Case Study: Holland Casino, Amsterdam
I arrived back to the Holland Casino, having indulged myself with a crybaby blog (see my last entry for details of how I dropped a grand on the tables and fed another hundo into a racist roulette machine), to find Michelle mid-decision for the majority of her stack. Having raised to 1000 from the button, an old dude went all-in from the Big Blind, insisting to his table-mates that the 'little girl' couldn't call. It was a further 3800 chips to call and from Michelle's body-language, I put her on a medium ace or small pocket pair. I figured she wasn't putting him on much but I also figured that she wouldn't want to call off a big portion of her stack with a marginal hand.
After a minute of contemplation, she made the call. The old guy grimaced and tabled K9. Michelle flipped up A8. "Great Call Honey", I hollered from the rail, "Now Hold!" Neither of them hit the flop, making Michelle over 75% to win. Boom comes a 9 on the turn and suddenly she is 14-1. No justice on the river and Michelle was left with 1500 chips. She got them in two hands later with A9 but found KK in the small blind. The Kings held and she was eliminated in 28th place.
As we walked back to our hotel, we bemoaned out luck and bitched about the dealers. The Dutch poker fraternity are a chauvinistic bunch, taking every opportunity to belittle female players. Michelle was the only woman in the room and in three short hours, she was talked down to on several occasions. Bizarrely, the worst offender was the female dealer, who twice joined in with the players at the table. Her snide remarks got Michelle so ruffled that, at one point, I thought she was going to summon her Super-Obama-Ninja-Fly-swatting powers and slap the bitch from across the table.
Crossing the Leidseplein, we agreed that we were done with poker for the trip. I also pledged to never again put money into a gambling machine. In the words of George W, "Fool me once, Shame on...Shame on you... Fool me, you can't get fooled again." However, like the book says: "You may be through with the bad beats, but the bad beats aren't through with you." Two days later, I completely miscalculated the time and we missed our flight. We arrived to the airport 40 minutes before take-off but we had a bag and they said it was too late to check it.
We were re-directed to the Aerlingus Help Desk where I booked the flight for the following morning. We went downstairs and booked a hotel for the night. We went to the pharmacy and bought Michelle some cold-medicine. We got coffees in Starbucks. We went out to the bus-stop where we waited for 15 minutes until our complementary shuttle bus arrived. 10 minutes later, we pulled up to the Novotel. Stepping off the bus, Michelle directed my attention to a plane flying overhead. Before looking upwards, I looked at Michelle and sighed - "Seriously?" Her expression was enough. I no longer needed to look up... but I did.
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