Reno trip report (long and boring crosspost)

[nolanfan34]

(Crossposted in General)

**WARNING** - This trip report contains no nudity, but instead actual poker hands and poker room reviews. I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. It may ramble at times and seem unlikely to conclude, but it does end at some point. Consider yourself warned.

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So, this past weekend I had the opportunity to head down to Reno to play some poker and watch the football games on Sunday. Reno baby! Yeah, that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “Vegas baby!” does it? In fact, I think last month at the Muckleshoot 2+2 gathering The Dude’s exact quote was “Reno? WTF are you going to Reno for?” Well, the room and food was going to be free, and I found a plane ticket for $130, so I figured what the hell. It would be my first visit to Reno, so I had no idea what to expect.

Friday

I left Friday night from Sea-Tac airport. I was flying down alone that night, and would meet up with my friend Mark and his uncle-in-law Rick the next day.

My original plan was to not even get a room Friday night and just play until they showed up the next day, but after fighting the flu for the past week I wussed out and got a room at the Eldorado where we would be staying.

Shortly after I board the plane, I see an Asian guy who looked exactly like GoT if GoT was 10 years older and didn’t have curly hair. This is noteworthy since GoT claims he hasn’t seen any Asians that look like him. I took this as an omen, although I didn’t know if it was a good omen or a bad one.

My first good break was the flight down. I arrived at about 7:30, and apparently they stopped landing flights at 8:00 due to fog and ice. Whew! Made it to the Eldorado, checked in, and went down to check out the action in the poker room.

The Eldorado was much nicer than I expected it to be. Smaller than a Vegas casino of course, but certainly as nice as some of the lesser properties on the Vegas strip IMO.

The Eldorado has a pretty decent poker room. Ten tables and it’s non-smoking from 10:00 am – 2:00 a.m. I expected to still reek from smoke just being in the place, but found that wasn’t the case, it wasn’t bad at all. They had 9 tables going, including some $3-$6 and $4-$8 full-kill games, one $1-$5 stud game (which one of the dealers called the tightest stud game in the world), one no-limit game, and one $4-$8 Omaha with a half-kill.

Playing some Omaha was one of my goals for the trip, so I decided to take an open seat at the table and bought in for $140. Shockingly, I was the youngest one at the table by about 25 years (I’m 28).

I saw pretty quickly that it was a terrible game, full of table coaches and one angle shooter. After every hand 3 or 4 of the players would discuss the previous hand, how it played out, etc. And one old-timer who had about 3 or 4 racks of white in front of him kept betting out of turn. It usually happened on the turn or river. He’d bet before it was his turn, to fold people out who were still to act, or he’d kind of hide his cards and let the action happen behind him before he’d pipe up and put his bet in. I didn’t think it was an act at all – he knew what he was doing, and some of the other regulars were clearly annoyed by him.

Although I think it was a beatable game, I decided that I didn’t want to play Omaha THAT badly and moved over to one of the $3-$6 full-kill games instead, down $20.

The $3-$6 full-kill games were great. Winning two consecutive pots would activate the kill, and there were no qualifiers on the pot size. The weird thing was it was a $1/$2 blind, and you could limp for $2 before the flop. Raises were in $3 increments though, so a PF raise would bring it to $5. I haven’t come across any games of that structure in Washington.

Anyway, I had a great table. In the 8 seat, I had two weak-tight locals on my right, and four absolutely terrible donators in seats 2-5. I don’t play live as much as I’d like to, and I really enjoyed adapting my play to the table, and making some moves that weren’t quite ABC poker like my auto-pilot, multi-tabling online play.

This presented some interesting hands and decisions, at least interesting for me. Here’s an example. I had been treading water, basically staying even when this hand came up.

I have K [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]J [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] on the button. Two or three limpers to the old guy on my right, who raises. I make a fishy cold-call, the blinds call, and the limpers call. Six to the flop for 12 SB.

Flop comes K88r. Everyone checks to me and I bet. Horrible lady (HL) in seat 3 calls, PF raiser calls.

Turn is a blank. Now the HL bets out. I’ve seen her make this move a couple of times before in the session – she flops top pair and checks the flop, then comes out betting on the turn. This happened against me in an early hand, where we both had KQ and ended up chopping the pot. PF raiser folds, I raise. I thought that KT and K9 are as possible as an 8 or a higher K. Well, she 3-bets.

