Hustler Casino trip report
Landed at LAX on Friday January 12th early in the afternoon. Walked to In-n-Out for lunch.
My frisbee friends driving down from San Francisco were 3 hours out so I thought about hitting up the casino. Decided to head to my hotel in Huntington Beach instead and meet the rest of the team. Enjoyed a meal and then conveniently at a CVS picked up a bottle of Crown Royal plus some Canada Dry ginger ale.
Saturday beach ultimate tournament day 1 pulled my calf during the first half of the first game. FML. Whiskey saved the day though. Found a way to have a good time even though I couldn't play.
Saturday night delicious Indian food. More whiskey. Passed out early.
Sunday morning woke up with hopes my calf would be better enough to play. No luck. Second half of the bottle of whiskey saved the day though.
Sunday early afternoon our tourney was over and we headed into LA for lunch. Delicious pad thai. I wasn't brave enough to use the handheld bidet attachment lmao
My friends got gas ahead of their drive north and I caught a Lyft to Hustler Casino.
$1,000 USD in my pocket. I was on the waitlist via PokerAtlas for the 5/5 PLO game. When I arrived at 5:00pm there were 4-5 tables of NL running in the Crystal Room, plus 1 table of $20 double board PLO. There was 1 table of 5/5 PLO running and I was first on the list.
I sat at the empty table next to it and watched the table trying to get a sense of the action. 8 players. Max buy-in 1000. Most of the stacks were in the 300 to 500 range, plus two stacks ~700, and two stacks ~1500. Few false starts when players got up from their seats but they were just going for smoke breaks. After 45 minutes one of the short stacks busted and didn't rebuy. I sat down in seat #4 at 5:45pm and bought in for $500. The first of my 2 bullets.
Most pots were raised preflop to 20 and sometimes reraised to 50 or 60. Lots of limping and cold calling of raises. My kind of game! Didn't hit any good flops for the first while. My stack dwindled to about 275. Thought about topping up given that most of the stacks were larger than mine. Decided to stick to my plan of 2 bullets.
Big hand #1. I'm in the BB, UTG limps, UTG+1 bumps it to 25, one call, button pots it to 90, SB folds. I look down at AKKx with AK of hearts. The math is perfect for a 4-bet shove of my 275 stack. With my hand I'm happy to either get it in multiway or scoop up the 150 dead money. Both the initial raiser and the 3-bettor called my shove. They checked it down. I don't remember the run out other than it was Q high, a low card paired, and no flushes were possible. Showed my KK for two pair and both opponents mucked. KK holds! I'm up to 800 and change.
Won/lost a few small pots after that. Stayed in the 750 to 850 range for a while.
Big hand #2. Flopped a set of 9s with no redraws, bet it the whole way, turn and river both weren't particularly scary. Neither the flush draw or obvious straight draws got there. Got paid off by one of the big stacks that showed he had flopped a set of 6s. Nice double up to ~1600.
I was earning a reputation at the table as playing pretty tight and having the goods. Saw one guy order a Caesar salad with salmon that looked really good. Made plans to order that myself if I got hungry. It was about 830pm at the time.
Big hand #3. I'm UTG still around 1600 in chips and I've got TT55 one suit. Bump it to 15. One fold, next guy bumps it to 40. 2 callers. I call to close the action. Flop T 7 4 rainbow. Beautiful! I bet 100 into ~160. The guy who made it 40 preflop pops it to 300 with about another 300 behind. Next guy to act has about 1400 to 1500 and thinks for a minute. Looks to me like he doesn't want to let his hand go. I try my best to play it cool. He seems somewhat reluctant but it's like he can't help himself, even comments on how I always have it. He says "Pot" which puts him in for more than half his stack. The player seated to my right shoves his ~700 stack! So it's looking like it's gonna be a 4-way all-in. I'm not going anywhere. When I shove the other players groan as it's pretty obvious what I've got at that point. Everybody calls. Pretty much everyone in the game was a gambler, there were very few folds after making large bets. So the pot is about $4000. The turn is a K and I kinda assume I'm dead at that point. River is a 2 or 3. No flush possible. I table my set of 10s expecting someone to show KK, I particularly expected the big stack to have KK - but he probably had AA and maybe a straight draw to go with it, or maybe I'm being generous. Probably a bunch of wrap draws with 89xx and other flopped sets. Everybody mucks and I scoop the enormous $4000 pot!
Coloured up $1000 worth of 5s and built a small wall of 100s in front of five stacks of 5s. That was fuckin fun
My frisbee friends driving down from San Francisco were 3 hours out so I thought about hitting up the casino. Decided to head to my hotel in Huntington Beach instead and meet the rest of the team. Enjoyed a meal and then conveniently at a CVS picked up a bottle of Crown Royal plus some Canada Dry ginger ale.
Saturday beach ultimate tournament day 1 pulled my calf during the first half of the first game. FML. Whiskey saved the day though. Found a way to have a good time even though I couldn't play.
Saturday night delicious Indian food. More whiskey. Passed out early.
Sunday morning woke up with hopes my calf would be better enough to play. No luck. Second half of the bottle of whiskey saved the day though.
Sunday early afternoon our tourney was over and we headed into LA for lunch. Delicious pad thai. I wasn't brave enough to use the handheld bidet attachment lmao
My friends got gas ahead of their drive north and I caught a Lyft to Hustler Casino.
$1,000 USD in my pocket. I was on the waitlist via PokerAtlas for the 5/5 PLO game. When I arrived at 5:00pm there were 4-5 tables of NL running in the Crystal Room, plus 1 table of $20 double board PLO. There was 1 table of 5/5 PLO running and I was first on the list.
