Positively River Street, Part 1
Thursday, 9 February 2006 23:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipitfishI began promising an ode to River Street that I started writing just after I arrived in New York City. I've been thinking a lot about River Street (which I historically called "Greg's Game" in this journal) since I got to NYC. Sure, there were always the NYC clubs, which have begun to disappear (for a while). These are much more profitable than my almost-break-even year (or so) at River Street. However, Greg succeeded where so many others have failed: he was able to mix a home game feel with what was (or, effectively became) a poker club, and it lasted longer than any NYC club I've seen. While a few of the clubs here in NYC have tried to give a home game feel, they didn't succeed, at least not in the way Greg did it in Boston.
Ironically, I used to give Greg a hard time in mid-2004 that his game was not really a home game anymore — which it wasn't — and I really lamented that at that time. But, I was mistaken to be bothered by it. It couldn't have survived much longer as a home game (after all, Greg was clearly getting sick of hosting it in a non-profit fashion), so the choices really were "death or club". I believe the transition was successful, even if the dealers scared the hell out of players with that high frequency of errors. (Having said that, I should (a) point out that Shannan was among the best dealers I'd ever seen, and (b) note that's basically the only real compliant, with a full year of retrospect, that I have about River Street.)
The year of River Street was an important time for me in my poker life. I have decided that I don't want that time to fade into jumbled memory too easily, and while there are still some fresh thoughts of it in my mind, I want to start journaling about them.
I picked this post for today as it is an historic date. My first visit to River Street was Tuesday 10 February 2004 (which, I believe, was the third or fourth time it ran as a "public" game). Tomorrow marks the two year anniversary of my first visit to what I still consider the "best" poker game I've ever played in.
By best, I certainly don't mean it was the most profitable. While it may have been the game that helped me learn more than I could have elsewhere, it wasn't that alone that made it great for me. It became, because of the great mix of personalities of players, most like the poker game that I once played in college. In those games (that someday I'll write about, too), the game was a true social event. We were a group of people who met frequently to study each other's psychological make-up through poker.
For the next year, through a series of posts, I'll trace the history of River Street as I remember it. I am sure some of the details have faded, and I'll get some wrong. I know there are a few River Street alumni lurking out there who might help with this diachronic look at that game we all loved.
Tuesday 10 February 2004 was, not surprisingly, a cold day in Boston. I left work early in the afternoon because I'd had an early morning meeting with an international delegation visiting the organization where I worked. During the day, I'd been emailing out to everyone on Boston's Craig's List trying to find poker games.
To explain what led me to be suddenly so interested in find a poker game, I have to make some of the most personal statements I've ever made in this journal. In mid-2003, I was seeing a therapist to help deal with the stress of my job. I had what might be considered my dream job, but with various complications that were making it unmanageable. I was focusing on work for 12-18 hours a day and working hard to keep the organization going.
Mix in my difficult boss, and I was a basket case. My therapist was
urging me to find something — anything — that would take
me far away from job to a world that was different. Stop
working. Get a hobby.
Good advice for the overworked and
underpaid.
I told my therapist about how playing games, card games and poker in particular, had always been important to me. I told her about my college poker games. She urged me to find a regular poker game. This may, BTW, be the only documented time someone in the psychological profession has actually urged a patient to get involved in "gambling".
Around that time, in August 2003, I'd visited Foxwoods for the first time, and discovered that there was such a thing as "casino poker". I had always known poker was a game of skill. I always thought of casinos as a place where the house took suckers. But I'd never put it together that there could be a "rake", and the house could charge a small fee for running the game where the players played against each other. I was, by February 2004, going to Foxwoods regularly, but was looking for a way to play and hang out with people locally.
So, it was with this situation in mind that I had emailed around Craig's List looking for games. Greg seemed pretty well organized; he'd put up a Yahoo! group for the game, which noted Tuesday nights as game nights, and had entries for past games.
I wrote Greg to join the list, and asked to be added to the group. I
bugged him for an invitation to the game that very night. He wrote
back with some screening questions, asking what I did for a living,
how old I was, and where I worked. These were typical screening
questions for home games; I'd gotten the same from other Craig's
List posters. I answered honestly, if a bit pedantically — I
told him in that email that I liked to play
Omaha-8-or-better-hi-low-split and and Texas Hold'Em
. I
guess I thought he might not know what "O/8" or "HE" were (the
standard abbreviations I use later in the email). How unlikely that
someone hosting a game wouldn't know those abbreviations? Maybe
instead I was trying to impress him and get invited to the game.
He gave me the address of the game. Ironically, the game was hosted on "River Street". I read it first thinking it was a joke, since it contained two poker terms. I mapquested the address, and found it was a real place in an area called Cambridge Port, not too far a walk from the Central Square stop in Cambridge, MA. I left somewhat early, to take the walk from my apartment to Kendall Square, and then the T (Boston's subway system) one hop into Central Square.
The walk was longer than I thought. It was a full six or seven blocks south of Central Square. I remember passing a collapsed mattress in the street, which would become a staple of my walk for the next few months. I would watch this mattress thaw from the cold Boston winter and eventually disappear, in those months when I no longer brought a coat with me to the game. I'd soon be passing this mattress at least once a week.
I arrived about five minutes early, and decided to walk past
the address and wander into a drugstore across the street. I felt nervous. In my pocket was $300, which at the time was
more money that I was used to ever carrying around at once. Thoughts
crossed my mind that perhaps I was walking into something dangerous. I
knew nothing about this fellow, and I'm not the type to be comfortable
with meeting people online then going to their apartments. But, I really
wanted to find a local home game. I had decided to take a leap of faith,
but was now starting to wonder if I wanted to put money up in a self-deal
game with people I'd never met.