I call, and the river is an A. She bets again, and given some of the strange hands she was showing down, I call and say “I hope we’re chopping this.” She flips over 88 for the flopped quads. B&M poker is rigged!

The full-kill was another good wrinkle that I hadn’t played for those stakes before. I’m a low limit guy, so the $6/$12 kill pots were a higher stake than normal for me, although I’m bankrolled for taking a shot at it. So, later in the session this hand comes up.

Weak-tight local guy has just triggered the kill and posts his $6 blind on the button. I’m in the BB with JJ. It’s folded to a fishy caller in MP who limps for $6. Folded to the old guy, who raises his option.

I think about 3-betting, but decide to just call instead. I want the fishy guy in the pot post-flop, and I think he’s not going to call $12 here. I also have a pretty good read on the old guy, and feel like I can easily get it heads up post-flop against the fish if the old guy misses the flop.

He was pretty easy to read on hands where he raised PF, as he’d keep firing with top pair or an overpair, but would check-fold if overcards flopped and he was faced with a bet.

So I call, and the fish calls. Three to the flop, with 6 SB’s in the pot.

The flop comes AQTr. I check, fish checks, old guy bets. I make a terribly loose call planning on spiking a turn K. Fish calls too.

Turn is a J.

I check and now the fish bets. Old guy folds. I think a bit, and decide that between my chance of making a full house, and the chance the fishy guy has something even as low as just top pair merits a call. Just one of the fun parts of live play, I probably wasn’t getting odds to call him if he has a K, but for some reason I just didn’t read him as having it, and I figured I’d check/call the river and let him continue his semi-bluff.

River is a blank. I check, fish checks, turns over AT, and MHIG. Old guy shakes his head.

I end up winning another nice kill pot later on after making a flush against an angry tilting Spanish guy who is cussing out the table under his breath, and cash out at about 2:30 a.m. up $130.

Saturday

Mark and Rick show up almost an hour late, after their flight circles for 45 minutes waiting for the fog to clear. They’ve had about 5 drinks each on the 90 min plane ride down. Southwest Airlines drink coupons rule!

After hitting the buffet at Harrah’s, we follow Rick from casino to casino. He’s been coming to Reno since he was 18, and knows the casino floors with his eyes closed. We bounce from casino to casino so he can check the sports lines, as he plans on betting a bit on the Sunday games.

We end up at the Cal-Neva, which is an older casino more typical of what I expected from Reno. The poker room is full of grizzled locals, drinking the bad coffee and grinding away at the low limit games. Mark and I decide it’s time for some drunken LAG action, so we decide to sit.

Cal-Neva has a great game if you want really cheap poker action so you can start drinking multiple beers. It’s a $1-4/$1-6 spread limit game, with a single $1 blind. I’m guessing this is similar to the Magoo game at the Excaliber that Al Capone has talked about, and I can totally see how it’s the perfect LAG structure for a bunch of 2+2ers.

Mark and I get onto the same table, in the 8 and 9 seat. Rick heads off to play video poker. He’s a video poker fiend, and has specific banks of machines he scouts out to check the progressives on, to find one with some good royal flush possibilities. Mark says Rick “always hits a royal, or a couple 4-of-a-kinds”. Right, because of his video poker skill… [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

Anyway, we settle into the game and start trying to loosen up the locals. Our waitress, “Cher”, keeps the beers coming. Cher fit her name very well. Her waitress outfit was having a hard time containing her breasts, which also looked about as hard as the columns at the Coliseum in Rome.

We played about 5 hours at the Cal-Neva. Some of the highlights include me repeatedly sucking out on people with monster hands like 84o, since I was seeing a lot of flops for $1. The range of profitable hands expands greatly when you’ve had 7 beers and play expertly post-flop like I do. An example of that expert play is being in a 3-way pot on the turn, having a player call out “I need an 8”, an 8 falling on the river, him betting out and getting a caller, before I call as well and PAY HIM OFF. I play g00t! It was an incredibly unprofitable game with that structure, but a fun one to lag it up a bit and have 7 or 8 beers, and I think I finished about even.

Oh, and we weren’t even there 3 hours before Rick comes up to the table, and tells us to follow him, he just hit a royal flush. Sure enough, on the SAME machine he hit a royal on during his last trip to Reno, he hit a heart royal flush, which paid about $1,500. I guess he needs to write Video Poker for the Advanced Player or something.

