NYC Trip Report
I’m so freaking tired.
What a wild few days it has been. My NYC trip has concluded and I’m currently on the first leg of my trip back home heading through charlotte, nc. I’m looking forward to the jamba juice that’s awaiting me before the final leg of my journey back home.
NYC. Where do I begin? Tuesday morning I awake at 4:30am to catch my 6am flight from KC to NYC (via washington, dc) after about 3.5 hours of sleep. Once in NYC I get a text from krantz telling me the address and directions to his condo. Turns out he’s about 2 blocks from Wall St which is cool because it’s something I wanted to see while in NY. I get lucky and have a really cool cab driver who is originally from Nigeria and he explains the different boroughs of the city and points out stuff (Cony Island, Brooklyn bridge, Statue of Liberty, etc) as we drive to jay’s place. About 35 minutes and $40 later it’s about noon and arrive at “Team Isreal’s” headquarters.
When I get there Dan (DJ Sensei) is on the couch playing online poker, Emil (whitelime) is asleep and Jay (krantz) is chilling. We decide to go grab a bite so me, Dan and Jay head to this café/sushi/bar place around the corner. After lunch we head back up to the room and Dan and Jay split action playing some HU 50/100 against a monster fish and clean him out.
When the fish busts it’s time for us to go check in at our hotel so Dan and I take a cab to times square. It was quite an experience. All I can say is most NYC cab drivers don’t f**k around lol. This guy wasn’t like the happy-go-lucky Nigerian that I had on my first ride…this guy was a man on a mission. Because of the United Nations summit meetings and the thing at Columbia with Makmood Nan-in-a-majad or whatever (Iran’s president) there were a lot of roads closed and traffic cops redirecting everyone away from the UN building – which of course is just a few blocks away from our hotel. In an effort to out maneuver every other car on the road, our cabby cuts off more people than Bill O’Reilly in an argument and somehow manages weave his way in and out of stop and go traffic. No red lights, left turn yields or even the back end of a city bus was going to stop us (in fairness, the city bus did stop us for about 15 seconds, long enough to throw it in reverse and cut the angle even tighter, after the CRUNCH that used to be our cab’s bumper… yes, we actually hit and ran a city bus in this cab).
After making it to the Westin and sorting out some reservation misunderstandings we make it to our rooms. Ariel (FoxwoodsFiend) and Dan are sharing a room and me and Greg (MYNAMEIZGREG – see blog on left) are in the other room except Greg and Ariel haven’t made it yet. We get settled a bit and then leave to meet back up with Jay and some other 2+2’ers at the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy club for some Improv comedy. There were 4 or 5 groups going, each get 30 minute slots to do improv comedy. Some of them were really good, others were brutally bad but all things considered it was worth going. Prior to the comedy I got my first taste of NY style pizza with Dan at this hole in the wall called Luigi’s. This place was old, a bit run down, had a few seats, and even a 13inch TV sitting on the side with the Mets game on. It was totally like a scene out of a mob movie or something.
After the comedy we head back to the Westin where we meet up with Greg and Ariel and the other 2+2’ers for lots of drinks in the hotel bar. Greg, Ariel, Joe (JoeTall), and Rob (forgot his screen name?) were especially cool to talk to. Rob and Joe were both fairly newly weds as I am so we had some funny conversations about poker and married life. When the bar closed down at 2am everyone left but Greg and I decided to check out Times Square since it was my first time in NY. Greg showed me all the ropes, got me my first street vendor hot dog and we had some more NY style pizza and a calzone. Although at 3am or so Times Square isn’t a cluster like it normally is, there was still plenty of activity and things to see. All the jumbotron ads made the place almost as bright as daylight in the dead of night. Pretty cool to see.
Wednesday we met up with Jay and the 2+2ers again to take care of some business and then we stopped at this outdoor café a few blocks from Wall Street and sat outside to hang out before dinner at an italian place near times square. Ariel, Vanessa (fslexduck), Dan, and someone else play $20 per point chinese poker. Vanessa went on a sick $500 downswing in like 20 mins and then ran it all back up to be a solid winner at the end. Was pretty funny to see. Greg and I played Joe (who typically plays limit hold’em) in a HU limit hold’em freezeout and got owned. Standard.
