Sealed submitted by pick-a-card-any-card to PlayingCardsMarket [link] [comments] Sealed Open Open picture of anyone brick box and zine, Fontaine poker set Hey fellow Card connoisseurs, I have some decks that I am selling for a decent price, if you don't like the price feel free to make me an offer. PayPal only, fees on me. Not super open to trades at the moment unless its an open fontaine, A1, or something. But feel free to offer a trade. As said in the title there is Free US shipping for over 3 sealed decks or 5 opened decks otherwise shipping is 7$ for up to 3-5 decks, worldwide shipping is available and there will be a discount on most orders that are shipped worldwide. Free sticker for all orders until they run out. Feel free to make offers on decks even if it seems low
the fontaine tote bag comes free with a 12 deck order or can be bought for 40$ its in the slight colors (navy blue). the box in the top left corner is free with a order over 10 decks. and lastly the fontaine poker set i bought for 190$ and shipping is like 25$ so i am trying to get 200$ for it, the cards are sealed and the poker chips are opened out of the cellophane but hardly used. I didn't list the condition of the opened decks because it would take to long so if you are going to buy i will tell you the condition of the decks before. feel free to make offers. i can take more pictures if necessary but please only ask if you are set on buying |
The Müllerian ducts end in an epithelial [membranous tissue] elevation, [called] the Müllerian eminence… in the male [foetus] the Müllerian ducts atrophy, but traces … are represented by the testes… In the female [foetus] the Müllerian ducts… undergo further development. The portions which lie in the genital core fuse to form the uterus and vagina… The hymen represents the remains of the Müllerian eminence.
In adult women, the Müllerian eminence has no function.
— Anatomy of the Human Body, Henry Gray, 1918
Charu Deol lived in the large cold city for five months and four days before he found the hymen, wedged between a wall and a filing cabinet in the small law office where he cleaned on Thursday nights. The building was an old government-protected church, but the local people only worshipped on the weekend, so the rector rented out the empty rooms. If Charu Deol had been a half-inch to the right, he might have missed the hymen, but the dying sunshine coming through the stained-glass window in streams of red, blue and green illuminated the corner where it lay.
Charu Deol thought it strange that a building could be protected. There were people playing music on the trains for money and two nights ago he’d seen a man wailing for cold in the street. He thought the government of such a fine, big city might make sure people were protected first.
Still, he’d known several buildings that acted like people, including his father’s summer house, with its white walls and sweating ceiling and its tendency to dance and creak when his parents argued. They’d argued a great deal, mostly because his mother worked there as a maid and complained that the walls were conspiring with his father’s wife. Charu Deol was also aware of a certain nihilism in the character of the room where he now lived – the eaves and floor crumbling at an ever-increasing and truculent rate. When he ate the reheated kebab with curry sauce his landlady left him in the evenings before work, he could hear the room complaining loudly.
The hymen didn’t look anything like the small and fleshy curtain he might have imagined, not that he had ever thought about such a thing. At first, it didn’t occur to Charu Deol that he’d found a sample of that much-prized remnant of gestational development, the existence – or lack thereof – which had caused so much pain and misery for millennia. He hardly knew what a hymen was, having only ever laid down with one woman in his life: the supple fifty-something maid who worked for his mother.
Away from his father’s summer house, his mother had her own maid, because what else did you work for, after all? The maid had offered warm and sausagey arms, the sweet breath of a much younger woman, and a kind of delighted amusement at his nakedness. After he’d expelled himself inside her – something that took longer than he’d foreseen, distracted as he was by the impending return of his mother – she’d not let him up, but gripped his buttocks in her hands, pressing her entire pelvis into him and pistoning her hips with great purpose and breathlessness.
He was left quite sore and with the discouraging suspicion that she’d used him as one might a firm cushion, the curved end of a table, the water jetting out of a spigot, or any other thing that facilitated frottage. Afterwards, she treated him exactly as before: as if he was a vase she had to clean under and never quite found a place for.
He used the side of his broom to pull the soft, tiny crescent-shaped thing toward him, then, bent double, he touched the hymen with his forefinger.
First, he realised it was a hymen. Next, that the hymen had lived inside a twenty-seven-year-old woman, for twenty-seven years. When she was twenty-four, her boyfriend returned home, bad tempered from a quarrel with his boss. When she asked him what was wrong one too many times, the boyfriend – who prior to that moment had washed dishes and protected her from the rain and gone with her to see band concerts and helped her home when she was drunk and collapsed laughing with her on the sofa – grabbed her arm and squeezed it as tight as he could, causing a sharp pain in her shoulder and her heart. When she said, ‘You’re hurting me’, like the women in movies and books, he squeezed all the tighter and looked happy doing of it, and the little flesh crescent inside her slid through her labia and down the leg of her jeans and onto their kitchen floor. The boyfriend swept it up the next day. The bin bag burst in the apartment rubbish dispenser; the hymen got stuck to the edge of someone’s yellow skirts and, helter-skelter, this little pink crescent was pulled along the cold and windy city streets.
Now it was gently pulsating in Charu Deol’s horrified hand.
The knowledge inside the hymen did not manifest in good and tidy order, like a narrative on a TV screen. It was more, thought Charu Deol, like being a djinn or a soul snake, slipping inside the twenty-seven-year-old woman’s skin and looking out through her eyes. He had the discomforting feeling that her body was a bad fit, and stifling, like a hot-water bottle around his thinner, browner self, baggy at the elbows and around the nose. He knew the woman was still with her boyfriend, and that she thought about what she’d do if he ever squeezed her arm again. Charu Deol knew they pretended that the arm squeeze and the not-stopping was a nothing, or a small thing, instead of the cruel thing it was, and that the hair on her arm where the boyfriend gripped her was like a singed patch of grass that never grew again.
Charu Deol sat down on the floor of the law-office church and saw that his hands were shaking. The hymen felt like thin silk between his fingers. What was he to do with it? To discard it was like throwing out a prayer book or a sacred chalice. Before he knew what he was doing, he took a new dusting cloth from his cart, carefully wrapped it around the hymen and placed it in his pocket.
When he got home, he stole a small, plastic bag from his landlady’s kitchen – the kind she packed with naan and Worcestershire sauce and tied up with a plastic-covered piece of wire for work. She would be angry when she discovered his theft, so he left a pound coin on the floor, to the left of the refrigerator, as if he’d dropped it.
She’d put the coin in her pocket without asking if it belonged to him.
Alone in his room, he unwrapped the tiny, silken, throbbing thing and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He was assaulted with the woman’s story again: the squeeze, the disbelief, the lurking, tiny fear. This was why, when the boyfriend slapped the backs of friends or laughed too loud, a small part of the twenty-seven-year-old woman winced and moved away.
