What could be more American on that most American of holidays than baseball and poker? Not much, perhaps except for BBQ and fireworks, but for this year, the former triumphed over the latter.
It’s just too bad that neither one was a winning proposition.
The Oakland A’s were in town, playing against the Toronto Blue Jays. I actually missed out on a bargain: StubHub had what appeared to be a decent field-level seat for a nice $17 on Tuesday afternoon, but I decided to keep looking around. A mistake to put it off: By the time I got home later in the evening, the ticket was gone.
So I did what any enterprising person would do: I posted on craigslist. I actually got a response from someone who had a $10 field-level ticket, but we never managed to connect before I had to make the drive across the bay.
so then I went looking for the ticket sellers who hang around the stadium. Funny, they were trying to sell above face value. I offered $20 for one (they go for $28 or $32) and got turned down. I suspect they got exactly $0 eventually. Their loss.
I ended up just going to the ticket window, where I sort of made another mistake: When offered the choice of sun or shade, I chose to be closer to the field. And on most days, 8 rows form the field, on the aisle, right on the 3rd base line by the bullpen pitcher’s mound would be a near-perfect seat. But this was not most days.
True, it was warm and sunny, a gorgeous day for baseball. Except that it was not “warm,” it was hot! I was soaked in sweat from just sitting there, and even multiple layers of sunscreen didn’t keep me from ending up with a couple of small red patches. Despite that is was Dollar Dog Wednesdays–hot dogs $1 each–it was too hot to have all that much of an appetite. But I did easily finish off two large lemonades.
Even the oppressive heat would have been tolerable if the game had been good. It wasn’t. Starting pitcher Joe Kennedy gave up 4 runs in the first inning and was yanked, the A’s failed to generate anything resembling an offense for more than 7 innings, and I ended up leaving after those 7 innings with the A’s trailing 8-0. The A’s ended up losing 10-3.
So it was on early to the second part of my planned day: A little poker. I had no idea what to expect at the Oaks‘ weekly Wednesday evening event, what with it being a holiday and all. (Just 26 or so thousand made it to the coliseum on the day off, leaving vast swaths of empty seats.) I was early enough for a little $3/$6 before the tournament started.
I was hoping to reverse a recent trend of losses. I had been getting hammered at the tables, mostly by river rats. It had been frustrating and I had been taking a bit of time off to try and recover mentally. I know, of course, that you want the loose passive players in limit games, but I’d been getting an inordinate number of them hitting their draws on the river when I would get aggressive with the best hands.
The early table I played was typical: very passive, occasional preflop raises. I got a bit up early, but that was the last of the pot-dragging I’d be doing in cash games this day. I encountered some additional frustration from another typical trait of the passive player: they don’t raise premium hands unless those premium hands are pairs.
So, for example, in one hand, with no one having raised and with me in late position with A-10o and an ace and rags on the flop, I bet out and got called down by the player on my right who had AQ. I never suspected that he had a bigger ace because he never acted as if he did.
I played for a bit after I got knocked out of the tournament as well, a good hour and a half, and never once dragged a pot. I continued to play a tight-aggressive style, but either flops not hitting the occasional premium hands or getting taken off hands on river draws left me with nearly nothing by the time I figured I’d had enough.
Meanwhile, the tournament attracted a disappointing 48 players, which meant that only the top 5 got paid. I actually made it to the final table by virtue of a lucky all-in quadruple up when my all-in reraise with pocket 8s flopped top pair after 3 other players called, but the final table wasn’t enough and I finished 8th.
The most entertaining hand of the night was one I wasn’t involved it. Three players were, though, one who had been seeing a lot of flops and two who eventually went all-in, one with pocket queens, one with pocket jacks. The flop on this hand was 9-7-7 and there was quite a bit of action after there had already been some good preflop action. When the turn bought the 3rd 7, the two pocket pairs both made it all-in, and when the third player turned up A-9 for the then-third-best hand, the table roared when the 4th 7 hit on the river to knock out both of the pocket pairs.
Still, despite the lousy baseball game and despite the lack of traction at the poker tables, and with a tasty banana split thrown in in-between, it’d be hard to argue that you could have much more of an All-American day. And that’s just fine with me.