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So yesterday my friend JC called and told me that he was going to a friend of his dad’s place to play a low-limit cash game. I haven’t really been in the mood for online poker much lately but a cash game intrigued me. So I went and met JC at his dad’s place and we headed over together.

We got to the house and headed for the basement, which had a pretty cool setup. The poker table was really nice and there was a TV and also a computer hooked up to a big monitor that was playing music videos. The owner of the place, I’ll call him Joe (I forget his name) explained to us that the game was going to be a .50/$1 cash game and you could only buy-in for $20 to start. This was extremely low for those blinds, and then he said that if you bust you can then buy-in for whatever you want, an interesting little twist.

When we started there was about 7 of us and Joe told us that a couple more would probably be coming later. There was myself, JC, his dad, Joe, another guy in his 20s and two older men.

I decided that since I hadn’t played with any of the players besides JC and his dad before and also since the initial structure limited the amount of hands I could play that I was going to play pretty basic to start. Then once I figured out how they were playing, I would maybe try and play more loose. I wasn’t really that concerned about losing the first $20 because I actually didn’t mind and I would be able to buy-in for more.

I found out pretty quickly that some of the players didn’t really know what they were doing. About a half hour into the game, Joe raised in early position $3 and two people called. The flop brought 10-7-J. Joe led at the pot with a $5 bet and one of the older men, we’ll call him Patrick, called. Since it was Joe’s place and he had the chips and table I had a feeling he knew what he was doing and didn’t really put him on much of a hand and that he was just making a continuation bet at the flop. I wasn’t really quite sure what Patrick had. The turn brought an ace and Joe upped his bet to $10, which made me put him on A-K. Patrick quickly called the $10 bet. The river brought a king making the board: 10-7-J-A-K. Joe put his remaining chips in (about an additional $10) and Patrick called pretty quickly making me believe he had the straight. Joe flipped up A-Q for the straight and Patrick showed 10-6 for a pair of 10s….

That one hand right there told me that it would be difficult to make any kind of move against Patrick, but also if I had a hand against him I could probably make a lot of money…

To be continued..