Back To Detroit

Move over Rancho Mirage; I think Greektown has become my new favorite casino.

I played in the tournament with a $75 buy-in. By Detroit standards, that would be a high-roller tournament. In fact, only 26 players showed up to play, counting me. I played a grand total of three hands over a two-and-a-half-hour period, and finished in ninth place. They only paid the top three. The structure was dreadful, with several levels that doubled the previous level (i.e. 50/100 went straight to 100/200). This makes it more of a luck-fest than a poker game.

My first hand came in the third level. By that point, three people had already gone out, one during the first level. That’s just incomprehensible to me. Regardless, I took Ace/King to showdown and beat my opponents Ace/Four to double-up (the board had two Aces on it, so my kicker played).

My second hand was a Jack/Ten. I flopped top pair, bet, and took the pot.

My final hand was pocket sevens. By this point we’d all combined to one table. I went all-in preflop (the first into the pot) and was called in two spots, by a King high and by a Jack high. A King and a Jack both flopped, so the Kings took us both out. Even though I finished out of the money, I played spectacularly well and not at all disappointed.

I made my way over to the cash games. The $1/$2 no-limit was the only NL they were spreading, although they had a $3/$6 limit game going too. The buy-in at the $1/$2 table was $50-$200, and most people were buying in for just $50. The crowd at the Detroit casinos is so different from anyplace else. One player was complaining because they had just cut off his phone service. There were a lot of discussions about lottery tickets. One guy said, “I’d played the same numbers every week for years. The one time I didn’t play last week, they hit. I woulda won $75,000. I couldn’t even sleep that night.” Another two players got into an argument over which of the Jackson brothers was the very first lead singer of the Jackson Five – Jermaine or Michael. Being a Jackson Five fan, I already knew the answer (they both were lead singers at the start and traded lead on different songs). But I kept my mouth shut and just raked in the chips. The players were so appallingly bad. I made a decent amount of money; actually a shocking amount of money given the fact that this was only a $1/$2 table and folks were losing their stacks at only $50 at a time. The only reason I left is because the table finally broke up – too many players lost all their money and had to leave. But I am sure that I’ll be back.