The monthly YMCA golf outing was this past Friday at Princeton Meadows. Earlier in the week, Twoin and I had been toying with the idea of heading down to Atlantic City for the weekend because if we wanted to, we could head straight down there right after golf. Finally he decided not to because of a few different reasons. So we play the golf outing and then we were heading home and sort of half regretting that we didn’t decide to just go to The Borgata since neither of us had anything really interesting planned for the rest of the weekend. But by that point we figured his bank was already closed so he couldn’t get money out anyway, so it was too late to change our minds. I head home but while I’m still on the road, Twoin calls me and says that he got a call from Mikey who was heading down to AC with a couple of our other friends. And as luck would have it, his bank was still open too! Suddenly it was on like Donkey Kong!

We rolled into The Borgata a little before 11p and checked into our comp’ed rooms. The room I got this time was much more spacious and luxurious than Twoin’s. My room was set up very similar to the regular rooms at The Wynn except that the TV was on the wall facing the bed as opposed to facing the couch. Regardless, I didn’t really stop to admire it very long as we were both hungry and so we headed straight down to The Old Homstead for some dinner. We had a dozen clams on the half shell followed by a humungous 36 oz. rib steak, perfectly cooked I might add, and chased it down with a bottle of Coppala Edizione Pennino zinfandel- a huge flavored red with gigantic lush fruit flavors and not overly tannic which made it a great pairing with the steak. Comp dollars I had left over from my previous visits were more than enough to cover the meal, so all we had to leave was a cash tip, and then we were off to play some blackjack.

I don’t recall anything too interesting happening during that session, but when we decided to quit at around 5:30a, I was up $1200 and Twoin was up a decent amount too. I told him that I was going to go to sleep and that if I happened to wake up early enough, I would try and enter the weekly $300+$40 NL hold ’em tourney at 11am. I had never played it before, but the poker room was newly opened and I figured this would be a good chance to check it out. Besides, my blackjack winnings covered my entry and if nothing else, playing a tourney could be a good way to kill a lot of hours without losing my winnings back at the blackjack tables. So after a long hot shower and a restful but short nap, I woke up at 10:15 and decided I’d go and sign up for the tourney.

Feeling pretty hung over but without enough time to grab any breakfast, I sat down to play and just ordered an orange juice from the cocktail waitress and that would be the only thing resembling nourishment I would have for the next seven and a half hours. There were seven tables in action and I think 64 players. We started with 10k in chips with 30 minute levels starting at 25/50. I started in seat 1 of a table that had one very solid female player to my left, a crazy loose caller in seat 6, and a rock at the far end of the table. Everybody else looked a bit amateurish and uncomfortable against aggression so I did a lot of cheap steals to build up my stack while avoiding all confrontations with the Lady and the Rock, just hoping to catch a hand I could play a big pot with against Mr. Loose Caller. Mr. LC managed to build up a big stack by sucking out against the Lady for a third of her stack, but promptly lost a bunch of it back to various players at the table, just not me since I had not yet caught a hand I would want to play for a big pot. Eventually I catch such a hand, flopping a set I think it was and he showed me down with just a pair. Sayonara to him and I was now close to chip leader at my table, probably a little behind the Rock. From there, I never relinquished control of the table, picking my spots to steal and still avoiding the Lady (who had rebuilt her stack nicely) and the Rock who had lost a couple of sizeable pots when the flop missed him.

For the most part, my reads on the overall tightness of the nervous players was spot on. I always raised enough to where I figured the players would only be capable of playing back at me if they held a monster. Most of the time I did it preflop or on the flop and out of all the times I got played back at, only once did I get visibly caught with my hand in the cookie jar, trying to steal preflop with Q8 suited and having to show down because a tiny stack reraised all in and I had to make the inexpensive call. All the other times that my targets played back at me when I held trash, I was able to just muck on the turn or river without showing. That was probably key because the bulk of the time between big hands was spent stealing pots from the same three or four players who might have found the courage to play back at me had they seen some of the hole cards I had been beating them with.

Anyway, to make a super long story a little shorter, I’ll just mention my favorite hand from the day before moving on. I decided to make a preflop call from the BB with pocket 4’s. I check immediately on a flop of A45 rainbow, but I had been checking almost all of my flops immediately, usually staring at the opponent and not even looking at the board when doing so. The aggressor in seat 7 threw in a sizeable raise, representing an Ace, but since he had been pushing worse hands pretty hard before, I thought he could also have just been fishing to see if I had an Ace. I pause to contemplate how to extract the most value from this hand and decide to act as if I’m making a tough call with a little Ace, you know, something he might be able to get me to lay down on the turn or river. After pretending to go into the tank for a while, I make what looks like a painfully reluctant call. Once again I stare at my opponent instead of the board as the turn comes a Queen. The long pause for my previous call, coupled with my staring at him instead of the board apparently confused him into thinking it was his action, and he checked out of turn in a too-quick fashion suggesting that he probably caught something. The dealer corrected him and said the action was to me. I had my right hand palm up as if I was going to check (I usually check by tapping the back of my fingers to the table), and then immediately acted like I was changing my mind because I knew a check was coming after my action and that I recognized this as an opportunity for an easy steal. I reached for my chips as if I was clumsily trying to figure out how much to pull off my stack in order to steal the pot. I pulled 15k off and sheepishly threw it forward as if embarrassed to make such a blatant steal and then… he immediately re-raised to 30k before my chips even hit the table! Bingo, I knew I nailed him! I immediately re-raised all-in and pot-committed he called with Q5!! Holy smokes, I figured him for A5 but he had Q5 and no flush draw! With a blank on the river I knocked him out giving me a commanding chip lead and from there I pretty much won the tourney without ever really getting into any serious trouble. I lost a couple of medium sized pots to bad beats but eventually knocked out those very same players so justice was served. Seven and a half hours later, I had all the chips and took down the first prize of a little over $7200. I was walking around like I had grapefruits in my pants, although I’m not sure if it was because of the giant wad of hundreds in each pocket or if it was my suddenly giant cojones. 🙂