Charu Deol placed the hymen inside the plastic bag and sealed it, setting it on the nightstand where he could see it.
He was a witness, and that was important.
He couldn’t sleep, conscious of the lumpy mattress, the large cupboard that took up most of his box room, the smell of the thin blue blankets his landlady stole from the old people’s home where she worked. ‘No one wants them,’ she said, ‘no one has any use for them.’ He didn’t know why she stole them; all she did was stack them in the cupboard.
He thought of his father, a man who had never held him or as far as he knew, been proud of him at all.
He got up and slipped the plastic bag in between the ninth and tenth blue blanket. Before he did so, he examined it one more time. In the dim light, the hymen looked like a beautiful eye: brown and dark and soft and wet, its worn edges like eyelashes, an expression he couldn’t fathom at its centre.
Charu Deol took long walks. That was what big city people did. He went to a small and well-manicured park during the hours he should have been sleeping. He bent his head near the small park pond and dipped his long cracked toes in the water until someone stared and he realised he was up to his ankles at the cold, dank lip. He watched a man teach his two girls cricket with a tennis racket. He watched an orange-helmeted man run down the path, holding his son’s scooter, laughing and calling, ‘Use your brakes!’ He thought about city people soaking in baths and whether they noticed the scum floating to the surface like bad tea, and about the landlady asking him if he’d like her bath water after she got out and how he’d stammered, ‘No thank you.’
‘That’s the way you do it here,’ she said, and her face reminded him of his mother’s when his father’s wife went out to get sweet biscuits at the end of a meal.
A woman walked past with a shrill voice and a plaid shirt and a friend eating grapes, while he dried his cold feet on the grass. When they were gone, he saw the small, iridescent thing by his big toe and wanted to ignore it, or to decide it was a lost earring. He closed his eyes. But he could not leave it there, forsaking his new knowledge, as if he had no responsibility.
Charu Deol lay on the grass, curled around the hymen, and played nudge-chase with it, like a cat with half-dead prey, snatching at the air above it, using his thin sleeve to push it around under the soft edges of the setting sun. The shrill-voiced woman’s hymen was not as soft or simple as the brown eye that lay between the ninth and tenth blue blankets in his room. This one was round, with seven holes in its centre, reminding him of the way thin, raw bread-dough broke when you dragged it across a hot stove; but he’d never seen dough encrusted with stars. This hymen glittered so ferociously against the wet grass, he thought it might leave him and soar into the sky where it belonged.
He touched it, expecting it to burn him.
The woman with the shrill voice had been raped twice before her tenth birthday, each time by her father, who smelled expensive then, and still did now. It was not the pain the woman remembered, but the shuddering of her father’s body and the way he closed his eyes, as if he could see the burning face of God. She had never had an orgasm because she couldn’t bear that same shuddering inside of her; if it broke free, it might kill all the flowers that ever were. Charu Deol knew all this and also that the shrill-voiced woman sometimes wondered: Why no more than twice? Was it because her father had stopped loving her?
Charu Deol shivered on the grass. After a while, he picked up the silver-star hymen and put it into the plastic bag in his coat pocket because part of him had known another would come. He watched the geese until a park attendant nudged him with a broom.
‘What’s up, chappie,’ he said. He was an older man, with the dark chin of an uncle.
‘What do you do when evil comes?’ asked Charu Deol.
The attendant took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes. He sat down next to Charu Deol and smoked two cigarettes and watched the geese. ‘I don’t know,’ said the park attendant. ‘But I think you have to be rational and careful about these things.’
Charu Deol took the plastic bag out of his coat pocket and showed it to him.
‘I think you’re very emotional,’ said the park attendant, and bared his teeth. He didn’t seem to see the bag. ‘Chin up, laddie,’ he said.
Charu Deol sat on his lumpy bed that night and examined the bagged and beautiful hymens. Surely, he thought, they belonged to virgins. But neither of these violated women were pure. Was this a strange sickness of city women that no one had thought to tell him? Certainly, he hadn’t known city women before, with so many ideas and so many of them about him. More than once, he’d found himself feeling sorry for them, even the ones who looked at him strangely on the 453 bus and moved their purses to the left when they saw him.
His Tuesday job was for a company that made industrial bleach. He liked it best there. Despite the smell of ammonia, his cart shone – and the teeth of his lady boss shone, and she looked into his face, not through the back of his head, and laughed loudly when he told her about the cracks in every one of his landlady’s china cups.
‘Is your country very beautiful, Charu?’
He thought it very familiar of her to address him so. He could see she was made of the same stuff as his mother’s maid, very different from the finer skin of his father. She lifted the hair off her neck, which was something he thought she should only do near a man she knew well. Nevertheless, he nodded politely and when the boss lady left he went to the large unisex toilet and scrubbed yellow and brown stains out of the bowls, his rubber gloves rolled all the way up his wrists and forearms.
When he backed out of the stall and turned around, there were three hymens on the floor. One of them was like a piece of thunder, singing a dark song and rolling back and forth – the hymen of a woman in her fifties who got something called a good backhander when she talked too much, and a pinch on the waist when her opinions sounded more clever than her husband’s. The second reminded him of a teardrop. When he lifted it to his face, it filled him with memories of a woman whose husband once ironed the inside of her left thigh like a shirt. The third one slipped him into the skin of a woman who had a happy life except she remembered walking home from school and the stranger who crept up behind her, put his hand up her skirt and clutched her vulva.
Charu Deol was so startled by the sudden feeling of invasion that he dropped her hymen in the soap dish and had to fish it out again. Two more hung from the rolling towels, like wind chimes, twins: one raped, one not, but he knew the untouched sister stayed with the violated twin because she wished it had been her instead. He clutched the sink; he couldn’t see his reflection because there was a spray of crystalline hymens across the mirror, each smaller than the last. He bent closer and realised it was only one after all, exploded across the glass like a sneeze. The woman it belonged to had clouted her best friend’s fiancée when he’d tried to hold her down. He hit her so hard in return he made her deaf in one ear. She had never told her best friend, but she didn’t go to her house anymore and that had caused problems between them. The blood from her ear had tinged the hymen spray a shy blush-pink.
Charu Deol set about gathering them all.
He thought them safe, slipped between the blue blankets, and so they were for a few days, but he had forgotten his landlady’s monthly clean-out, and returned that Friday to find her shining his floors with a coconut husk and changing the sheets on his bed, her fat, brown back unexpectedly familiar. The blue blankets were stacked on the floor, one plastic bag peeping out from a crevice. He was so frightened she might have thrown them away, or hurt them, that before he knew it he was speaking in his father’s baritone, demanding she respected his privacy, please and thank you, and if she couldn’t, she could find someone else to pay her every Sunday for this shithole. It was a city word and he felt powerful saying it to her.
