Crazy Eights at the Meadows ATM

I played a six hour session last night at the Meadows ATM.  I got up early when I had pocket 8s twice flop sets, and I made two good reads/hero calls for decent pots, but no real monsterpotten as much of the table was playing rather short.  Then came up the hand of the night:

I straddled UTG for $4.  There were several callers back to me, and I found AJo.  Figuring I was ahead of the field, I popped it to $29 straight to take it down or get heads up.  Of course, I get three callers ... establish tight image, check.  Then, the SB (a solid regular) repops it to $129, leaving himself ~$150 behind.  I thought a bit, and decided none of the remaining players could have a real hand, given the action to that point—the three limp-callers had all passed on two shots at raising, while the SB would never have limped a strong hand.  I decided that SB likely had a small PP, thought I was full of bovine excrement, and was trying a squeeze play.  I immediately decided I should crush his dreams.  I rerepopped it to $299 total, and got one caller all-in for $109 total, while SB thought a bit and reluctantly folded.  Flop was KKJ, followed by two baby blanks, and my hand was good.

Of course, instead of cashing out +$550, I stuck around another hour and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  I ran into the table luckbox/maniac twice and donked off ~$300 to his improbable two pairs and straights before he gave away all my chips plus his buy-in to the rest of the table.  A horrid misread and a bad crying call dissipated the rest of my profit, and my buy-in went up in smoke when variance turned my two hot hands into a cooler.  I had AJ, flopped top two pair, and ran into a flopped set of 8s (in unrelated news, Dealer Jim has plummeted 10 spots on the official Grange dealer rankings).  Nothing better than combining bad luck with bad play.

The entertaining moment of the evening occurred when a guy in his late 20s got a text message from a college gal he had hung around with last year.  He asked us to interpret her message:  "You should make some loves on me."  The table decided it was a typo for "moves", and encouraged the guy to head out and pick her up from the bar where she was having a fight with her boyfriend (the genesis of the text message).  He decided to play it cool and stay and play poker.  So, for over an hour the entire table took turns needling the guy over how he should leave and get the girl, knocking him off his usual solid game.  I might possibly have had some small part in keeping the heckling going.  In any event, just more proof that sex-tilt is a dangerous thing—women truly are the rake!