Live Poker at Canterbury

By Paul “Beanie” Nobles It was a Monday night and I was free to do as I pleased--there are really no movies out that interest me right now--so I decided to go play some live poker. Truthfully I really don’t like live poker very much. I just feel like online poker is poker in its best form. The game moves faster and all of the deficiencies pale in comparison to the advantages in my opinion. I went with Tony Lazar (interesting Rolling Stone article that was written a couple of years ago) who I have known casually for some time. I met Tony (this isn’t close to representative of Tony’s wins, he and Scott tore up Vegas low limit buy ins before poker became what it is today) a while back at Canterbury and I fancied myself a decent poker player even back then. When I ran into Tony the next time we were in Reno and I had to remind him of our chance encounter back in Minnesota. This was the second year of the WPT. He was with Scott Fischman who I would later become more acquainted with when Tony, Scott and I began grinding short handed games on UB. The cool thing about Tony is he doesn’t pretend to be something he is not. He makes a living grinding low limit tourneys and cash games and takes shots when the value is there.

I showed up at Canterbury a little bit before he did and signed up for everything but the only seat was at 15-30 limit. The game was short handed when IloveParis and I sat down, he just happened to show up. Donovan used to kill the short handed limit games on Paradise. Between him, a Canterbury pro and myself there wasn’t a lot of easy money at the table, but it was a must move game and that was where things got interesting for me. By the time Tony showed up I was up $1,300, which is a shit load of money for 15-30, never mind that I had been playing for less than an hour. It had little to do with skill as both of the hands I won were real lucky to win. On one I hit a gut shot and on the second I hit 2 pair on a pot capped pre-flop; on the flop I had Ad7d and only called because the last pot I won was so big and I was doing a heat check.

I never got called to the 30-60 game but did take a seat in the Omaha 10-20 kill where a lot of my old friends from local games were hanging out. Before I did though I got to see 2 guys arguing, one of the guys was complaining how bad everyone was playing, meanwhile he was playing like crap. Then I heard something that I thought only occurred online. A guy asks, “Would you like to play heads up?” I sat there quietly but I would have loved to play either guy heads up. It just seems like there is such a negative vibe at Canterbury every time I go there. What is weird is that the manager of Canterbury took over the management at The Wynn and honestly other than poker they have no similarities at all.

By the way it had been a while since I had played poker with chips so I was fumbling my chips a lot and looked silly in a lot of the pots I was playing.

I ended the night up about $1,800 for the 2 games and it was nice seeing everyone again. I didn’t jump into 30-60 because I had a good win and it wouldn’t be uncommon to lose 2k in 30-60; couple that with the fact that I have been playing a lot of break even poker for the last month and I probably need to build on that success. Certainly if I played at Canterbury more often it would probably help, but unfortunately it might kill my positive attitude in the process.

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