The landlady stared at him, as if he was a new and rare object.
‘Please yourself,’ she said, and shuffled away from the half-polished room. ‘Do someone a favour,’ he heard her muttering as he scooped up the plastic bags, ‘look what you get.’
He bought himself a long coat from a charity shop. The coat had many pockets and after his Sunday job, he sat on his bed and sewed more into the lining. His Sunday job was at a university, where he cleaned staff offices and found thirty-eight hymens. Some were like bright cherry-red fingernails; one s-shaped, glimmering wrought iron; he tapped it and heard a ting-ting sound like his mother’s bracelet on her kitchen pots. One reminded him of a cat’s paw; another smelled like fresh sea urchin. It surprised him to find that eleven of the hymens were from women abused by scholarly, well-respected men.
As the numbers increased, anxiety took him: the risk of forgetting even one precious story. To forget would be sacrilege. He stole two reams of recycled typing paper from his Sunday job and wrote the stories of the women down and read them at night, trying to commit them to memory. On Wednesday, he was fired from his Wednesday job, for refusing to take off his suspiciously bulging coat for the security guard. On Thursday, the landlady left a note from his Sunday job, to say he must not come back – their cameras had recorded his paper theft.
At his Tuesday job, the boss who was overly familiar left her hymen on the edge of her computer desk.
It was so pretty he mistook it for a small, white daisy. When he touched it, his head reeled with alcohol: cranberry vodka and alcopops. Last Friday she’d gone around the back of the pub with two men who seemed quite nice; she was sexually aroused but also frightened and when one of them said something lewd and dark, she wanted to run back into the pub, but the second one had a hand on her hip and she decided she might as well bite her lip because making a fuss might. Might. Might just.
Hurt.
She found Charu Deol weeping for her, his cheek hard against her computer screen and fired him for the way he looked at her, his face broken open. She said if he told anybody about unfair dismissal, she would say he tried to rape her.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’
Charu Deol’s head is light and empty as he walks through the early morning sunshine. The coat full of hymens rubs his ankles; the satchel on his back is stuffed with scribbled paper. He is concerned about himself. He has taken to muttering in public places, to stopping men on the road to tell them about women. He needs help. He cannot witness these stories alone. If he could just explain, if he could just ask them, politely, not to hurt anyone; if he could just talk to enough of them, it might stem the tide. Most thrust him away, mistaking him for drunk.
‘It’s not true,’ say the few who listen when he tells them that it’s one in every three women he sees. ‘It’s complicated,’ say the men. ‘What can I do?’ they say.
He doesn’t know.
His skin hurt. He feared it was transparent, exposing his internal organs. This was not a job for one man, not for a man who needed to pay rent, although he found himself less concerned with such banalities. He avoided speaking to women at all, worried he might hurt or offend them. He was practically servile with his landlady since his last harsh words, cleaning not just his own room, but the entire house, including her roof and digging her backyard until she yelled at him. He was relieved that she was among the unscathed, and marvelled at women on the streets for their luck or stoicism.
One tall lady left a trail of hymen strands behind her like golden cobwebs, a story so long and fractured and dark that he bent over in the busy street and cried out his mother’s name. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again; if he could bear to take the risk, now that he was witness. He watched the golden cobweb woman laughing with a friend, swinging her bag, her heels clicking. How was she standing upright? How did they restrain themselves from screaming through the world, cleaving heads asunder, raking eyeballs? How did the universe not break into small pieces?
He became convinced that the hymens in his coat were rotting. Despite their beauty they were pieces of flesh, after all. At other times, he imagined them glass; feared he would trip and fall and shatter them, piercing his veins and tendons. Still, he walked every day and gathered more. They littered his room, piled under the bed and towards the ceiling.
He bought a lock for his door.
On Monday, or perhaps it was Thursday, he took himself to the church that was a law office. The gravestones ached with the weight of early Spring daffodils. The rector found him bent over one of the graves, inserting his fingers into the damp earth, hands going from coat pocket to soil. When he said, ‘Son, can I help you?’ Charu Deol asked if this was blessed earth, and would it protect blessed things. He clutched the area around his heart, then the area around his neck, and whined like a dog when the rector tried to soothe him.
‘Can you not see them?’ Charu Deol said.
‘What, my son?’ asked the rector.
Charu Deol grasped the man’s lapels and dragged himself upright. He was weeping, and frightening a holy man, but the hymens were thick on the ground like blossom, and the task was suddenly, ferociously beyond him. He dropped the rector and ran through the graveyard, past clinking, bleeding, surging, mumbling pieces of women.
The hymens were a sea in his landlady’s front yard. He crushed them underfoot, howling and spitting and weeping, feeling them splinter, break, snap, squelch under his heels like pieces of liver. He tried his key, once, twice, again, wrenched it to the left, and pushed inside. The place was quiet, the usually dull and lugubrious walls mercifully blank, his bed cool against his face.
The landlady knocked and entered. ‘Lawks lad,’ she said, ‘I’m worried about you. It can’t be all that bad, now.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him.
He remembered a son she’d once mentioned; he’d never taken the time to listen.
‘Tell me of your son,’ he said.
She did, saying that she knew young men. All they needed was a firm hand and a loving heart. The two of them, they’d got off to a bad start, but now she saw he was in need of help. Would he like a cup of tea? He was too handsome a lad to get on so. Charu Deol sniffed, tried to smile, inched forward, put his head on the soft knee. She patted him awkwardly, and he felt a mother’s touch in the fingers, and a fatigued kind of hope. He crawled further up her knee, put his face into her hipbone. She smelled familiar. His teeth felt sharp, his fingers sweaty. He could hear flesh outside, beating on the door, crawling up the windowpanes.
He didn’t see the hymen inching down her thigh, like a rubied snail, like torn underwear.
Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. She can tell, because the love is stuck to the walls of house, making the wallpaper sticky, and it has seeped into the calendar in her kitchen, so bad she can’t see what the date is, and the love keeps ruining the food – whatever she does or however hard she concentrates, everything turns to mush. The dumplings lack squelch and bite – they come out doughy and stupid, like grey belches, in her carefully salted water. Her famed liver and green banana is mush too; everything has become too-soft and falling apart, like food made for babies. Silk food, her mother used to call it.Concluded in the comments.
Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love. Not with her, no.
She gets away from the love by visiting Wood Green Shopping City on a Saturday afternoon. She sits in the foyer on a bench for nearly two hours, between Evans and Shoe Mart. She doesn’t like the shoes there; the heels make too much noise, and why are the clothes that Evans makes for heavy ladies always sleeveless? No decorum, she thinks, all that flesh out-of-doors. She likes that word: decorum. It sounds like a lady’s word, which suits her just fine.
