I just got back from the Trump Indiana, where two buddies and I played - and lost at - some 2/5 No-Limit Hold ‘Em. I have some observations. The play is generally very weak and rather loose; most tables will have one or two sharks and one or two decent players, with a few more non-suicidal players and the rest fish. All in all, the games are very beatable, but you need to do a few things: realize the play is loose and mostly bad, buy in for the full amount (somebody will have well over the $200 max buy-in, and you don’t want them pushing you around while you get started), and get there early, before anybody has built a monster stack. On the 2/5 tables, at least, the rake consists of “time” - $7 every dealer change, or every half-hour. Given the loose play, that’s not too bad. Waits for ring games are pretty short (<15 minutes, and the place was packed). There are also sit-n-go’s, which I didn’t play.

Myself, I lost, mostly on blinds and pre-flop calls, with one spectacularly bad beat and a couple lesser ones. The killer was flopping trip eights and calling an all-in raise for a loss of most of my stack on the hand, when I got out-kicked. The rest was either bad cards (I had 39 of clubs I don’t know how many times) or decent cards (like pocket Js) walking into devasting flops or turns (like straight-flush draws I can’t fit). So, I only got dealt maybe 15-20 playable hands out of roughly 180. Of those, only about 5 or 6 looked strong after the flop. Given different cards and a full buy-in, a decent player should clean up (indeed, a few were doing just that).

I’ll definitely head back out there - it’s only a 25 minute drive - sometime, earlier and with a bit more of a bankroll.

EDIT: It dawns on me I forgot to mention the two most ridiculous stories of the night. One player hit quad aces and didn’t even know it; he called a small bet on the river because he was worried about a straight. It wasn’t until about ten seconds later, after the other nine of us been staring at him like he had just yelled, “Long live the Emperor!”, that it hit him that he had four, not three, aces. The other incredible story was a hand that came KKJ-J-K. So, everybody’s playing the board, right? No, one guy has pocket K-J. Quad kings with trip jacks for good measure. That’s what you call crippling the deck…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 12:20 am and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.