At 7 or so we head to the itialian place for dinner. I believe there were 12 of us in total. The food was excellent, appetizers really good and the wine was flowing. I had some mozerella and tomatoes as well as some fried calamari for appetizer, some sort of italian steak perfectly cooked for dinner with garlic mashed potatoes and for dessert it was an open faced apple pie with vanilla ice cream. So freaking good…mmmMMmmm
I had no idea that after dinner I’d witness the craziest most degenerate gambling I’d ever see in my life. We went to a bar a few blocks away that was fairly empty and seemed standardish for a bar. We all drank lots and hung out and after an hour or so I see Jay and Ariel playing rock paper scissors (rps). I ask what’s going on and apparently they are playing RPS for money. Jay gets stuck a bit, ups the stakes, stuck some more, ups the stakes, then before too long they are playing for $1,000 per RPS throw. They keep going, and going, and before you know it Jay is stuck like $12,800. So Ariel takes out $200 from his pocket, gives it to Jay so he’s down a nice round $13,000… lol. Someone pulls out a deck of cards and Jay proposes a $5000 omaha “flip” (they deal out a heads up hand of omaha high, all the cards face up and see who wins). Jay wins the flip. So now he’s down $8000, they do another flip this time with 7s wild for $8000. Board is something like K 5 6 9 2 and Ariel shows 5 K x 5 x for 5’s full. Now Jay turns his cards up, first one is a 7 for the wild card, then an A, then a blank, then… 5 so jay takes it down with quad 5s lol. Ariel proceeds to rip the last card in 4 pieces and throw it on the bar haha. More prop betting insues, don’t know the details, but eventually Ariel wins back the $200 he gave to Jay earlier then proceeds to rip the money up into pieces infront of everyone just because he didn’t want Jay to physically hold any of his money lolol…. Yes that’s right he simply tears up two $100 bills into a bunch of pieces in the middle of the bar.
So as time goes on there’s more prop betting on this or that, seven-way omaha $100 flips. I ended up doing 2 seven way flips but I run bad so I didn’t do any more. It was just as fun to watch everyone else. DJ ran hot and won like three 7 way flips in a row 2 outing the river twice. So then someone pulls a coin out and Jay and Ariel start flipping the coin for money. I don’t recall the exact amounts but at one point Jay was down $5k, so he offers Ariel 7:5 on the flip (putitng up $7000 to win back the $5000 on a 50/50 shot) and Jay loses, so down 12k now he offers like 15k for the 12k on a flip, jay loses again so he’s down like 27k, then Ariel is like no more, but jay pleads and pleads for another flip upping the amount, finally they agree on a 33k to win the 27k on a coinflip. Jay flips the coin catches it and covers it on the top of his hand. Ariel hollywoods a lot about what he’s going to choose, heads or tails, weighing the options. Jay peeks at the coin, Ariel hollywoods some more, then as time goes on Jay freaks out and flips the coin again, covers it, Ariel hollywoods more, finally decides “tails never fails” and calls tails. Jay shows the coin…. It’s heads lol… back to even. Apparently before Jay re-flipped the coin was actually on tails, which meant he would have been stuck 60k.
I know this is getting long but it was just so hilarious I have to keep typing it out. After some more prop betting later, Jay is down 5k to Ariel and Ariel is so pissed that he should have been up 60k, or at least 27k so he refuses to do any more prop bets because he wants to lock in 5k of his money. He’s so mad he wants to punch something so they start haggling back and forth as Ariel wants to offer Jay some of his $ back if he’s allowed to punch him. Finally they agree to $1k per punch, has to be to the stomach, Ariel isn’t allowed to move his feet and it can’t be a surprise punch. So we’re clearing out of the way in the bar getting ready to set this up. Prop bets are flying from the rest of us as to whether or not Jay will puke or if he’ll get knocked over. Jay takes 2 punches to the gut like a man, no knocking over, no puking and reclaims 2k of his 5k debt just like that. Hilarious…. Lol. I was quite impressed. I was actually about to lay some $ that he’d get knocked over but thankfully I didn’t. The bar closed fairly soon after that. The irish bartender just shook his head at us, but he got a sick tip so it was all good.