There are three days left to Christmas and the ceiling of the shopping mall is a forest of cheap gold tinsel and dusty red cartridge paper. People walk past in fake fur hoods and boots. A woman stands by the escalator, her hand slipped into the front of her coat; she seems calm but also she looks like she’s holding her heart, below the fat tartan-print scarf around her neck. Then Mrs Neecy Brown sees that the woman by the escalator is her, standing outside her own skin, looking at herself, something her Jamaican granny taught her to do when the world don’t feel right. People are staring, so she slips back inside her body and heads home, past a man dragging a flat-faced mop across the mall floor, like he’s taking it for a walk.
She trudges through Saturday crowds that are smelly and noisy. The young people have fat bottom lips and won’t pick up their feet; she has a moment of pride, thinking of her girls. Normal teenagers they’d been, with their moods, but one word from her or one face-twist from Mr Brown, and there was a stop to that! She had all six daughters between 1961 and 1970: a cube, a seven-sided polygon, a rectangle that came out just bigger than the size of her fist and the twin triangles, oh! The two of them so prickly that she locked up shop on Mr Brown for nearly seven months. He was so careful when he finally got back in that their last daughter was a perfectly satisfactory and smooth-sided sphere.
All grown now, scattered across North London, descending on the house every Sunday and also other days in the week, looking for babysitting; pardner-throwing; domino games; approval; advice about underwear and aerated water; argument; looking for Mamma’s rub-belly hand during that time of the month; to curse men and girlfriends; to leave pets even though she’d never liked animals in the house; to talk in striated, incorrect patois and to hug-up with their daddy. Then Melba, the sphere, who had grown even rounder in adulthood, came to live upstairs with her baby’s father and their two children. The three-year-old sucked the sofa so much he swallowed the pink off the right-hand cushions. The eight-month-old had inherited his father’s mosquito face, long limbs and delicate stomach, which meant everyone had to wade through baby sick. Then Lara, Melba’s best friend from middle school, arrived in a bomber jacket with a newly-pierced and bleeding lip so long ago that Mrs Neecy Brown didn’t even remember when, but regarded her with fond absent-mindedness, not unlike a Christmas decoration you’ve had so long you don’t know where it came from. And the noise. Oh dear, oh Lord.
In between all of this, her husband’s bouts of lovesickness.
He’d proved no good at marriage: the repetition, the crying babies, the same good mornings, the perfectly decent night-dresses she bought – Lord woman, you couldn’t try a little harder? – but there was nothing wrong with her pretty Marks and Spencer cotton shifts, lace at the décolletage, and little cream and brown and yellow and red flowers. He seemed to crave what she privately called The Excitement Girls. She thought of them as wet things: oiled spines, sweating lips, damp laps. She saw one of them once, kissing him goodbye no more than fifteen minutes from their home. She’d scuttled behind a stone pillar to peep. The girl turned away after the kiss. She looked happy. Her chest was jiggling, bra-less, the nipples like bullets.
So that’s what they look like then, thought Mrs Neecy Brown.
She paused at the entrance to Wood Green tube station. One turn to the left and she’d be on her street. No, she wouldn’t go home, not yet. He’d be there for his tea, pirouetting through the house with his broad grins and smacking her bottom, his voice too loud. How stupid he thought she was; didn’t he know she could see, that she knew him? In love he was alternately lascivious and servile and too easily tempted into things – brawls, TV shows, games of poker for too much money. Gone for too long and out too often, and when he came back he would lunge at the family: Come, let’s go to Chessington Park next Sunday, or-we-could or-we-could, and he’d get his grandchildren excited, and she’d fry chicken and make potato salad and buy Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, 39 pence the packet of ten and pack tomatoes like a proper English family, in a proper hamper basket with thermoses of tea. Then, when all is ready, the greatest of apologies he comes up with. Once he even squeezed out tears: Can’t come, Mrs Brown, he calls her, or Mummy on affectionate days, Can’t come, my dears. They working me like a bitch dog, you know. Errol, she murmurs, language! Then he’s heading out the house, tripping up on his own sunshine, free, free. Make sure you come back in time, Errol boy, she always thinks, in time to wash that woman’s nipples off your neck-back.
After all.
She loves the London underground; it still seems a treat, an adventure, paying your fare, riding the escalator, choosing a seat, settling back to watch the people. So many different kinds, from all over the world! She settles into a corner and watches a Chinese boy struggling with a huge backpack. The straps are caught in his long hair. She’ll ride with him all the way to Heathrow, she thinks, see if he untangles the hair before Green Park. Then ride the way back. She leans her head on the glass partition and steps outside of her body.
Last night, Mr Brown did something he’d never done in all these years of his lying, stinking cheating.
Walking in, midnight or thereabouts, easing himself onto the edge of the mattress – she pretending to be asleep as usual, groaning a little, turned on her side – he rolled into the bed, after casting one shoe hither and the other thither and his tongue was in her ear, digging and rooting. Snuffle, snuffle, like a pig. Then she became aware of the smells. Vicks Vapour Rub. Someone else’s perfume, and… Mrs Neecy Brown lay trembling and affronted and frozen in the first rage she’d let herself feel for a long time – not since the first time he’d cheated, and repented and wept so much and talked to Pastor for weeks and then just went out and did it again, and she’d realised that it was a habit, this love-falling, and that she could never stop it, only fold her own self into a little twist of paper and stuff herself near the mops and brooms in the downstairs cupboard. No not since then had she let herself cry.
He’d come to her bed unwashed, with the smell of another woman’s underneath all over him.
She’d felt as if her head was rising; would never have expected to recognise such an odour so immediately when it assailed her. But it was just like the smell of her own underneath, the one that she made sure to clean and dress, like a gleaming, newly-caught fish, lest it flop from between her thighs and swim upriver.
She clapped a hand over her mouth as he snuggled into her, so she didn’t leap up and scream it at him: Is so all woman underneath smell the same, Errol?
If they were all the same, why turn from her and seek another?
No, she wouldn’t cook for him. Let him eat what bits he could find in the fridge for tea, and vex with her. Let him use it as an excuse to storm off to she.
The Chinese boy has sagged next to the centre pole, holding on for dear life. There are empty seats, but perhaps getting the mammoth backpack off and on makes the option too tiresome. There’s another young man sitting to her right. He’s wearing a creased blue shirt and stained navy-blue pants. His black socks are covered in fluff, like a carpet that hasn’t been hoovered in days. He has a dry, occasional cough and he sits with one hand akimbo, the other on his jaw. His eyes dart around. He’s a man in need of a good woman, if ever she’s seen one. Then she looks closer and sees she’s wrong – someone has creamed his skin and it gleams amongst the other imperfections.
