A Royal Flush (Almost) at Ballys

Friday morning began with toast, coffee and catching up on the TV news. We like the Vegas NBC morning show - Wake up with the Wagners - which features a husband and wife anchor team and a nerdy traffic/weather guy.

There's lot of activity in Vegas this week with the National Finals Rodeo in town (cowboys everywhere) and the annual Las Vegas Marathon, which attracts almost 30,000 runners.

Helen wanted to clean up my appearance, so she cut my hair, which was getting a little shaggy. After the pruning, she sent me back to the Strip to try and recover the $47 that I had lost on Thursday. I pulled into Bills Gambling Hall parking deck about 11 a.m. and made my way across Flamingo to the Ballys poker room where there were two games going. Two names were ahead of me on the waiting list, so I checked in and took a little walk to kill time. I was called about 20 minutes later.

I bought in for $100 and didn't do much early as the cards were cold. Eventually I won a couple of pots and after about an hour I had built my stack to about $160 when the key hand of the day took place.

Like many poker rooms, Ballys offers bonuses for big hands - royal flushes, straight flushes and four of a kind (quads). The bonuses for royals start at $1000 by suit and grow as no one hits them. For example, the bonus for a spade royal flush is now about $5,900, while the diamond royal is $4600. The straight flush bonuses start at $250 and grow also. In fact yesterday a guy at the table next to mine hit a diamond straight flush for $950.

So whenever I get two suited pocket cards that could possibly become a straight flush, I tend to play if the buy-in isn't too pricy. Ya just never know...

With that in mind, here's the hand that set the tone on Thursday: I had about $170 in front of me when I looked down to see Q-10 of Spades. About 6 of us threw in $2 each to see the flop of
A-K of Spades and a 7 of Hearts.

I had two shots to hit the Spade Royal Flush. All I needed was the elusive Jack to snag $5,900.

Three of us called a guy's $15 bet. I thought about raising, but didn't want to scare people out. I felt even if I missed the jack, any spade would give me the Nut Flush.

Turn card was 3 Spades, giving me the unbeatable flush as long as the river card didn't pair the board and set up a possible full house. The Original Raiser (OR) bet $30 and two guys folded, leaving me heads up against him. I raised him to $120, putting his final $90 at risk.

At this point I had two hopes - that he would call and that the river card didn't pair the board setting up a possible full house.

My hopes were answered when he muttered "All In" and the flop was a 4 of Diamonds. I knew I had this huge pot. I showed my Q-10 Spade flush and he tossed in his A-K. He had flopped two top pair and lost all his chips in the process.

A woman sitting across from me said she had my Jack of Spades...

Thanks to this hand, I was up about $260 and was tempted to leave. But I waited a while, slowly and patiently growing my profit up to $375 before heading off to lunch at 2:30. Three hours of playing netted me $125 per hour - not bad. There was something particularly tasty about my comped chicken salad on rye!!

While I was toiling away in the poker room, Helen relaxed a while, talking on the phone with Anna, Norm's wife Lorraine, and Scott, who told her he and his family have made reservations to come visit LV in Feb. 22-28. They'll be staying just off the Strip in a Marriott Grand Chateau that I'm not real familiar with. It'll be fun to have them here.

I whipped up a dinner of cheese-stuffed tortolini with a mushroom vodka marinara sauce. It was hearty and darned tasty. Then we settled in to watch a little TV and calling it a night.

Today we may head over to Wal-Mart where Helen has a prescription to pick up and some shopping to do. I'm sure our LV adventures will continue...