trip to Illinois.

I haven't played much poker lately, so while here I decided to play in the Saturday Horseshoe $160 buy-in $12K guaranteed tournament. There were 99 of us (actually they allowed reentry, so that was not 99 discrete players) who wanted to donk around spend Saturday playing poker.

About two hours in, I picked up K-K and raised a full three times the big blind. I got one caller, a guy who held ♦K ♦10. There were two diamonds on a queen-high flop and I couldn't bet the villain out of the hand. A diamond on the river meant I had lost 7000 out of my 14,000 chip stack (we started with 12,000).

I dribbled down to six big blinds, and shoved over a limper with ♦J ♥J, got called by another short stack and by the button who had A-Q. My hand held for the triple up (plus), and I was back in business.

One more hand: a guy limped in from UTG with ♠Q ♣10 (mistake No. 1 -- either raise or fold) for 1200. I raised to 4200 and he called (mistake No. 2). The flop was a queen and two low cards. He checked and I bet and he called (mistake No. 3). The same thing happened on the turn and the river (for two more mistakes), and we were all in by then. I won't even tell you my hand, because it doesn't matter -- I had him crushed. You see when you play crap from UTG, and hit your hand, and lose your whole stack, there's something wrong with this picture, no?

When down to two short tables (around 15 players), I ran hot. Had aces twice and flopped a set on another. I also had some good hands that I won uncontested, and built my stack from around 100,000 up to 200,000.

At the final table, we eliminated some players, looked around and saw that everybody had a playable stack (the short stack had 25 big blinds), so chopped for about $1400 each, sweet.