Choctaw Trip Report

As mentioned in the previous post, my brother in law and I ventured out to Choctaw Casino in OK for the Friday night $225 Bounty tournament. For your buyin, you got 5k in chips, and you could buy an additional 500 chips for $5, when you registered. In addition, if you played at the cash tables leading up to the tournament, based on time, you can earn additional chips.

The day we went, they had about 60 runners or so. The poker room itself is pretty nice, by Indian casino standards. It is fairly new, I believed just open back in February. The chairs are very comfortable, which was a nice upgrade from the standard hard chairs you usually get at most casino's.

The structure is pretty fast, 20 min levels, so you have to watch stack sizes relative to the blinds at all times, and you have to try and look for opportunities to steal or double up to give you some breathing room.

My first table had a bunch of regulars. I knew this since every time we had a dealer change, greetings were done on a first name basis. What you basically had in the regs, were some hard core rocks. It took me a very short time to figure this out, however, there were a couple of young guys who were playing pretty loose, so it somewhat countered the table dynamics.

I had 3 tight players immediately to my right, and had the loose young guys to my left. Not ideal, but I worked with it. The first hand I got involved in was in the BB with 99. The tight button raised 3x and I called. Flop comes 555, I check he fires 2/3 pot, and I rocket my boat into the muck. The nice thing about the local tighties, is that for some reason, they play friendly poker, and he was nice enough to show me his Kings.

An interesting hand took place between the 3 tighties and one of the loose guns. The tighties were button and blinds, and the loose guy open 4x, only to get flatted by all 3 tighties. Flop comes KQJ all spades. Young guy bets pot, and all 3 tighties flat....hmmmmmm. Turn brings a low non spade blank. Young guy shoves, first tighty cold calls, and so do the other 2. River brings another low non spade card. I don't recall the stack sizes, but bottom line is that they all wound up all in. Young guy had AA with the a of spade, and he lost. Can you guess what the 3 tight guys had? Yup, KK, JJ, QQ. Live poker is rigged!

The tighty who wins the hand, rides that to the final table, where as I alluded to the earlier post, was chopped 7 ways.

We got some new players, who were some more action players than rocks, and things opened up a bit. I unfortunately kept getting 2nd best hands, and had dwindled down to about 10 blinds, at around the 100/200 level. I got 99 in the big blind, so needless to say I'm going with the hand. Middle position opens for 3x, button flats, I shove and both call, where I and the button are all in. I'm in bad as middle position has JJ and button has TT. However, the dopey poker gods decide to allow me to hang around a bit longer, and I get a 9 in the window and hold to triple up, and picked up my first bounty for $50 bucks.

I pick up another bounty on a play where I wasn't paying attention, and got promptly chewed out by the BB. The guy in the previous hand was crippled, and had less than a BB. It had folded to me, and not thinking, I made it 3x. The BB immediately has a cow, because I was suppose to just 'call', so we could check down and eliminate the all in guy. First of all, I was distracted and acted in auto mode. However, had I really thought about it, I still would have raised out the BB, as I had a decent hand to go up against a basically blind hand, in KQ. I won the hand, got the bounty, and told the guy to STFU. Ok, maybe not in exactly those terms, after all I am in OK, and I was sure these guys would have no problem getting into a brawl right then an there. In fact, that did happen, but let me finish the recap of the tourney.

So a few hands later I get moved to the what would be the final table, and my brother in law is on life support with about 4 blinds or so. We immediately go on break, and he gives me the rundown on the table, which we were 7 handed. Basically, the 1 seat was a decent player, 2 was a loose cannon, 4 was a local rock, I was 5, and 6 was drunk and BIL was in 9. A few hands after break, I'm on the button and get AA. First big pair I've got, and I have BIL in the BB. Oh well, not going to soft play so I put in a standard raise, and of course BIL insta mucks. No issue realizing that I'm not raising him without a hand, just unfortunate for me that I get that hand in that circumstance. A few hands later BIL goes all in with Kx, and gets eliminated by someone with a pp, and the table goes 6 handed. In fact, at that point we are 11 handed, and I'm down to about 12 bb's, with the blinds heading to 1k/2k. So I have to make a move, and find KT sooted, so I shove, and get called by K2 and 44. I don't improve, and I get eliminated on the final table bubble.

I hang around and 2 players get eliminated pretty quickly, and then much to my surprise, the chop talk starts. I mean I understand that with the blinds at 2k/4k, that this is going to be a crap shoot. But you got 3 players which had less than 4 blinds! The chip leader had around 100k....and he agrees to an even 7 way chop, where they all got about 1K! It really made no sense to me, but these guys were pretty happy. I asked the chip leader why he would agree? at a minimum, he should have asked for a larger share....and his reply was that, with the blinds as high as they were, anything could happen. I just shook my head, and went to look for my BIL who was in some cash game action at $2/$5 blinds.

I don't want to get very winded here, but suffice it to say, that the play I saw was about as bad as I've ever seen. And there was some serious money on the table too! There were guys with several thousand dollars...I don't recall if the buyin was uncapped, but these were some juicy games.

At one point the drunk guy from my table in the tournament that my BIL had updated me on, got into some argument with a TJ lookalike. I happen to be with the floor manager asking him about the TJ Cloutier classic in September, when all of sudden we hear FLOOR! I look over, and it's at my BIL's table, and the TJ lookalike and the drunk where nose to nose, with fist clenched. So the Floor dude (after politely excusing himself from our conversation) runs over and gets between them, right before the punches were about to fly. Pretty wild, but then again, it is OK, and I thought about my earlier incident I related above.

Well, that about did if for that night, as I described in my previous post, BIL got his money back and then some on that pot, and we left shortly after midnight.

The following week, I went back to play in the Shawn Merion Celebrity tournament, not realizing it was a charity event. So I gave a little to charity, and at the end of the day, had a decent time.

I met TJ Cloutier who is the 'house pro', and in fact you can see him pimping the casino on the tournament of champions on ESPN. Annie Duke, Tiffany Michelle and Maria Ho were there too, as was Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavs. I didn't get to play with any of them, although they were at adjacent tables, and were stopping play all the time to take pictures, which I'm sure is what they are told to do. I of course took no part in pictures, as I'm much too good looking to be seen with ugly folks! ;-)

Oh yeah, I made the final table bubble again, so that is 2 for 2, and I hope to break that string the next time I play. I do think I will be going out there again for the TJ classic, and may run some satty's. It's only about an hour drive for me, so its not that bad.

2BA