Before we leave the Cal-Neva, I decide it’s time to pop my sports betting cherry. While I’ve played fantasy sports for a long time, and done the office March Madness pool, for some reason I’ve never actually made a sports wager in a casino. Mark and I check out the NBA action for the night, and even though Mark holds the title of “worst sports bettor in the world” over the past two years, we decide to each put in $10 toward a two-team parlay, and take the Cavs and Wolves, who are each giving about 3 pts. $20 to win $52, for a sweet, sweet, $26 profit each if we win.

Next we hit the buffet at Harrah’s again. This was only noteworthy because they had some seafood dish called the “fiery Diablo”! [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] I was scared to try it, because from the looks of it I probably would have been Ole-ing in the bathroom for the rest of the night.

We head back to the Eldorado, and get seats in the $3-6 kill game. Mark hasn’t played live higher than $2/4, but he’s gotten into online poker recently and read SSHE, so I convince him he can handle it. We each buy in for a rack, and I proceed to run my stack up to $240 by hitting pretty much everything over the first hour or so.

Then my luck changes.

I take a phone call from a friend back home who has called to check in and see how we’re doing, but really just wants to complain about some bad rivers he got on Poker Stars. I think I was too sympathetic to him, because the poker gods decided to punish me thereafter for listening to this bad beat story during my rush.

Well, it was either that or the Red Bull’s and vodkas that we had switched to that caused the downswing.

Coming into the trip I really wanted to play solid and take a shot at a $6-$12 game. That might have been +EV, but I decided that sitting in the $3/$6 game and lagging it up with my buddy was way more +FV (fun value).

That was about when I decided it was time to pop another cherry and blind straddle. As the guys who went to the Muck will attest, I’m a major risk-adverse gine, so this was a big step for me.

It was a nice loose PF/weak-tight post-flop table, which was prime for straddling. So I announce my blind raise UTG, and get some funny looks. I get like 5 callers, and the flop comes QJ6r. Checked to me and I bet blind. Couple of callers. I decide before the turn that I’m going to make a modified blind-stop-and-go move. I’m going to finally look at my cards, and still bet regardless of what I have. Turn is something like a 9. Checked to me, I find 63o, bet out, and everyone mucks. I rule at straddling!

Shortly after, the table becomes even more of a lag-fest because of one player.

This guy sits down in the 10 seat, with Mark in the 9 and me in the 8. His name is David, and he’s waiting for a seat in the No Limit game. He’s playing pretty LAG to begin with, but after I straddle and Mark blind 3-bets on a hand, David decides that he’s going to raise every hand PF blind. If it’s limped to him he’d raise, and if it’s raised he’d 3-bet, no matter what. He held up to his end of the bargain, as he was doing it every single hand, and was really putting a couple of the weak-tighties on tilt.

He burned through a rack pretty quickly, re-bought, and then started hitting some blind hands, mostly against me. I like money, so I was calling him down with some decent hands, and every fricken time he actually turn over a legit holding. The only good news while he was at the table was that Mark and I checked the NBA scores – Cavs and TWolves both win by 10! Whoo hoo! 1-for-1.

We chatted David up a bit while he was at the table, and he said he lives in Vegas now, after moving there in the recent past from San Francisco. Said he used to play the no limit a lot at Lucky Chances, and now plays the no limit at the Bellagio. If he has to wait for a seat in the Bellagio NL game, he said he plays the 80/160 limit game. I could never decide if I believed him or not, but if he wasn’t BS’ing me, then I’m sure some of you Bay Area and Vegas guys may have played with him. Heck, maybe he’s a 2+2er for all I know, but he seemed to be giving off more of a donator vibe to me.

After about 6 hours of play, we called it a night at about 2:30 a.m., since we wanted to get up and play in a tournament at Harrah’s the next morning at 10:00. I ended up cashing out exactly $100, for a profit of $0, and one heck of an hourly rate. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Sunday

We get up at 8:30 or so, and head over to Harrah's. They have a $25 morning tournament. It unofficially should be titled "the worst structured tournament ever". You start with 800 chips, and blinds of 25/50. The blinds double each 15 minutes, so by the 2nd level you're already less than 10x BB if you don't win some hands early. Fun!

