Missed it!

Well I'm an idiot. I missed Maudie at the T-Bird on Friday night. When the friend I brought busted out and mysterously disappeared, I got up and wandered around the tables looking for someone that matched her description. What I didn't do was check the table that my friend was actually sitting at, because she was there! I knew it when she described him as "BIG GUY." My friend is HUGE. He's a former boxer and weighs in at 420 lbs. I was praying there would be a fight, because I always want there to be a fight when I have a man-mountain covering my back.

The game at the T-Bird was good. Almost all newbies and you could read everyone all the time. If you raise them, they shrink. They still call, but you could buy the bet every time. If you get re-raised, RUN! I easily took control of the table when I wanted it, and still got people to lead out when I wanted them to. And of course, plenty of people calling with absurd hands. Counterfeited pairs, straights with 4 flush cards on the board. You know. Donkey Poker.

The thing about donkey poker is that it can really frustrate better players. Especially NL and tourney players. You CANNOT just play super-tight at these games. You end up leaking money from calling with decent hands that don't hit and paying the blinds. You have to speculate a lot and put players to the test with sub-optimal hands. If one of the donkeys catches his miracles, you're screwed. I think that's what happened to the BIG GUY. The donkeys were catching, and he was going down in flames.

If you can adjust your game to donkey poker, there's a lot of money to be made there. You can just sit and count the extra bets that players are pissing away. "That was a dumb call. That was a dumb call. That was a dumb call," goes over and over in your head. They wear their tells like cheap OU shirts. They give away the strength of their hand with every grunt groan or mutter under their breath.

I'm sure there are sharks there. I'm sure Maudie, if she hasn't already, will adjust to the donkeys and start hauling money out of that place. So the most important skill you can have at these live tables is to figure out who the good players are. At the table I occupied for 3.5 hours and $157, there were none to find.