Furthest away are a mother and daughter, stamps of each other, but even if they hadn’t been, she would have known. Mothers and daughters sit together in particular ways. Mother is shorter, more vibrant. She rubs her temples, manipulating her whole face like it’s ginger dough. Daughter has a face like a steamed pudding, two plaits that begin above her ears and slop straight down over them. Her hand’s a wedge of flesh, rubbing her eyes. She smiles at Mrs Neecy Brown, who finds she can’t smile back. She can’t take the chance. She presumes that Mr Brown finds his girls in north London. He’s lazy. This latest one is near, she can feel it; she could even be this young woman. She wonders whether they know her face, if they’ve ever followed her.
The train stops, empties, fills, whizzes past stations: Turnpike Lane, Manor House, Finsbury Park, Arsenal, Holloway Road. Where was she, this latest one, casually breaking off bits of her husband and keeping them for herself? She’d had to feed breakfast to a limbless man at least twice; can’t forget the week he didn’t smile at all because some selfish woman had stolen his lips.
She doesn’t realise that she’s been asleep until she wakes up.
‘Hello, ma’am?’
Balding head and a large beauty mark on his left jowl. He hunches forward in the seat; he’s been sitting like that for years; she knows the type – bad habits you couldn’t break by the time your fifties set in. There’s something young about his chin: it’s smooth and plump and might quiver when he cries. He’s wearing a horrible, mustard-yellow jacket and red trousers.
The man is bending forward, gesticulating, and Mrs Neecy Brown sees that her tartan scarf has fallen to the floor. She leans forward, feeling creaky, bleary, feeling her breasts hang, glimmers at the man who’s smiling at her and beats her to it, scooping up the scarf and placing it delicately on her knee, like a present.
‘Thank you.’
‘You welcome.’
She looks around; they’ve reached Heathrow. She must have fallen asleep soon after Green Park, half an hour at least! The train hisses. People come in slowly. They’ll be heading back soon. She’d like to be a movie star, she thinks – to pack a perfect set of matching luggage and leave the house, a crescent, golden moon above her. She would come to Heathrow and… what? She sighs. The fantasy won’t hold. She doesn’t have a good suitcase any more, because triangle number one borrowed it and still hasn’t given it back, and she knows what that means. Last time she asked for it, the triangle brought her three packs of heavy-duty black garbage bags from Sainsbury’s, where she works.
The train jerks and the scarf jolts forward again and spews onto the floor. The man picks it up again, before she can move.
‘Look like that scarf don’t want to stay with you.’
Sudden rage floods her.
‘What you know about me or anything? Mind you bloody business.’
‘Oh my,’ says the man. He touches a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m very sorry, lady.’ His voice is slow and wet, like a leaf in autumn. A crushed, gleaming leaf, in shades of gold and red and yellow.
She grunts, an apology of sorts. He recognises the timbre, inclines his head.
She thinks of her girls. If any of them is a cheater, it’s the second triangle – with her vaguely cast-eye and that pretty pair of legs. Never could stop needing attention. She sighs. Anger will help nothing.
‘You alright, sis?’ The autumn man looks concerned.
‘What business of yours?’
‘Just…’ he gestures. ‘You look like something important on you mind.’
‘Nobody don’t tell you that you mustn’t talk to strangers on the underground?’
He hoots. ‘That is the rule? Well, them tell me England people shy.’
Silence. The train doors close and it starts back home. The man has a suitcase. Marked and scrawled. She remembers arriving in London, so long ago, and how it seemed everything was in boxes: the houses, the gardens, the children and how big and cold the air was and how the colour red snuck in everywhere: double-decker buses and phone boxes and lipstick. Mounds of dog doo on the street, and you could smoke in public places those days. She, a youngish bride, Errol like a cock, waving his large behind and his rock-hard stomach. He’d kicked up dirt in the backyard that he would eventually make her garden and crowed at the neighbours. Mrs Smith, from two doors down, came to see what the racket was; she brought a home-made trifle and was always in and out after that, helping with the girls, her blonde, cotton-wool head juddering in heartfelt kindness. She’d needed Mrs Smith.
‘So you come from Jamaica?’ she offers.
‘St Elizabeth. Real country.’
‘Where you headed?’
The man consults a slip of paper from his lapel pocket. ‘32 Bruce Grove, Wood Green.’
‘Well, that’s just near where I am, I can show you.’
They regard each other for some seconds.
‘You come to –?’
‘You live near –?’
Laughing and the softening of throats, and her hands dance at her neck, tying up the scarf. He has a grin perched on the left hand side of his face.
‘Ladies first,’ he says.
‘You come to see family for Christmas?’
He nods. ‘My daughter married an English husband and her child is English. So I come to see them.’ He seems to let himself and his excitement loose, slapping his hands on his thighs and humming. ‘Yes boy, my first grandchild.’
She smiles. ‘I know you have a picture.’
He scrabbles in his wallet and passes it over. His daughter is dark black, big-boned and big-haired, her husband tall and beaming, the child surprisingly anaemic and small-eyed. She has a snotty nose. Mrs Neecy Brown thinks that an English person must have taken the photograph, for anyone else would have wiped it. But they look very happy. Grubby but happy, Mrs Smith would have said. Dead now a year or so. She hands the picture back.
‘Pretty.’
He nods vigorously, slaps his thighs again, stows the photo carefully back inside the dreadful coat, blows on his clenched fists. He must be cold, she thinks.
Night lies down on Wood Green station as they puff their way up the escalator and stand gazing at the road. My, how they’ve talked! Not easy; she can’t remember the last time she spoke to a man who was listening. The sound of her voice was like a tin, she thought, rattling money. But he’d opened his mouth and made sounds, and so had she, all the way home. The smell of vinegar and chips from a nearby shop; three boys play-wrestle in front of the cinema across the road – some wag had named it Hollywood Green. She doesn’t know whether she thinks it’s clever or stupid. She points.
‘What you think of that name?’
He reads, shakes his head. He doesn’t have an opinion. She smiles. That’s just fine, with her.
A cat tromps by, meowing. Lord, the noise.
Mrs Neecy Brown drops her handbag and grabs the autumn man’s arm, and reaches up to his shoulder, fingers scrabbling, her wedding ring golden against his terrible jacket. She hates cats. They don’t seem to care. He puts his suitcase down and pats her hand. They stand like that, arms interlinked, her hand on his shoulder, his hand patting. She is aware of happiness.
Eventually she moves away and he picks up the suitcase. Her fingers tingle from the shape of his shoulder. She waves towards the darkened roads. ‘I show you where.’
