Quads, Trips, & Amazement

Good morning everyone.  I'm sorry that this is coming to you a day late, but once my internet was finally hooked up yesterday, I received a good call from a friend of mine who needed some help moving.  After helping him for 3 1/2 hours (from 3:30 to 7:00 in the Texas sun) I strangely enough was unable to muster up enough energy to do my poker post, so here ya go.

'Quads' and 'Trips' are nicknames for a couple of the players who I sat with on my recent move (extended vacation) to Las Vegas.  I'm not going to go all-out Rob on you and start nicknaming everybody, but these two earned their nicknames for the hands they made, usually on the flop, in the 2/4 game at the Flamingo.

'Quads' is our friend from Buffalo.  I enjoyed playing two sessions with Quads and his wife.  As our first session together was ending (ending for them, because they had dinner plans with another couple), Quads said that he was playing his final hand.  This was at the end of an hour (like it was about to become 7:00 for example).  Well, the flop came with a pair (kings I believe, but this was awhile back).  On the turn, Quads turned to me mentioning something to the effect that it was too bad he wasn't going to get much action on this hand.  Due to his opponent making some sort of decent hand, Quads was actually raised on the river, which he in turn re-raised before tabling his quads (OF COURSE - I hope you figured that out) for the winning hand.  Well, as it turns out, the Flamingo gives out 100 bucks for quads in their high-hand promotion.  What was ALSO going on though was a high hand OF THE HOUR promotion.  Now these high hands of the hour were also receiving 100 smackaroos, but the hour had just started, so Quads was going to have to wait around and play 2/4 for another hour if he wanted to receive this 100 bucks.  His quads were not guaranteed to hold up (though highly likely), but if they did, he had to be present at the end of the hour to collect his prize.  Being the good-natured guy he is, this irritated Quads because his friends were on the rail, ready to go eat.  They did understand that it was 100 bucks though, and they went off to find some food themselves.

Despite the hand mentioned above, Quads didn't become Quads until I ran into him and his lovely wife the NEXT DAY, when I met up with 'Trips' at Bally's, and we decided to head over to the Flamingo.  Well, wouldn't you know it, Quads FLOPPED QUADS, AGAIN!...  :)  By the way, the night before, in the 4 hours of the high hand of the hour promotion, my table produced the winner 3 times, the last winner making a royal flush, and I won NONE of the 3 hands - go figure...  Back to the next day, and now I'm not only watching Quads flop quads again, for another 100, but now this guy Trips to my left, you guessed it, keeps making trips (3 of a kind, without holding a pocket pair).  For those of you who are regulars in the poker blog world, Trips is none other than Lucki Duck (you're telling me), and I enjoyed sitting and chatting with him for a few hours in the very non-stressful setting which is the 2/4 arena.  During our session, Lucki pointed out another common tell which I don't know if I've seen discussed much in our blogs, but it almost always holds true.  "Watch out for the speech" (or something to that effect) was the utterance from Lucki's mouth when someone at the other end of the table started chirping at the end of a hand...  I enjoyed sitting with P and J and Lucki during these two days at the Flamingo - this next paragraph comes to you from a recent home game I went to, and was closer to shocking than enjoyable.

In the very first hand of said home game, there is TONS of action on the flop (I laid down a flopped straight with K 9, because A K would be a higher straight).  The hand plays out, and a rivered full house (10's full of queens), beats out 2 straights (the flopped A K straight - good read Coach, and a turned straight where the player just needed to hold the queen).  We use the alternate deck (nothing eventful happens), and then play another hand with the first deck (which is again a big hand).  While playing the 4th hand, my friend to my left counts the deck used in the 1st and 3rd hands, and discovers that it has only 48 cards???  After proceeding to recount it twice, it still has 48 cards each time...  Turns out that the deck was a PINOCHLE deck (which is 9's through aces, 8 of each, for 48 cards).  The BAD PART is that the guy who rivered the boat on the first hand doesn't want to return the chips to the losers of the first two hands played with the pinochle deck (everyone was using the same deck was his reasoning).  The WORSE PART is that they didn't make him...  I was about to leave right there (although I wasn't heavily involved in the hand, but then I would have missed the next gem hand, which OF COURSE he dealt).  Let me say right here that this was pretty low-stakes for what most of us are used to, so no one lost hundreds of dollars on these hands, but STILL...

The next eye-opening hand happened when 3 players were acting after the flop.  I bet out, got raised 3 times my bet, which another player called, and then the dealer flips the turn card before I act.  Before acting on my hand, I ask, "that card is going to be burned (shuffled into the deck, whatever), right?"  The dealer responds, "no, it's part of the game, sorry, I wasn't paying attention..."  So now I'm left to act on the postflop raise, KNOWING what the turn card will be, and then we'll have a round of betting on the turn card...  That's one thing about learning to play poker in Las Vegas - I have almost no stomach for home games...  Anyway, I left shortly afterward, and as you can probably figure out, won't be back...

I apologize again for the day-delay on this post, and I'll be back again tomorrow with some football picks for you.  Have a great day!