The extra minutes passed, and I arrived at the game almost exactly on time. I rang the bell at the front door and was buzzed in, and walked the three flights of stairs. I knocked and was met at the door by a young fellow and a very excited terrier jumping in circles all over me.
Sydney,
, the fellow said, calm down!
I'm Bradley; we
exchanged email earlier today
, I said offering my hand. The
lanky, relaxed fellow shook it and said, Yeah. I'm Greg. Come
on in. This is Steven.
.
They both seemed very young; only Sydney seemed old. Being in Boston,
I thought right away "students", and said: Hi, Steven, I'm Bradley.
How's it going? I run a non-profit organization in Boston. What do
you guys do?
. I glanced at the end-table and saw a book with a
title like Day Trips for Dog Owners in Boston; A guy
who loves dogs this much can't be dangerous
, I thought.
We're computer science graduate students. At MIT,
Steven
answered with a slow, calculated, mid-western-sounding accent (I'd learn
months later he was the Californian and Greg was the midwesterner). That
statement simultaneously calmed me and concerned me. I felt calmer
because, if they weren't lying, this was surely going to be just fine. It
now seems like the silliest thing that I kept thinking this game was some
sort of setup to take people's bankrolls — after all, why pull a con
with an advertised game at such low stakes? But, at the time, $300 was a
big piece of my bankroll and $4/$8 was still a "huge" game to me.
As my worry calmed, I became concerned about something else. One of the points of getting into this hobby was to let go of my work world, which is very closely related to the world of computer science. Yet, here, I had found a game full of computer science (CS) graduate students. I decided to keep a low profile about my high-profile connection to the CS world, and was glad to discover the game wasn't just filled with other CS students.
The "IPO", as I came to call the "offering of the game to people outside of Greg's circle of immediate friends", had been done a few weeks ago, so there were other non-CS-student Cambridge folks in attendance. I came to know them as "the low stakes home game crowd". I met Jonathan, who worked with autistic children and sang along with the music (including even Michael Jackson) when he had a good hand. I met Ben, an MIT chemical engineering student who was smart but overplayed AK in limit. There was Paul, who actually dug graves for a living but later got a job at UPS. There was PJ, who dressed like a beatnik and played way too loose-passive. There were a few others, but their names drifted easily from my mind, as they disappeared in the months to come when the stakes got bigger. But that night, we played low-stakes poker ($1/$2 limit HE) at a folding table in Greg's living room. Meanwhile, on the comfy chairs in the kitchen, they played a "high stakes game" of $3/$6. I don't remember a single specific hand that I can tie in my mind to that night, but I do remember when the $1/$2 table broke.
It was only 11PM, and I had planned to stay until 12:15 or so, when the Boston trains stopped running. I wandered back to the $3/$6 game, where a NL HE game had broken out. In those days, Greg's game "became" no-limit at some point in the evening. There was no controlled buy-in; you just landed in it with whatever stack you happened to have sitting in front of you. I had yet to play a single hand of NL HE ever that wasn't in a tournament, so I decided to buy into the game for a mere $2 — one big blind. Some at the table were amused; others were annoyed. I actually caught an Ace-high but went up against AT and lost.
Done the first NL HE hand I ever played, I offered to deal for an hour
or so until I left. I didn't do a terrible job, but only made a
whopping $2 in tips. I didn't care. I had gotten comfortable with
this home game. Greg was friendly; his dog was nice. His friends
weren't creepy. I now had a place to go to play poker that didn't
involve boarding a Greyhound bound for the Connecticut hills. As I
said in my thank-you note to Greg two days later, I may try my hand
at your no-limit game eventually, but I certainly didn't mind dealing
it and watching. You have a good mix of players and I found the
competition challenging but not over my head
. My time at River
Street had begun, and my Tuesday (and occasionally Thursday) nights in
Cambridge would have a special significance for the year that
followed.
I'll try to post, over the next year, stories of River Street to match events on the 2004-2005 calendar to coincide with the same dates in 2006-2007. I obviously don't have specific incident and date memories nor email records that match the whole year, but I'll try to keep the general time frames right over the year. I hope you all enjoy this series, and I hope a few members of the River Street crowd resurface to chime in, and even correct me when I misremember.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 20:20 (UTC)I did meet Jonathan at another game though, and he currently lives in Brooklyn. Or he was moving here a year or so ago. That's all I know.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 20:57 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 23:07 (UTC)Looking forward to it
Date: 2006-02-10 21:35 (UTC)Re: Looking forward to it
Date: 2006-02-11 16:47 (UTC)I must apologize in advance, but I'm having trouble figuring out who you are. I invited many people to the game, and I can't place who you are for sure. Do you mind telling me what your first name is? I'm sure I'll place it at that point.
Re: Looking forward to it
Date: 2006-02-12 14:52 (UTC)Re: Looking forward to it
Date: 2006-02-15 04:34 (UTC)shane
Date: 2006-02-11 05:31 (UTC)Shannan!
Omgz time files. Thanks for the chronicle.
Re: shane
Date: 2006-02-11 16:46 (UTC)Geez. I make that mistake yet again, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nick_marden
didn't even corrected it when he read this early on. :) Shannan, forgive me for getting your name wrong one last time. It wouldn't be River Street if I didn't call Shannan, "Shane" after all!
Yes, time has gone by. For those who don't know![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dkwad is
the illustrious Steven who will play prominently as I write this River
Street series.
pretty entertaining.
Date: 2006-02-13 22:12 (UTC)T
Re: pretty entertaining.
Date: 2006-02-15 04:33 (UTC)