By the end of the tourney, it had been probably about 19 hours since I had eaten anything, so it was time to celebrate with a kickass meal. Twoin and I grabbed a seat at the bar at Michael Mina’s new restaurant Sea Blue. It was impossible to get a table there on a Sat night, but fortunately they offered the full dinner menu even at the bar so we weren’t missing out on anything. This celebration definitely demanded champagne so I ordered a bottle of the oh-so-delicious Krug NV Grand Cuvee. I then proceed to order every appetizer on the menu in addition to the seared Ahi entree. Funny how we didn’t get much attention from the bartender until I ordered the bottle of Krug along with all the apps, and then suddenly we were the ones getting all the preferential treatment and everyone else was getting ignored.

Instead of standard rolls and butter Sea Blue gives you delicious pita wedges that seem to have a hint of curry to them, and they are served with two different puree-like spreads and some creme freche. It was a great thing to nibble on while waiting for our apps, and boy were the apps about to come… First came the trio of soups. There was a tomato and crab soup that was lightly spicy with nice chunks of crab meat and a few shreds of basil. I loved the flavor balance as it was a clean and bright tomato zip without overwhelming the chunks of crab meat. Next was a roasted garlic soup of some sort which was brought to life by the flavor of cumin. Very ethnic tasting in a good way. But the best soup of all was a corn puree that featured seared scallops redolent with the essence of truffle. The flavor of the corn was sweet and inviting and when you tasted a bit of the scallop, it would blow your mind with the initial flavor of the searing followed by the sweetness of the scallop itself and finishing with that heady aroma of truffle. Sooo good.

The raw trio was also pretty tasty. The Ahi tuna tartare was just like I make it at home, heavy with the flavor of toasted sesame oil. The kobe beef carpaccio however was a little too thin and got lost in the accompanying sauce. The big winner of the trio though was a tartare of some type of medium fatty/slick white fish topped with wasabi tobiko. Terrific.

Too bad the trio of fried apps were all misses. Lobster corndogs were too contrived as a concept to begin with and the execution of them left a lot to be desired too. Basically a seafood meatball inside a mini corndog shell. Weak. Then there was a fried battered prawn which was just ok, nothing special, but not bad. The third item I can’t even recall, but I know it was also unspectacular.

The steamed trio of mussels, clams and prawns was much better. The mussels were accented with chunks of chorizo which is always nice. The prawns were served with the head on as they should be, and sat in some heavily buttered sauce which is like cheating, but was definitely irresistable. The star of the trio had to be the clams though. Also sitting in a buttery broth of some sorth, the clams themselves were bursting with rich clam flavor. Grilled bread was served to give you something to sop up all that goodness and that too was of course heavily buttered and delicious. By that point we were getting a little full and we ended up not finishing our seared Ahi tuna entrees which while good were nowhere near the level of quality or creativity we saw in the apps. Too full for dessert, we finished the meal with a couple glasses of a Kracher Cuvee dessert wine I had never tried before. Honeylike with with a nice apricot flavor, it was a really nice big finish to the meal.

Twoin had lost a bit at blackjack while I had been playing in the poker tourney, so after dinner we went back to the blackjack pit to exact our revenge. We got in at a table with two of the best dealers we’ve ever had the pleasure of sitting with. George was the easy mannered main dealer who loved to chat about sports gambling and never seemed to have a blackjack when his upcard was an ace. The dealer that would replace George during breaks was a really funny guy named Minh. When he would draw himself to an improbabe winning hand he would look at it and declare “Unacceptable!” Then when anybody would color up and leave he would say “Hey, peace out, ok?” Very cool guy. Unfortunately I had lost almost all of my $1k buy-in when I decided to put the last of my stack in play on one hand. Luckily I hit that hand and then kept hitting hands after that until I had clawed my way back, just like Twoin was doing. When we finally felt like we had milked the table for the last good shoe, we both walked away with our winnings. George and Minh had brought Twoin’s bankroll back to profitability and I had made another $600 profit on the session. All told, that’s about $9k in profits for the weekend. Oh and as a little added bonus at the end, Twoin finally earned his Borgata Black Label status too. Not bad for a trip that almost didn’t happen!