Post-Work Poker: Texas Holdem and the Lord and Master Stein

It’s been a long, long time since our last post-work poker game. Technically, Phil pointed out that this was our first game so far this year. Crazy.

These are images from last night’s get-together, after the work day. Joining for the first time were a few new faces. L to R it’s Ben, Kevin, Chris C, Sean, Phil and Chris.

We were big enough that we had to split off into two smaller groups. I was on this end with (L to R) Eddie, Jeff, AJ (the current owner of the Lord and Master Stein) and Justin.

A closeup of the trophy.

I was on a pretty good streak for most of the night. Got a lot of good cards early on, and made some good decisions on both my bets and my calls. For a while there, I was also the chip leader.

After our groups merged and it was getting down to 5 people or so, my play was a little more hit and miss. I went after things that I shouldn’t have, but that was a small part of me wanting to actively play differently. In the past, I’d wind up near the final table… but without any material to work with. Tonight, I ended up doing fairly well… and continued to try to play more aggressively. My impulse was to slow down a good deal, which maybe I should have.

I got lucky a few times – I ended up beating Chris on a huge bit of luck, drawing a flush at the river. But my mojo wasn’t anywhere near as strong as Kevin’s, as he ended up drawing flushes on the river (twice), split a pot with me when the river turned up a full house (with aces and nines on the table).

And one of the worst beats I’ve had so far was when I went all-in against him, me with ace five and him with a pair of pocket fives… and an ace turned up on the flop. Again on the river, Kevin catches the reamaining five – the only card in the deck that could have saved him, and takes me out.

It was a tough beat, and I had a hard time shaking it off. For a brief moment, I could understand why Phil Hellmuth goes off the deep end when, statistically, things don’t go his way. The numbers suggest that I would have won my hand, but there’s that smallest fraction of randomness and luck that factors in to each hand… despite our best calculations.

Kevin was definitely on a roll, and there wasn’t much stopping his winning streak. Here’s a (blurry) shot of the final two: Kevin and Ben going head to head.

Below is the final hand, where Kevin is holding Jack ten and Ben is holding pair of tens.

In a heightened state of exuberance, Kevin doused himself in his winnings, pennies and all.

For some unexplained reason, there were a ton of coins in the bottom of the stein. I don’t know if those guys were leftovers from back in the day when we used to play our ball-in-the-stein game (see here and here).

Kevin, the big winner and new Lord and Master. According to the original charter/rules, we technically get to call a game even if Kevin’s not around (seeing as he’s based in St. Louis). He’s back in Chicago next week, so perhaps we’ll see another game take place… and another chance for us me to win it back.