Posted by Dr Fro 11:33 AM

I am in Calgary. As I always do when travelling for work, I found the local poker room and took a shot at taking some money out of the local economy.

Calgary has several poker rooms. I settled on one nearest my hotel. Although it offered NLHE, nobody there (other than yours truly) had any interest. It was a very big poker room, but at its peak, only 8 of the tables had poker going. I believe that there was one high stakes ($30-$60) limit game and the other tables were either $4-$8 or $4-$8 with a full kill. I chose the latter.

I won 4 of the first 5 hands, and it didn't end there. Without even getting very good cards, I easily won $400 (50 BBs). The players were horrible. I hadn't played Limit Holdem in a long time, but it all came back to me pretty quickly. I can't tell you how many times somebody bet the river with a busted hand, trying to get me to fold something like top pair, bad kicker. In every instance but one, I made the cheap call to win a big pot. This just doesn't happen in NL.

The dealers were terrible. The tips are pooled, so there isn't a lot of incentive to do well. I caught the dealer ignoring mistakes (bets for the wrong amount, etc.) several times. I think they actually knew something was wrong each time, but they weren't going to exert the effort to address it unless called out by a player. If I wasn't involved in the hand, I would just let it go. Rarely, if ever, did another player catch and point out a mistake. Heck, he didn't even calculate the rake correctly.

The locals were terrible. Just terrible. They would buy in for like $50 at a time, call every street, then rebuy.

I am definitely going back later this week.

0 Comment(s):

Post a Comment