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Newspaper Columnist Found Lacking

I made the mistake of picking up the San Jose Mercury News that was within arm's reach this morning during an idle moment. What I saw was a column by Scott Herhold about the Bay 101 Card Club possibly moving to Milpitas.

From what I gather, Bay 101 feels a need to spruce things up now that there is a sassy club by the airport from the people who once owned the Garden City club on Saratoga Avenue. And so now they are trying to find a spot to build their own new club with a hotel and shopping and things of that sort to pad the coffers.

Herhold:

My take? San Jose should let them go. In fact, hold a ticker-tape parade to escort them out. Hire a drum and bugle corps to go along.

Yes, it's true that the city will lose some $8 million yearly without Bay 101, enough to pay for 40 cops.

That's hardly chicken feed. But without the card club, the cops should have less crime to worry about.

I played poker probably ten times at Garden City during the poker boom. It was relatively low key and fun to play at before the owners who eventually canned it for their new swanky club came on the scene. It was brutal after that and I stopped going.

I have played at Bay 101 once or twice and been inside another time or two. The other times I have been inside I did not play because the wait are insane. So I just leave.

But never in my time there have I felt like I was in a dangerous spot. You've got primarily people who are too sad to have the energy to fight, and crusty Vietnamese people who just want to gamble, baby! Perhaps not the most savory of characters on the whole, but not a bunch walking around with knives up their sleeve.

Herhold goes on to site two murders he knows of that were connected to Garden City. So, two murders in X number of years requires enough police resources to mean the city missing out on $8 million is a fair trade-off?

That's newspaper columnist logic, right there. And a pretty good indication of why nobody gives a shit what anyone writes in the newspaper anymore. Total asshats unwilling to dive any deeper than "well, I have heard that casinos increase crime."

For instance, Bay 101 at its current site is not part of any neighborhood. The less savory customers don't walk out the door and then stumble around drunkenly disrupting citizens trying to live in harmony. It's an island unto itself. That's too much for Herhold to consider. Much less looking up any statistics beyond "I know of two unsolved murders".

Both M8trix and Bay 101 are too crowded for me to go there. And I don't really care for more cops. So, as it relates to my own self-interest, I care not where Bay 101 ends up.

But Scott Herhold is a lazy bum. Just the sort of person he might find at Bay 101 if he ever set foot there.

#scott herhold #mercury news #bay 101

Running Good in a Foreign Land

So my journey through the card rooms of California has pointed me north. Through the mountains of central Cal and past a few odorous cow pastures I made my way to the Bay 101 Casino in San Jose, CA. This is yet another room that I’ve heard quite a bit about back east, but it’s not exactly a stone’s throw from where I’ve been staying in Santa Clarita. The trip took about 5 hours to get to my hotel down the street from Bay 101 and a $100 swipe of the credit card for the one night stay. Under normal situations I would never indulge the urge to travel such a distance for low stakes poker. Since I’m out in California though, and one of the purposes for this trip is to start getting out of my safe little bubble in Connecticut and see some of what the poker world has across the US I wrote it off as a business expense and made the trek, and so far so good.

I arrived at the Bay 101 around 4PM local time and began grinding shortly thereafter. The place itself is impressive looking, from a poker player’s eyes anyway. The room is impeccably cleaned, well-organized, it’s easy to understand the layout, and the dealers are animated and genuinely funny. So far on my trip, I’d say this is the nicest room I’ve played in and certainly made me feel the most at ease while playing. If you’re looking for something other than poker though, you’re probably not going to be thrilled. There is nary a slot machine in site and only a small area that has any table games at all. From what I saw at first glance, if it didn’t involve a deck of cards the Bay 101 didn’t have it. None of these observations deterred me in the slightest. I’m here for one purpose, to play poker, and Bay 101 is a great place to do that.

The no limit hold’em games are interestingly designed. There are 3 blinds each hand, a traditional small blind and big blind, and then the button puts in a small bit as well. The three blinds levels I saw being spread were a $1/$2/$2NL game with a $40 minimum buy in and a $200 max, a $2/$3/$5 game which went from $200 to $500 for buy ins, and a $2/$3/$5 deep stack game that spread the buy in limits starting at a $500 minimum and went up to a $1500 max. The first number in the blind structure is the button’s portion of the blinds, so for example in the $1/$2/$2NL game that I was playing in the button put up $1, the small blind was $2 and the big blind was $2. One final twist is that limping in the $1/$2/$2 game isn’t a $2 call. The first call into the pot is $4, so if you wanted to limp UTG for example, it’d be $4 to play. The game plays pretty comparably to a standard $1/$2NL game.

I do believe I’ve been playing well over the past week and a half worth of sessions, but my first session at Bay 101 sealed the deal for me, I’ve been running really hot as well. On more than one occasion I found myself winning a hand with second or third pair in a 4 way pot. I’ve been flopping sets and getting paid off. When my draws have been hitting, they’ve been holding up. With all that said, I’m getting paid off by some less than stellar holdings as well. A perfect example came last night, I made it $16 pre-flop with AA UTG+1 and the only other big stack at the table called two seats to my left, the SB also called.

We see a flop of A96r.

Action checks over to the caller on my left who leads out for $20, SB folds to me. At this point I’ve got about $650 left behind me and this villain has me covered. He’s been calling my raises with QXs type hands regardless of what position I’ve been raising from. He likes to play pots and his range is pretty outrageously wide here. I opt to flat the $20 and plan on leading out any turn card.

Turn brings a 7.

I lead for $45 as was my plan and get snap called by our villain. I wish I had made that bet a little bit bigger, but because of my position I really need a raise out of this guy to even think about getting stacks in. So I just tried to get value from as much of his range as I could.

River is an 8.

We both check down and he rolls over QQ having lead out in a 3-way pot on an Axx flop and then called a turn donk lead. Players like this have been rather numerous during this trip so far. I’m sure I’ll cool down and start running more like a normal human being again rather than the mighty Odin. Even when the cards do finally turn cold, guys like this are still going to be paying off really wide so I’m hopeful my pace of profit continues.

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#poker #1/2NL #1/2/2NL #2/3/5NL #bay 101 #san jose #California