Wednesday Night

I made my usual appearance at Sidelines Grill in Alpharetta for Wednesday night poker. It's my favorite place to play because of the no-smoking, but I haven't had much luck there in the past. At first it looked like not many people were going to show up, but we filled up right at the end of signups. I sat down at my table to the right of a pair of older women, probably around 60 years old or so. They were complete beginners at poker. They had no idea of the hand strengths and had little cards that were given to them by one of the ladies father. His name was Bob and he sat directly across from me.

We had to help the women do everything. They didn't know how to do anything, including deal. They had no idea what anything was and would call or bet all the way to the river on a pair of 8's. The sad thing was that they won at first cause all of us were afraid to do anything with them. Bob was a little different. It was obvious that he had played poker before, but since he had to be at least 80 years old he wasn't playing with a full deck. I'm pretty good at putting nicknames on people and I came up with "Bob the Pot Builder" for him. He called or raised everything. He wasn't really so much of a calling station as he was a raising station. He raised or called every hand. At one point he just started matching the big blind automatically even before the cards had been dealt and out of position. The crappy thing was he kept flopping two pair and was chip leader for a long time at that table.

I finally hit him twice for a large amount of chips when I had a set of 6's and a straight. His chips took me to the final table. There were 9 of us to start the final table, including Bob the Pot Builder, but thankfully he got bounced out pretty quickly. As soon as I sat down at the final table, the cards went very cold on me. I didn't see any paint for at least 7 hands, and when I did have something and raised, everyone folded to me so I just took down the blinds for about 3 turns around the table.

When it was down to five of us, I was sitting in the short stack and went all in with an A6o from the button. The guy to my right called me with a KQ. I said "I need an ace!" I flopped a Queen and two garbage cards.

"I need an Ace!" Fourth street was a Queen.

"I need an Ace!" Fifth street was a Queen.

Sigh.