A Lucky Night

Wouldn't it be great if you could walk into a casino with $100 and leave with over $1,100 in your jeans/

It doesn't often happen, unfortunately, but when it does, the world takes on a rosy tint. It happened to me the other night at Talking Stick Casino near Scottsdale, AZ. and I am still basking in the glow of the after-effects.

My normal game at Talking Stick is Omaha High-Low. However, when I walked into the poker room, there was a long list of names for the Omaha game, so I switched over to Texas Hold'em. It turned out to be the best possible decision I could have made.

In Omaha High-Low, most pots are split between the high and low hands. You can also be quartered, which is a brutal way to lose. I had been running into bad luck on the river which depleted my bankroll, so I decided to have a fling with my old mistress -- Texas Holdem.

Regular readers of this column know I have bashed Hold'em in the past. But when you come right down to it, Hold'em isn't a bad game, especially if you haven't played it for a while. It is currently the world's most popular card game and that says a lot for it. I figured, why not take a chance on the game that people like Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negraneau and so many others made famous.

Thursday happens to be football night at Talking Stick. As a special promotion, the poker room gives out tickets with two numbers printed on them. If your numbers match the scores at the end of a quarter, you win up to $300 in cash. My numbers were good ones -- 0 and 4 --and I managed to hit two quarters perfectly, picking up $300 each time.

I also won one of the splash pots. When a lucky ticket holder hits the numbers, the poker room management splashes the pot at his table with $100. That pot totaled about $250 and it was sweet.

It was my lucky night.

The table was my kind of table, made up of passive players who rarely raised but who called raises. The player at seat five was the only one who raised consistently and he did it with poor hands. He managed to lose most of them, but it's still tough to call a raise when you are holding a borderline hand.

I stayed out of trouble most of the evening. When I raised, my cards hit the flop and you can't ask for more than that. Even though most of my opponents were good players, I was lucky enough to outdraw them.

I followed Doyle Brunson's advice to play suited connectors like high pairs or A-K. While my raises with the connectors sometimes failed, they won enough to give me a profit. And isn't that what real poker is all about?

Author: Geno Lawrenzi Jr.

(Geno Lawrenzi Jr. is an international journalist, magazine author and ghostwriter and poker player who lives in Phoenx, AZ. He has published 2,000 articles in 50 magazines and 125 newspapers. If you want to share a gambling story or book idea with him, send an email to glawrenzi@gmail.com ).