Several weeks ago I posted this tutorial on how to mount flimsy cardstock player boards to chipboard to help them match the look and feel of other board game components. I included some instruction therein on how to make and mount artwork backings to those boards, and offhandedly mentioned the same process could be use to mount/make double-sided player boards. submitted by PixelartMeeple to boardgames [link] [comments] That wasn’t enough information, though. People had a lot of questions about how I do double-sided boards, and a lot of comments trying to extrapolate the process that didn’t quite hit the mark. So, I figured I’d sit down and make a separate tutorial for that process. Bear in mind: Much of this process is close to, if not identical, the “Mounting Flimsy Boards to Chipboard” tutorial, so if you’ve read/followed that post, a lot of this will be repetition for you. But if you want to do double-sided boards in the future, I suggest following this tutorial all the way through so you can internalize the differences. I will also reiterate: this is a purely aesthetic upgrade! We’re not creating dual-layered, recessed boards here. We’re just making nicer player boards so those of us who have a problem with component inconsistency or feel card-stock boards come across as cheap can rectify that production decision. MATERIALS NEEDED
With single-sided boards, I’ll typically just mount the included game board to chipboard and call it a day. With double-sided boards, however, I prefer to scan both sides of the board and print new copies. There are a lot of ways this process can go just slightly sideways, and having printed scans allows me more leeway for mistakes. I won’t go into details about scanning boards and all the fiddly bits involved with that. You’ll have to be comfortable with print resolutions, possible color and/or size corrections, and graphics software that will allow you to make the boards look as nice as possible. I’m not the right person to teach those skills, so I’m going to limit my instruction on this point to: Scan both sides of the board you wish to mount and print off the copies on a high-quality color printer using nice linen-finish paper. I have an older Canon Pro 9000 MkII printer, and I print on Neenah Paper’s CLASSIC Linen Digital in Avalanche White. The linen finish adds a nice texture to the board and feels nice to the touch. It’s a good aesthetic choice for game boards. MOUNTING AND CUTTING THE “FRONT” OF THE BOARDTake your print of the front side of your boards – in my case I’m using the boards from Century: A New World, so the “front” for the purposes of this tutorial are all the “1” sides of each board (A1, B1, etc.).Trim away most of the excess paper around the print, but leave a small white border around your board (about ¼ inch). https://preview.redd.it/1fsmgba248m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=114ed49648f61e0dac02fe6753707a8fde5f26a4 Then, flip that image over and apply a generous amount of spray adhesive to the back. Don’t spray the chipboard in this step – always do the “front” board image. Lay the image, glue side down (duh), on a chipboard sheet. I suggest AGAINST trying to align the edge of the board with the chipboard; that way lies madness. It’s easier to just drop the board onto the chipboard and trim away the excess, and it will produce cleaner results. https://preview.redd.it/ymyy4b3448m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=17619febf204038db933aa40afe89cc498d924c5 The first thing you’ll want to do before cutting is look at your image and determine which edges would be best to trim a little off. Find the sides that don’t have any play information or are close to board elements. We’ll start by cutting the sides that can’t be trimmed. Place the glued board onto a cutting mat (don’t cut over a surface you don’t want marred), and align your ruler with one side of the image, as tightly to the edge of the images as you can. https://preview.redd.it/lph8o30648m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fa4e0e88fe7e05bdd4e66ed1c51e96c9ecfeb477 Put pressure on the ruler so it doesn’t move, then cut away the excess chipboard. https://preview.redd.it/b57fcm7748m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a00c1a783c2926f7aafb2194e451fc6ab38dd4d Important Note on Cutting: Do not try to cut through the chipboard in one cut. You’ll dull your blade faster and generally end up with a rougher edge. Use firm but not hard pressure and cut through the board in multiple passes. With a new, very sharp blade, It’ll usually take 2-3 passes. As the blade dulls over time it may take up to 5-6 passes, but be patient and don’t try to force it. The final product will look nicer if you take your time. Repeat this process for one other side of the board, again aligning the ruler as tightly as possible to the image edge. https://preview.redd.it/27mckmp848m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=77d7927c3221b675d43252923d53d5db88fe5a6a Here’s where the process diverges from mounting single-sided boards a little bit. For these cuts, we’re going to be trimming away a small – very small – amount of the actual board image so that the resulting board is about 1mm (or less) smaller in both directions than the back-side image we’ll be mounting it to. NOTE: I had several people tell me there are better ways to do this, suggesting things like content-aware fill and other methods. Their reasoning is that trimming some of the image away means you’ll potentially be cutting off usable parts of the board you’re mounting. I assure you it’s just not true. We’re talking about making the boards less than 1mm smaller, and you’ll be purposely trimming away useless bits. If you understand what content-aware fill is and have access to the software to implement it, then you don’t need my help making things like this. I, for one, do not have access to more advanced features like that, and I’m trying to tailor these tutorials for as many people as possible. So, for this tutorial, I’m telling you to trim a little bit of the image away. For the other two sides of the board, align your ruler about 1mm into the artwork from the edge (the amount does not need to be super precise, as long as your alignment is). https://preview.redd.it/0vu2pdga48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1351f921bd8712d4c743f6ede0b11aadf93ee70b The cut away the two leftover sides, eliminating all the excess chipboard. https://preview.redd.it/auyrk2qb48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b7e8749bb3d9d1b881ba439f21d15edd704cd2e MOUNTING THE BACK-SIDE IMAGENow that you’ve mounted and cut the front side of your board, what you should have is a board that is very slightly smaller than your back-side image.If you have a light box, you can skip the next couple of steps if you so choose, because you can use the light box to do your alignment. I, however, prefer to draw guide lines on the back of each board anyway, because for me it makes aligning the boards easier. With a light box or a window, lay your back-side image face down on so you can see the image through the paper and mark the edges of the image. Then, use those marks to draw lines on the back of the print to mark the edges of the image, like this: https://preview.redd.it/5mpt8o4e48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c428d28485690599bf7763ff0cda078e8b59dd05 This way, you’ll be able to line up the placement of your board for the next step. Apply a generous layer of spray adhesive to the back (blank) side of your already mounted board, then, using either the light box or the marked lines from the last step, place the board glue side down (duh) onto the back. https://preview.redd.it/zyj0iyof48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=87842b9ed61b44b5e93bee19cb2b9de960717676 https://preview.redd.it/dnanzw7h48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=53c6574c73d7fa9fb510dfa0ea88caa3b17c91db Place your mounted board onto a cutting mat and align your metal ruler with the edge of the