The next day, Thursday, Lars Luzak was on FTP so they decide to play him and chop action. Me and Greg had 5% of their action, Emil, Ariel and Jay took 30% playing $100/$200 blind $20k buyin HU NL hold’em. I don’t think I could ever play that high… the swings are insane and Lars is one of the best players that no one has ever heard of (much tougher than almost anyone you have heard of, including the likes of Ivey and Durr). After swinging up like 50k by flopping flushes and getting ridiculously lucky on some poorly played hands the downswing insues and they crash to like –60k before bobbing back close to even. The next day they play again and similarly crash down a bunch before ending almost evenish. The rest of the day is spent by me, Jay, Ariel, Emil playing 5/10 – 50/100nl and chopping action 25% at all stakes playing on each other’s accounts. Jay and I stay up til like 4am running worse than ever and end up dropping like 45k. We lost a 20k pot ai pf vs Durr at hu 50/100 with AK getting outflopped by AQ. It was so sick… plenty of cooler/setup spots at 25/50 as well and some bad plays contributed. I was pretty sick to my stomach. (Some of you that IM’d me about playing 25/50nl, that was actually Ariel on my account BTW) So I get back to my hotel at like 5am and catch about 6 hours of sleep before I have to check out, then it’s back to Jay’s place to try and play catch up…
So because of the hole we were in I decided to stay an extra day in NY to try to recoup some losses with them. I played all freaking day and night on Friday and managed to put a little dent in, but we were still down a truck load. When 4am rolled around I finally crashed on their couch. Saturday was more of the same and when I finally left for the airport they were upswinging a bit but we’re all still down about 7k each. Sick. Can’t believe how bad that timing was to run so terrible when playing higher. Oh wait, of course I can believe it. Lol.
So now I’m in the airplane flying somewhere over the midwest on my way home. NYC was quite an experience. I really liked seeing all the huge buildings and the rat race of the entire city. People everywhere. The subways were dirtier, smellier, and nastier than I had pictured. Times Square was about how I thought it would be. The soup-nazi-esque style of the local food stops was fun to experience and I’m glad I finally got some real NY style pizza. It was kind of a bummer I didn’t get a whole lot of 1 on 1 coaching time with krantz but I did get to watch him play a lot so that counts for something. Everyone I met was real cool and they are some fantastic players…even when they are acting like spewtarding calling stations (*cough* TT no heart bet/call on Kh 5h 6h board *cough*). Playing so aggro at super high stakes vs good players seems to induce psychiatric ward levels of paranoia at every bet or raise though. It was tough for me to swallow some of that, but I haven’t spent enough time at big stakes like 25/50nl+ to know whether or not I’d adjust so drastically.
Alright this is probably my longest blog entry to date. I doubt anyone actually makes it down to the end. I’m sure I didn’t do the prop betting stories justice as there’s no way I can possibly convey how completely insane these drunken bets were…I definitely don’t have that level of gamble in me… haha
September recap will be up in a few days.
Aaron
What a wild few days it has been. My NYC trip has concluded and I’m currently on the first leg of my trip back home heading through charlotte, nc. I’m looking forward to the jamba juice that’s awaiting me before the final leg of my journey back home.
NYC. Where do I begin? Tuesday morning I awake at 4:30am to catch my 6am flight from KC to NYC (via washington, dc) after about 3.5 hours of sleep. Once in NYC I get a text from krantz telling me the address and directions to his condo. Turns out he’s about 2 blocks from Wall St which is cool because it’s something I wanted to see while in NY. I get lucky and have a really cool cab driver who is originally from Nigeria and he explains the different boroughs of the city and points out stuff (Cony Island, Brooklyn bridge, Statue of Liberty, etc) as we drive to jay’s place. About 35 minutes and $40 later it’s about noon and arrive at “Team Isreal’s” headquarters.
When I get there Dan (DJ Sensei) is on the couch playing online poker, Emil (whitelime) is asleep and Jay (krantz) is chilling. We decide to go grab a bite so me, Dan and Jay head to this café/sushi/bar place around the corner. After lunch we head back up to the room and Dan and Jay split action playing some HU 50/100 against a monster fish and clean him out.
When the fish busts it’s time for us to go check in at our hotel so Dan and I take a cab to times square. It was quite an experience. All I can say is most NYC cab drivers don’t f**k around lol. This guy wasn’t like the happy-go-lucky Nigerian that I had on my first ride…this guy was a man on a mission. Because of the United Nations summit meetings and the thing at Columbia with Makmood Nan-in-a-majad or whatever (Iran’s president) there were a lot of roads closed and traffic cops redirecting everyone away from the UN building – which of course is just a few blocks away from our hotel. In an effort to out maneuver every other car on the road, our cabby cuts off more people than Bill O’Reilly in an argument and somehow manages weave his way in and out of stop and go traffic. No red lights, left turn yields or even the back end of a city bus was going to stop us (in fairness, the city bus did stop us for about 15 seconds, long enough to throw it in reverse and cut the angle even tighter, after the CRUNCH that used to be our cab’s bumper… yes, we actually hit and ran a city bus in this cab).
