Guys night out

I saw an old friend from high school over the past weekend. He e-mailed me that he was getting a guys night together. We met at his place for some drinks. Then we went downtown. We went to the Pogue Fadoe. That was a pretty good place. The band was good. They played rock.

It was a bit different visiting him. He's had some changes in his life, and he now lives in an apartment building. I haven't been in an apartment building in a while. It was a nice building. His place had a postcard view of the Halifax skyline.

I wonder what it's like going from a house to an apartment. It does seem a bit regressive. Still he's hardly down on his luck. He had a great time going down to Cuba last winter. I know I can't afford to do that. It's just about being in the right location with the right amount of space for the number of people living there and the stage in your life you're at.

Some guys cancelled out, so there were three of us there. Before we went downtown we got a game of Texas hold'em going. I brought a kit along. The others knew how to play poker, but hadn't played hold'em before. That was fun.

My wife's family has a get together over Christmas. I know some people there like to play hold'em, so I'll bring my kit there and hopefully we can get a low stakes tournament going. These are some things from the weekend that I'll keep in mind for the future.

• Get a hold'em kit. They are only $3 at the Great Canadian Dollar Store. For that little you get two decks of cards, 200 chips, and a dealer button. Definitely money well spent.
  
• Use different coloured chips for different bet amounts. We used white=1, blue=5, and black=10. This worked well and kept the game moving and people didn't fumble with huge stacks of chips that were worth just one each.
• The starting stacks were 50 chips. This was too high. The next time I get a game together I'll go with 40.
• Set a timer for the blinds to go up. I used my digital watch set to 10 minutes. That worked pretty well. 10 minutes was about right for the small number of players. They went up with the progression 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8 .... By the end it was 7/14. So we weren't playing very fast. That's one reason I'll use 40 as the starting stack instead of 50 next time.
• I prefer to have just one person deal the tournament and move the dealer button. But the others wanted to take turns dealing so that was OK. However there were a number of misdeals due to the inexperience of the others. It was just for fun so that was OK. Still I prefer to have one good dealer dealing every hand than rotating the deal. I'll try to be more firm on this point in the future.
  
• One thing the others noticed was that I didn't look back down at my cards after the deal. They had to recheck their cards frequently. I think that made me look like a stronger player. The truth is I did have to recheck my cards during the occasional hand. I'll have to practice so that I don't have to recheck during the hand.
  
• Face to face play is fun. It is different than playing on the Internet.
  

One hand was interesting. It was heads up, just me and one other person left. The blinds were up to around 6/12. I was on the small blind. I had King Jack offsuit. KJo is a pretty good hand in heads up, so I raised to 25, around twice the big blind. The other guy looked at me and folded.

The hand was interesting because then we showed our hands and he had Queen Ten offsuit. QTo is a strong hand, only slightly less than what I had. Definitely strong enough to play against the bet I made. The other guy said I seemed confident when I bet. He thought I had a high pair and he was beat.

In a way that's good, getting someone to fold QTo with only a 2 x BB bet, just by apparently projecting a strong hand. But in a way it's bad. If I look strong when my hand is strong, then I probably look weak when my hand is weak. I'd like to be more difficult to read and have fewer tells.