Monday, December 21, 2009

Atlantic City

So I planned a trip a while back to visit Atlantic City as my friend Collin and his wife Katie would be there to play some WSOP qualifiers and having not ever met face to face I was thrilled for the chance to go. Having never been east of Chicago I was pretty excited to visit the east coast, My good friend Louis (grind4moniez) was also going to AC so we decided to share a room at Borgata and he would pick me up at the airport in Newark..

The 2 hour drive from Newark to Atlantic City is not bad at all - lots of trees to llok at and coming from the dessert it was a nice change of scenery. Atlantic City was so much smaller than what I had imagined, very similar to Laughlin is anyone has ever had the mis-fortune of visiting that place :)

The Borgata was very nice and "Vegas like" as they say.. our room was located on the 43rd floor and had a great view of the city.

An interesting situation occurd when we pulled in to valey parking and the nice lady getting our bags refused to take the case of Corona we had, some kind of rule about 2bottle maximum or something.. So Louis carries a case of Corona bottles by hand to the check-in counter... Fun!

A few observations about Atlantic City:
poker players talk more in this town than I have ever seen anywhere!! the players are not shy about critisizing any play they witness, describing why/how they played their own hands and precisely what they would have done with yours - nice information right? Wrong! It becomes aparent soon that they really just like hearing themselves talk and rarely practice what they preach. This was the most annoying table chatter that I have ever been witness to - I suggest strongly in taking an Ipod to the tables!

At one point there were litterally 7 people all talking about the same hand at the same time..

Taj Mahal: If your familiar with the movie "Rounders" you remember the Taj scenes.. Well, The Taj is not the same place as portrayed in the film - The poker room was the dirtiest room I have ever played in. the tables were just disgusting and i wont even go into the chips.. I was appraoched for money 2 times in ~4 hours while in the vicinity of the poker room. the drive between Borgata to Taj re-afirmed the notion that walking down these streets your life is in danger!

As far as games, Borgata had a $10/20 O.E. (Omaha, Stud 8) game with half kill that seems to run every day. On thursday Lou and i were able to get a $20/40 H.O. game started in the back that played short handed.. Their was a steady $40/80 LHE game every day however holdem is played 10 handed in AC so I stuck to Omaha or the mix games..

poker wise it was an OK trip with me winning around $1500, Lou did ok as well as he was able to get some short handed $40/80 action for a few hours where he picked up ~$2400 and Colin "mother F%$^ing" Moshman shipped the $100/daily for $~7kish which gave myself Lou, Katie and Simon an awesome booz filled railing session..

In Feb the same crew will be meeting in Vegas for 2 weeks and I'm sure there will be some awesome stories to tell from that trip!