1. 2009-04-14 00:43:32

   Chad Luck and the Poker Failure

   One of the best parts about living in wonderful Foster City are the power outages. I've been told it's because we live on a landfill at a very low elevation, which causes leakage into the power grid tunnels, which causes shorts. I've already had to throw away dinners and change work plans, and worse yet, power outages decimate our database infrastructure at work. I've never had outages affect my online poker, but today something unbelievable happened.

   My good friend and roommate Chad plays low buy-in tournaments on Carbon poker. Some of these tournaments are 25-50 players while a lot of them are 100+ or even 1500. He does pretty well, and usually at least bubbles, even in the big ones. Sunday he was signed up for a 3:30pm $5 bounty tournament, but the power went out at 3pm. He couldn't unregister on his iPhone, so we just hoped the power would come back on in time...

   At 5:12pm, the power came back up. He turned his computer on and logged in. He was UTG with 430 in chips (starting stack was 2k) and the blinds were 150/300. There were still 21 players left out of the 60 initial players. He was dealt and decided to fold, since the chance of the next hand being better was so great. A player at another table got knocked out, so it was down to 20. On the 300 big blind, Chad was dealt ! Five people limped (probably trying to collect the bounty) and a sixth person went all in for 1100. Chad called all in, and another 2 players called the 1100.

   The flop:

   Awesome! Everybody checked it around. We were hoping somebody would bluff with air and the twos would hold up, but no dice.

   The turn:

   Damn!

   The river:

   Pow! While everybody was checking it around we were yelling and were high-fiving each other. Our celebratory yells were soon replaced by yells of disbelief as the monitor went blank. Before we could even tell if we won the hand for sure, the power went out. Insane!

   The power just blipped on again (for only 5 minutes of course) and it turns out Chad won the hand and had about 2500 in chips. He ended up folding into 15th place :p

   Posted by Jason M at 2009-04-14 00:43:32

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Comments on “Chad Luck and the Poker Failure”

1. • Posted by Sheila g 2009-04-18 02:19:46
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   • This was funny. Thanks for sharing.

2. • Posted by Nick L g 2009-04-17 15:00:18
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   • Great post that is pretty unbelievable ya no way you can stage something like that.

3. • Posted by Jason M g 2009-04-17 04:42:22
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   • yeah, that was some crazy stuff. we couldn't have staged that if we tried!

4. • Posted by Phil g 2009-04-17 00:19:24
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   • That's one of the funniest poker stories I've ever read. Man, Foster City is like Siberia. Maybe that's why Helmuth lives in Palo Alto.

5. • Posted by Svidri g 2009-04-16 22:28:56
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   • How annoying... good story, well written.

6. • Posted by Jason M g 2009-04-16 04:04:57
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   • Nice 'tar, dawg. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. Thankfully, this is only a once-in-a-few-months phenomenon.

7. • Posted by Graham g 2009-04-15 23:47:40
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   • Insanity! Chad told me to read the blog, but I never expected that. How do you guys run a business with that shit going on. If it's not getting sucked out on the river, it's getting powered out on the celebration!? Blood pressure meds, think about it...