I sat at the empty table next to it and watched the table trying to get a sense of the action. 8 players. Max buy-in 1000. Most of the stacks were in the 300 to 500 range, plus two stacks ~700, and two stacks ~1500. Few false starts when players got up from their seats but they were just going for smoke breaks. After 45 minutes one of the short stacks busted and didn't rebuy. I sat down in seat #4 at 5:45pm and bought in for $500. The first of my 2 bullets.
Most pots were raised preflop to 20 and sometimes reraised to 50 or 60. Lots of limping and cold calling of raises. My kind of game! Didn't hit any good flops for the first while. My stack dwindled to about 275. Thought about topping up given that most of the stacks were larger than mine. Decided to stick to my plan of 2 bullets.
Big hand #1. I'm in the BB, UTG limps, UTG+1 bumps it to 25, one call, button pots it to 90, SB folds. I look down at AKKx with AK of hearts. The math is perfect for a 4-bet shove of my 275 stack. With my hand I'm happy to either get it in multiway or scoop up the 150 dead money. Both the initial raiser and the 3-bettor called my shove. They checked it down. I don't remember the run out other than it was Q high, a low card paired, and no flushes were possible. Showed my KK for two pair and both opponents mucked. KK holds! I'm up to 800 and change.
Won/lost a few small pots after that. Stayed in the 750 to 850 range for a while.
Big hand #2. Flopped a set of 9s with no redraws, bet it the whole way, turn and river both weren't particularly scary. Neither the flush draw or obvious straight draws got there. Got paid off by one of the big stacks that showed he had flopped a set of 6s. Nice double up to ~1600.
I was earning a reputation at the table as playing pretty tight and having the goods. Saw one guy order a Caesar salad with salmon that looked really good. Made plans to order that myself if I got hungry. It was about 830pm at the time.
Big hand #3. I'm UTG still around 1600 in chips and I've got TT55 one suit. Bump it to 15. One fold, next guy bumps it to 40. 2 callers. I call to close the action. Flop T 7 4 rainbow. Beautiful! I bet 100 into ~160. The guy who made it 40 preflop pops it to 300 with about another 300 behind. Next guy to act has about 1400 to 1500 and thinks for a minute. Looks to me like he doesn't want to let his hand go. I try my best to play it cool. He seems somewhat reluctant but it's like he can't help himself, even comments on how I always have it. He says "Pot" which puts him in for more than half his stack. The player seated to my right shoves his ~700 stack! So it's looking like it's gonna be a 4-way all-in. I'm not going anywhere. When I shove the other players groan as it's pretty obvious what I've got at that point. Everybody calls. Pretty much everyone in the game was a gambler, there were very few folds after making large bets. So the pot is about $4000. The turn is a K and I kinda assume I'm dead at that point. River is a 2 or 3. No flush possible. I table my set of 10s expecting someone to show KK, I particularly expected the big stack to have KK - but he probably had AA and maybe a straight draw to go with it, or maybe I'm being generous. Probably a bunch of wrap draws with 89xx and other flopped sets. Everybody mucks and I scoop the enormous $4000 pot!
Coloured up $1000 worth of 5s and built a small wall of 100s in front of five stacks of 5s. That was fuckin fun
Comments
So I lose ~600 and I'm sitting around 3200. The fish with 1200 of what felt like my chips proceeded to donate the money to the table over the next hour or so and I only managed to win a couple hundred of it before he busted.
No significant hands for a while, at least not compared to the $4000 pot. 11:30pm ordered dinner and quickly ate it away from the table anxious to get back to the action. It was just as delicious as I had hoped. Only cost $8 instead of $18 with the seated player discount but I happily paid $20.
The action was good. There was a second table of 5/5 PLO that had opened around 10pm and was a must-move table so we consistently had a full table of 8 players.
On dealer changes there would be a $20 double board bomb pot. These were pretty good money for me all session, able to pretty consistently win half the pot in 3 and 4-way medium size pots. With one exception, I did get 3/4'd against a guy that had about 700 when he had quads on one board and the same nut straight as I did on the other.
Big hand #5. AA23 rainbow, bumped it 15 and called a reraise to 60. 4-ways to a flop of A85 all diamonds. I bet 110 which was just under half pot hoping not to get raised. 2 callers. Turn is a beautiful 5. I check. One player bets 250 and gets 1 call, they were both pretty pot committed at that point. I shoved and they both called. River idk, but they both showed flopped flushes, one K high the other Q high. The K high guy afterwards said he didn't see the board had paired - thank you alcohol - and the Q high guy just seemed really bad at PLO and was surprised he lost haha. I think he went back to a NL table after that. So I scooped the ~2000 pot and was then sitting around 6500 at that time. No one else on the table had over 1800.
Around 4am most players had cleared out and I was playing 3 handed with 2 clearly degenerate gamblers. One guy had about 800 and was decent so I tried not to tangle with him light. The other guy was quite bad but was also running terrible. Both of us kept stacking him and he'd continuously rebuy 200 or 300 at a time. The 800 stack never seemed to make that much money though, mostly sat around 600 to 800 for the next few hours.
I had a plane to catch for 1pm so gave them the heads up that 845am was my cut off. That worked for them. We kept playing, including some rounds of $20 double board bomb pots on the one guys request. I was just happy to keep killing the time until my flight. When all was said I done I cashed out $8500 for a profit of 8 grand!!!
Enjoyed a delicious breakfast and the pit boss congratulated me on my winnings. He seemed quite pleased that I took those last 2 dudes' money. The run bad guy had commented he lost 2500 that night, which didn't sound like it was all that out of character for him.
Moral of the story #2. PLO in LA is plenty profitable
Does this mean the $1-$1 in Paris is tougher than that at the Hustler? 😉
Without a doubt!