By brad2002tj on June 4th, 2008

I spent a day at Winstar casino this week and although it wasn't a terribly profitable trip I was really impressed by the poker room. First of all the poker room is absolutely huge and has a nice players' lounge for players to chill out while taking breaks or whatever, along with a grill and self service refreshment center. I have played live poker at a lot of places around the country but I must say the dealers at Winstar were among the best I have seen. They were extremely quick and accurate and seemed to do everything automatically. Combined with auto shufflers at the cash tables, the pace is pretty good.

I played $1/$2 NL for a few hours and hit a nice $600 pot when our table hit the "splash pot," where a randomly selected table gets $100 dropped into a hand. When the average stack is around $200, this obviously creates crazy play. Anyway I am UTG+1 and peel up A4o and jam my $180 stack in and get 3 callers. Only 2 of the callers showed, one with 44 and one with 45(???) so 44 is drawing dead when I flop an ace and collect the pot. I chip down to about $415 by the time the tournament starts, mainly with losing what I consider a cooler with a queen high flush where villian had an ace high flush. It could have been worse as villian didn't get full value from the hand.

The tournament is a $115 freezeout with a rapidly escalating blind structure typical of low buyin tourneys. You start with 3,000 chips at 25/50 and 20 minute levels. Around 80 played. I am pretty happy with my overall tournament play but got knocked out with a close decision. At the start of the third hour at 500/1000 I had 7500 chips in the big blind where shortstack for 2000 shoves, another shortstack for 2500 shoves, and SB reshoves, who covers. It's only 6500 for me to call for 20,000 so I need 32% equity in the pot. I look down at A[h]Q[h] and think for a minute before calling. Initial shortstack didn't show but first reshover had 55 and sb had KK. Damn. I don't suckout and am out. In the end I'm not sure about the call but at the time I felt I had a hand with 7.5 BB, 1BB already in the pot, and a lot of dead money. I havn't taken the time to crunch the numbers but I'm fairly sure this is a call 100% of the time.


Anyway, I finished up $100 for the day, which after my fuel driving up there left me with a whopping profit of $60.

By brad2002tj on June 4th, 2008

I spent a day at Winstar casino this week and although it wasn't a terribly profitable trip I was really impressed by the poker room. First of all the poker room is absolutely huge and has a nice players' lounge for players to chill out while taking breaks or whatever, along with a grill and self s...