board. https://preview.redd.it/zhygm23j48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=947942f068c251943c05d1cb5c437c87505cfd1a Use your xActo knife to cut away the excess paper, making sure the blade lines up exactly with the edge of the chipboard. https://preview.redd.it/neu43cck48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=30b60d4e00b3a739edf3673622b774d35c8a11c7 The reason we use a metal ruler in this step is to ensure the xActo blade doesn’t accidentally bite into the edge of the chipboard and unintentionally carve away a section of your board. Again, when cutting, use firm but not hard pressure. Even if it takes two cuts to get through the paper (it shouldn’t with a sharp blade) it’s worth going slow. https://preview.redd.it/49s9nl7m48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c3606c96b32d3ae1c08762669a9dcec03087824 Then, repeat the process for all four sides. https://preview.redd.it/knz7g66n48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fe753220a3260dfe4f42523e387eff2470144a7 APPLYING FINISHWith normal linen paper like this, you’ll need to apply a few coats of varnish to ensure the ink doesn’t peel, fade, or become marked. Spray one side of the board with acrylic sealer in fine, light coats, waiting about 15-20 minutes between coats, until you’ve built up a nice surface.https://preview.redd.it/w49u18to48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e06b46a19f5de0e7bf9d143071607a09722cdfe6 Once the varnish on the front side is dry, flip the boards over and do the same for the backs. DON’T try to shortcut this process by spraying a single heavy coat! A heavy coat of sealant will create a blotchy effect and can potentially soak through your linen paper and undermine the adhesive underneath. Acrylic varnish will help bring out the colors on the board as well as protecting the ink from damage. I really like the way the finished boards look. https://preview.redd.it/ikhdmmzq48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bb2b0b767e082f235d78220199e731b1c5d0d1ca And you’re done! Well… maybe. Unless you want to round the corners of the board for aesthetic purposes, that is. PUNCHING THE CORNERS (OPTIONAL)As I mentioned at the start, you’ll want a good, heavy-duty corner rounder for this step. The only ones I’ve found that truly work consistently and make nice, smooth cuts are the punches from Oregon Lamination. The link above will take you to the exact punch I use.This step is easy: Slide the corners of your finished board into the punch and squeeze. That’s it. https://preview.redd.it/rrlf1das48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=172fbca0b23ba48c1d0953e69e107fb98627aaf6 This will produce a nice, rounded edge to your boards that, in my personal opinion, is much more aesthetically pleasing than squared corners. https://preview.redd.it/63dfzrkt48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d2859866c3a8f7ee7e65db3185c48562edd0a76 This also helps prevent the corners from getting damaged in storage or if you drop a board. THE FINISHED PRODUCTNow, you can replace your thin, flimsy, card-stock boards…https://preview.redd.it/9tqj4bou48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b133d5f423c63631fcda187c7af63816ba590cb0 …with nice, mounted, double-sided boards that match the look and feel of the other mounted board game components! https://preview.redd.it/um2op7ov48m31.jpg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72254aa8d595de154b79b75f86500adc495e0249 I love this particular upgrade. It really bugs me when companies use card-stock for player or central boards in games. It always feels cheap to me, and I love upgrading them like this. I just flat like the final result better than simple card-stock boards. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions. I’d love to see your results if you follow this tutorial for your own player boards. Happy gaming! NOTE: Although I post a lot of the custom artwork for the various boxes and poker chips (and one playmat) I’ve made, I will not post scanned artwork for game boards. There is too much risk of pirating/counterfeiting in that instance. If you want to do this, you’ll have to scan your own boards to make it happen. Sorry not sorry. |
Hello everyone, I'd like to add some content to the poker community in the written form on an ongoing basis. I'm not a Vlogger and have no idea how Brad Owen, Doug Polk, or Dnegs do their videos with background music, graphics, and such (however, I am a huge fan of all of them), so for me, the best way to share content is in the written form with potentially a couple of pictures sprinkled within. Please let me know how I can improve my posts (and my game, lol!) for the future, and I hope you enjoy the read! submitted by jtex316 to poker [link] [comments] This tournament review will essentially be my second one, as I sort of reviewed the Seminole Hard Rock Deep Stack Series Event #1 last month. Background / Details: Seemingly, every poker player and their mother is out in Las Vegas for the WSOP and having a great time. However, the "working man" like myself can't make it out there this year - fortunately, living in West Palm Beach, FL provides me the opportunity to compete in many well-structured and large-fielded tournaments throughout the year. For example, the Seminole Hard Rock series runs four times a year, whose Main Events have become legitimate "stops" in the professional poker circuit. However, I'll have to wait until August to review one of those tournaments. Today's tournament review covers the Seminole Hard Rock June Big Stack Special. Buy-in / Structure: This NLHE tournament is a two-day, multi-flight event with a buy-in of $130. There are unlimited re-entries up until the start of Level 9. Players start with 15,000 in chips with blinds at 100/100 (Structure Sheet). Day 1 ends at Level 14 and the Day 2 restart is on Sunday. There are 7 starting flight total - I played in Flight E. Pre-Tournament: I drop off my kids at Summer Camp and head down the Florida Turnpike. I'm a hard rock / heavy metal kind of guy, so today's playlist is all Metallica. The very first song that comes on via shuffle is "Master of Puppets" - that's got to be a good sign of things to come, right? I arrive at the SHR and for those of you whom have played at the property before, I predict that you'll have a hard time recognizing it after the guitar-shaped hotel is 100% built. The property is being completely revamped, inside and out. Even the Hard Rock Store is now relegated to a temporary, uncomfortable corner of the hotel as this massive construction project continues. Nevertheless, everyone is very excited about the project, and I for one can't wait to see the end of the rebuilding phase of one of my favorite properties for playing poker. When I get to an event early, I like to play a little cash, to further put me in a poker-like mindset and, hey, who knows, you can get lucky and hit a high hand or double-up. There aren't many tables running at this time as it's early, so I get seated at a $1/$2 NL table and buy-in for $300. There's only one hand in 90 minutes that's worth mentioning: I have about $275 and I pick up two red Aces in UTG+2 and raise to $15 (there was a $5 Straddle on the button). The SB calls and has roughly $100 behind, and we're heads up to the flop. The flop comes A23, with two spades. I continue for $25 and he again calls. The turn is the 8s, and see that he has a little over $50 left that he's playing with in his hands. I put him all-in and he snap calls with Ks9s for a turned flush. The river bricks out for me, and he wins a nice pot. I take it on the chin, as this is about the fourth or fifth cash game session where I lose 1/2 a buy-in and then work the whole session to either even up or at least not go broke (I will detail this in another post sometime in the future). It's now 20 minutes before the start of Day 1E, so I pick up my chips and cash out for about $200, which is salvageable. I buy-in for the tournament, and after taking a break, I make my way over to table 35, seat 3. Levels 1 and 2: The tournament starts and in seat 6 is a familiar