While we're deciding whether to play or not, we check the football lines at Harrah's. Over the past 24 hours, the most popular bet seems to be taking the under on both games, with the blizzard in the East, and 12 inches of snow possible. Except on Gameday I notice both of the fields look fine, and it's not snowing. So I decide to buck the trend, and put $20 to parlay both overs - 36 for the Falcons/Eagles and 34.5 for the Pats/Steelers. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

We play in the horrible tournament, the only highlight being my expert AA cracking, when I get all-in PF with KJo. Board of QQJJK, and AA is no good!

Mark and I head back to the Eldorado and get into the $3-6 game again while we watch the Falcons. Clearly my overs bet triggered the line, because apparently the line moved to 37.5 before game time...heh heh. I drop about $35 during the game with a nice string of ice cold hands and missed flops. I'm just not that good at flopping sets. I had a ton of small pocket pairs, which were whiffing at an amazing rate.

That was the end of the poker playing, and we headed back to the Cal-Neva to get some cheap food and watch the Pats/Steelers game. Nothing better than watching a game in the sports book, except when you're worried about the potential for a riot or murderous rampage from everyone who was taking the under.

I flew back to Seattle shortly after the game, tired, but after having a fun weekend. Some summary thoughts:

- Downtown Reno, at least between the Eldorado, Cal-Neva and Harrahs, isn't much for mid-limit hold em. Eldorado had a $6-12 going for a little while Friday night, but other than that I never saw anything higher than 4-8 kill. We didn't make it out to the Peppermill, where I think they have higher limit games. One of the dealers at Eldorado also told us about a PL Omaha game with a $3 grand buy in that goes once in a while in Tahoe. I asked him if he wanted to stake me in it, but for some reason during my hold em lag-fest he was slightly skeptical of my Omaha skill.

- Reno is cheap. The prices for things are probably more in line with what Vegas was like 20 years ago. If you're a skier, it's pretty cheap too. One guy we played with was staying at Eldorado for $57/night as part of a package that included a lift ticket for Tahoe.

- Straddling is fun, sports betting is fun, Red Bull and vodka is good, and so is loosening up the old timers in Reno.

[shadow29]

trip report

no nudity

[img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
trip report

no nudity

[img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I figure most people won't read past that part. I don't blame them.

[ThaSaltCracka]

[ QUOTE ]
That was about when I decided it was time to pop another cherry and blind straddle. As the guys who went to the Muck will attest, I’m a major risk-adverse gine, so this was a big step for me.

[/ QUOTE ] haha, great. Sounds like you had fun.

[nolanfan34]

I forgot one of the major highlights from the first night, and it's worth adding on.

The first night, right after I sat at the Omaha table, there was a major disagreement between two players at one of the 3-6 tables. Both players were pretty drunk, and after warnings from the floor a couple of times, they both continued their tough guy argument and talked about "taking it outside". The floor ended up forcing both of them to pick up and leave, much to the dismay of the Omaha guys, who wanted to see a fight.

What was funny, is that one of the guys involved looked just like thebruiser500 based on that one pic that always gets posted. He was really steaming, was it you Danny?

The even funnier part was that I overheard him explaining the problem to the floor after he got kicked out. Apparently he had told another player who had beat him in a pot "nice hand", and the guy responded "ni han". He was very clear on that, explaining the spelling and everything. Danny/bruiser look-a-like explained that he was mad, because "ni han" in Vietnamese means F-you.

Good times.

[That guy]

I was at Lucky Chances recently where they tell me Mills Lane (the boxing ref and judge) plays small-stakes hold em at Cal Neva daily...

I haven't been to Reno in a looong time but I vividly remember all the old timers drinking industrial coffee and acting generally 'curmudgeonly' (my new adverb)...

[stabn]

He really was such a gine at our first table too. Never played a single hand blind. The dude and i tried everything, but he just sat there playing his cards like a girl and rivering me when he didn't have odds [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[ThaSaltCracka]

[ QUOTE ]
He really was such a gine at our first table too. Never played a single hand blind. The dude and i tried everything, but he just sat there playing his cards like a girl and rivering me when he didn't have odds [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[/ QUOTE ]total douche.

[The Dude]

[ QUOTE ]
That was about when I decided it was time to pop another cherry and blind straddle.

[/ QUOTE ]
WARNING! Imposter Alert!

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
That was about when I decided it was time to pop another cherry and blind straddle.

[/ QUOTE ]
WARNING! Imposter Alert!

[/ QUOTE ]

I have witnesses.