Yesterday afternoon I went to the Hialeah Casino which has a long history ent...

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Hialeah Casino which has a long history entertaining heads of state like Churchill and Kennedy going back to the early 20th century.

Today, it has a large poker room with good service.

It is funny, they do not even pretend to enforce the English-only rule, in fact I felt embarrassed that I was in the wrong when I spoke English. Even the native English speakers with poor Spanish would speak in Spanish to the staff. It felt great, actually.

I sat down with $600 at a 2-5 NL game, and there was one player from "Malibu, California!" who was clearly worse than me, but the rest of the table seemed pretty solid. I played tight and picked up a small pot in the first 30 minutes by making a set of 8s and slow playing one player for a tiny gain of about $30.

Then I spent the next 3 hours getting absolutely no hands. Biggest pocket pair? 4s, once. No suited connectors. Once in a great while Ace-junk, no AXs or KXs. Just this long 3 hour boring streak.

This is my problem with poker, getting bored. And I am very self-aware of the problem. But it is still a problem.

Every once in a while in good late position I would steal the blinds, and more often I would limp in to see a flop with a marginal hand only to surrender to a strong bet.

Between the blinds, the rake on my tiny wins and my misadventures with those marginal/weak starters, I was surprised to see myself down ~ $450 after three hours.

Then I looked down and saw pocket Queens!

I had bettors ahead of me pre-flop and I re-raised, and then one guy re-raised all-in with about $80, and then another all-in with about $120. I called and another player called - for 4 players with lots of chips in the pot.

Then the flop came with just a ragged 3 cards, just the same junk as I had for the last 3 hours... I pushed my remaining chips all-in and I got that last caller.

The turn and river had no As or Ks.

One guy turned over QJ with a smile.

I enjoyed turning over a queen and spreading the cards to show the other queen.

Boom!

I was back up to $670 after a long wait.

I waited to the BB came around to me, then racked up and went to eat some good cuban food at Versailles (but not nearly as good as the Versailles in Culver City that Sean Dumas and I used to eat at all the time.)

I felt like I unlocked an achievement: Any other time I would have gotten bored and started to play Kx Qx, Jx and try to steal and be aggressive. Yesterday, I just chilled. Didn't even drink any beer, just water and somehow found the patience. And being down a bunch was not bothering me as much as it used to.

And it was so easy to walk away - up.

I know much of the theory of Poker and I enjoy the game, but I am not very good at long cash games because of this very problem. But it feels like I made a material improvement. I credit it the change to water therapy!

Originally posted on Facebook on June 07, 2017.