After making it to the Westin and sorting out some reservation misunderstandings we make it to our rooms. Ariel (FoxwoodsFiend) and Dan are sharing a room and me and Greg (MYNAMEIZGREG – see blog on left) are in the other room except Greg and Ariel haven’t made it yet. We get settled a bit and then leave to meet back up with Jay and some other 2+2’ers at the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy club for some Improv comedy. There were 4 or 5 groups going, each get 30 minute slots to do improv comedy. Some of them were really good, others were brutally bad but all things considered it was worth going. Prior to the comedy I got my first taste of NY style pizza with Dan at this hole in the wall called Luigi’s. This place was old, a bit run down, had a few seats, and even a 13inch TV sitting on the side with the Mets game on. It was totally like a scene out of a mob movie or something.
After the comedy we head back to the Westin where we meet up with Greg and Ariel and the other 2+2’ers for lots of drinks in the hotel bar. Greg, Ariel, Joe (JoeTall), and Rob (forgot his screen name?) were especially cool to talk to. Rob and Joe were both fairly newly weds as I am so we had some funny conversations about poker and married life. When the bar closed down at 2am everyone left but Greg and I decided to check out Times Square since it was my first time in NY. Greg showed me all the ropes, got me my first street vendor hot dog and we had some more NY style pizza and a calzone. Although at 3am or so Times Square isn’t a cluster like it normally is, there was still plenty of activity and things to see. All the jumbotron ads made the place almost as bright as daylight in the dead of night. Pretty cool to see.
Wednesday we met up with Jay and the 2+2ers again to take care of some business and then we stopped at this outdoor café a few blocks from Wall Street and sat outside to hang out before dinner at an italian place near times square. Ariel, Vanessa (fslexduck), Dan, and someone else play $20 per point chinese poker. Vanessa went on a sick $500 downswing in like 20 mins and then ran it all back up to be a solid winner at the end. Was pretty funny to see. Greg and I played Joe (who typically plays limit hold’em) in a HU limit hold’em freezeout and got owned. Standard.
At 7 or so we head to the itialian place for dinner. I believe there were 12 of us in total. The food was excellent, appetizers really good and the wine was flowing. I had some mozerella and tomatoes as well as some fried calamari for appetizer, some sort of italian steak perfectly cooked for dinner with garlic mashed potatoes and for dessert it was an open faced apple pie with vanilla ice cream. So freaking good…mmmMMmmm
I had no idea that after dinner I’d witness the craziest most degenerate gambling I’d ever see in my life. We went to a bar a few blocks away that was fairly empty and seemed standardish for a bar. We all drank lots and hung out and after an hour or so I see Jay and Ariel playing rock paper scissors (rps). I ask what’s going on and apparently they are playing RPS for money. Jay gets stuck a bit, ups the stakes, stuck some more, ups the stakes, then before too long they are playing for $1,000 per RPS throw. They keep going, and going, and before you know it Jay is stuck like $12,800. So Ariel takes out $200 from his pocket, gives it to Jay so he’s down a nice round $13,000… lol. Someone pulls out a deck of cards and Jay proposes a $5000 omaha “flip” (they deal out a heads up hand of omaha high, all the cards face up and see who wins). Jay wins the flip. So now he’s down $8000, they do another flip this time with 7s wild for $8000. Board is something like K 5 6 9 2 and Ariel shows 5 K x 5 x for 5’s full. Now Jay turns his cards up, first one is a 7 for the wild card, then an A, then a blank, then… 5 so jay takes it down with quad 5s lol. Ariel proceeds to rip the last card in 4 pieces and throw it on the bar haha. More prop betting insues, don’t know the details, but eventually Ariel wins back the $200 he gave to Jay earlier then proceeds to rip the money up into pieces infront of everyone just because he didn’t want Jay to physically hold any of his money lolol…. Yes that’s right he simply tears up two $100 bills into a bunch of pieces in the middle of the bar.
So as time goes on there’s more prop betting on this or that, seven-way omaha $100 flips. I ended up doing 2 seven way flips but I run bad so I didn’t do any more. It was just as fun to watch everyone else. DJ ran hot and won like three 7 way flips in a row 2 outing the river twice. So then someone pulls a coin out and Jay and Ariel start flipping the coin for money. I don’t recall the exact amounts but at one point Jay was down $5k, so he offers Ariel 7:5 on the flip (putitng up $7000 to win back the $5000 on a 50/50 shot) and Jay loses, so down 12k now he offers like 15k for the 12k on a flip, jay loses again so he’s down like 27k, then Ariel is like no more, but jay pleads and pleads for another flip upping the amount, finally they agree on a 33k to win the 27k on a coinflip. Jay flips the coin catches it and covers it on the top of his hand. Ariel hollywoods a lot about what he’s going to choose, heads or tails, weighing the options. Jay peeks at the coin, Ariel hollywoods some more, then as time goes on Jay freaks out and flips the coin again, covers it, Ariel hollywoods more, finally decides “tails never fails” and calls tails. Jay shows the coin…. It’s heads lol… back to even. Apparently before Jay re-flipped the coin was actually on tails, which meant he would have been stuck 60k.
I know this is getting long but it was just so hilarious I have to keep typing it out. After some more prop betting later, Jay is down 5k to Ariel and Ariel is so pissed that he should have been up 60k, or at least 27k so he refuses to do any more prop bets because he wants to lock in 5k of his money. He’s so mad he wants to punch something so they start haggling back and forth as Ariel wants to offer Jay some of his $ back if he’s allowed to punch him. Finally they agree to $1k per punch, has to be to the stomach, Ariel isn’t allowed to move his feet and it can’t be a surprise punch. So we’re clearing out of the way in the bar getting ready to set this up. Prop bets are flying from the rest of us as to whether or not Jay will puke or if he’ll get knocked over. Jay takes 2 punches to the gut like a man, no knocking over, no puking and reclaims 2k of his 5k debt just like that. Hilarious…. Lol. I was quite impressed. I was actually about to lay some $ that he’d get knocked over but thankfully I didn’t. The bar closed fairly soon after that. The irish bartender just shook his head at us, but he got a sick tip so it was all good.
The next day, Thursday, Lars Luzak was on FTP so they decide to play him and chop action. Me and Greg had 5% of their action, Emil, Ariel and Jay took 30% playing $100/$200 blind $20k buyin HU NL hold’em. I don’t think I could ever play that high… the swings are insane and Lars is one of the best players that no one has ever heard of (much tougher than almost anyone you have heard of, including the likes of Ivey and Durr). After swinging up like 50k by flopping flushes and getting ridiculously lucky on some poorly played hands the downswing insues and they crash to like –60k before bobbing back close to even. The next day they play again and similarly crash down a bunch before ending almost evenish. The rest of the day is spent by me, Jay, Ariel, Emil playing 5/10 – 50/100nl and chopping action 25% at all stakes playing on each other’s accounts. Jay and I stay up til like 4am running worse than ever and end up dropping like 45k. We lost a 20k pot ai pf vs Durr at hu 50/100 with AK getting outflopped by AQ. It was so sick… plenty of cooler/setup spots at 25/50 as well and some bad plays contributed. I was pretty sick to my stomach. (Some of you that IM’d me about playing 25/50nl, that was actually Ariel on my account BTW) So I get back to my hotel at like 5am and catch about 6 hours of sleep before I have to check out, then it’s back to Jay’s place to try and play catch up…
So because of the hole we were in I decided to stay an extra day in NY to try to recoup some losses with them. I played all freaking day and night on Friday and managed to put a little dent in, but we were still down a truck load. When 4am rolled around I finally crashed on their couch. Saturday was more of the same and when I finally left for the airport they were upswinging a bit but we’re all still down about 7k each. Sick. Can’t believe how bad that timing was to run so terrible when playing higher. Oh wait, of course I can believe it. Lol.
So now I’m in the airplane flying somewhere over the midwest on my way home. NYC was quite an experience. I really liked seeing all the huge buildings and the rat race of the entire city. People everywhere. The subways were dirtier, smellier, and nastier than I had pictured. Times Square was about how I thought it would be. The soup-nazi-esque style of the local food stops was fun to experience and I’m glad I finally got some real NY style pizza. It was kind of a bummer I didn’t get a whole lot of 1 on 1 coaching time with krantz but I did get to watch him play a lot so that counts for something. Everyone I met was real cool and they are some fantastic players…even when they are acting like spewtarding calling stations (*cough* TT no heart bet/call on Kh 5h 6h board *cough*). Playing so aggro at super high stakes vs good players seems to induce psychiatric ward levels of paranoia at every bet or raise though. It was tough for me to swallow some of that, but I haven’t spent enough time at big stakes like 25/50nl+ to know whether or not I’d adjust so drastically.
Alright this is probably my longest blog entry to date. I doubt anyone actually makes it down to the end. I’m sure I didn’t do the prop betting stories justice as there’s no way I can possibly convey how completely insane these drunken bets were…I definitely don’t have that level of gamble in me… haha
September recap will be up in a few days.
Aaron
posted by WiltOnTilt at 7:28 PM
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