face that I've played with a few times before. He's an older gentleman who is very friendly and has run hot in a few tournaments that I've also competed in. He immediately says hello to me, and we chat it up a little bit. I then begin to recall some hands that we played together and wonder if we'll get involved in some crazy situation at some point today (Spoiler Alert: It happens). Only one hand of particular interest to report: In Level 2, blinds are 100/100/100 (That's the Small Blind, Big Blind, and the Big Blind Ante), and I'm in the SB with T8o. I check, and there are 4 of us to the flop. The flop comes J96 rainbow, and I decide to lead out for 300. I get called in two spots, and the pot is now ~1,300. The turn brings the Ks, so I have a double gut-shot straight draw. I bet again, this time I believe I bet 1,100, hoping to just take the pot down right here without having to sweat out a river card, and in the hopes that this board really connects with a hand that a player in the Small Blind (namely, myself) could have. I get called by the player in the CO, and there's now ~3,500 in the pot. The river is a big giant brick for me, but I continue with my story that this flop hit me and that I did fill my straight. I bet 2,800, and the CO immediately calls with QJo, but tells me "very nice bet". It's a small consolation, but does put the table on notice that I am not weak/tight and am willing to put my opponents to the test. Honestly, at this point, I am already thinking about firing bullet #2 as I'm down to about ~8,000 from my starting stack of 15,000. Levels 3 and 4: This is where the tournament really gets interesting for me. Remember the older, nicer gentleman that I said hello to earlier? Well, we're about to have one hell of a hour in these next two levels. The blinds are now 100/200/200, and my elderly friend raises to 500. The HJ and D both call, and I look down at Ah5d. I consider a 3-bet for a split second, but the table has been very loose/passive and I can't recall a 3-bet before the flop as of yet. So I pay the extra 400 chips and make the call, as does the BB. There are 5 players to the flop with 2,500 in the pot. The flop comes 2h3h3d. I really like this flop, but check to see what my friend will do. The BB checks and my friend bets something in the neighborhood of 1,200. Action folds around to me and I consider my options. Folding here is not an option for me for a couple of reasons. For one, it's very early in the tournament and if I do bust, I can go re-buy and start fresh (and at a $130 buy-in, it's not a big deal). Second, even though I'm most likely behind, I have a a backdoor flush draw and any 4 will do just fine for a wheel. After 20-30 seconds of deliberation, I move all in for ~6,500 more. I get snap-called by my friend whose name I should really know by now. He flips over KK. I say "That's a nice hand", and the dealer whose name is Brittney starts to burn & turn. The turn card is a 5d, to which I say "That's not that bad", or something to that effect. The river is the magical, miracle, improbable 4c, giving me the straight and boosting my short stack back up to ~18,000. The older gentleman and I laugh a bit about it, and we move on. During Level 4 now, I win a few small hands and then, with about 15 minutes left to go in the level, I start to run super red hot. All of the following action happens within the last 15 minutes of Level 4, where blinds are 200/300/300: i. I pick up 66 in mid-position and make it 700 to go. I get two callers and the flop comes K65, with two diamonds. A player (I think the BB in this hand) makes it 2,500. A bit scared of the flush and to protect my hand, I raise to 6,500. I showed a very small bluff to the table a few hands ago where I had complete air, but bet into 2 players on the button, so I am convinced this player in the BB is thinking about making a move. He ultimately sigh-folds, and I show my hand to the table. ii. On the very next hand, I pick up KK. I raise again to 700. My friendly nemesis whom I doubled-up through calls, and it's heads up to the flop, which is 7-high with two hearts. I bet 1,200, he snap calls. The turn is an 8h, so we're looking at a super-connected board with three hearts now. I bet again to 2,200, and he instantly raises it up to ~8,000. Even though I have a big over-pair, this player knows what he's doing and would not be raising light in many spots. There is so much that can beat me, and I had just ran up my stack to a decent level again. I start to count my remaining chips behind after my 2,200 turn bet and I have about 22,000. I tell him "I just feel like this hand [as I show the table] is not good here", and muck it. My friend says "whoa!" and says "that's a really good fold - we were about 50/50 going to the river!". He didn't tell me exactly what I had, but by his statement he must have had 15+ outs (any heart, any straight-card, and possibly whatever lower-paired card he was also holding for 3 additional outs). We start discussing the hand and chat back and forth a bit about probabilities and if he could have made that lay down, when all of a sudden.... iii. ... I look down at 7c7s UTG. I again raise to 700, the player immediately to my left calls (he has a stack around 18k-20k). The CO calls and both the SB and BB complete, so we're five ways to the flop. To my amazement, the flop comes T97 with two diamonds, so I flopped bottom set and am loving life. The SB and BB both check and I decide to get cute and set the trap, with a plan of check-raising anyone who dared throw any chips in the middle of the table. That's exactly what winds up happening - the player to my immediate left throws out a bet of ~3,000. Action folds to me and I get a feeling that I may not want to play coy for too much longer, as the table, like I mention previously, has been very limpy and "call-ey". I look at the player, look at his remaining chips, and I move all-in. I can sense that the table is getting annoyed with my constant aggression, so all eyes are now on me and the player to my left. He asks me "Show if I fold?", to which I don't respond. He tanks for over a minute and finally grabs his stack, picks it up off the felt with one hand and drops it forward. I flip over my bottom set and he shows JJ. The board run-out is clean and honestly I don't even know what my chip count is, but I eliminated the player and I think I'm around 40,000. The dealer begins to shuffle the deck and the tournament clock is almost at zero for the first 15-minute break of the day. Players start to get up and fold and I'm in the BB on the next hand... iv. ...My older friend makes it 800 from UTG+2, and action folds all the way back around to me in the BB and I look down at KsJs. I make the call and we're heads up to the flop. The dealer tells other players that if they're not in the hand, to please leave for the break, so there's a lot of commotion and movement around me, but I'm in a hand so none of this matters to me. The flop comes T95 - ALL SPADES. My eyes must have been as big as watermelons popping out of my skull at this point. I check and my buddy in seat 6 leads out for 3,500. He started the hand with around 30,000, and for some reason I'm thinking I'm drawing to one out, the Qs, because I somehow convince myself that he's had enough of me and has AsXs for the Ace-high flush. I think about it for a little while and I call. The turn is some brick and I ask him how many of the grey & yellow 5,000 chips he has behind. He sort of mumbles something unclear, and I don't know what possessed me to do this but I say "OK - I'm all in". I think I was running so hot and I was still all jazzed up about the previous hand that I just let it rip. He exclaims "Are you serious?!?!?", and makes the call. He flips over pocket 5's for a flopped set, and I turn over my hand to reveal my flopped King-high flush. He says "pair the board", and I say "no, please don't pair the board". The dealer burns and flips over a 8, which doesn't pair the board, winning me a monster pot and busting my older friend from the tournament. We get up, shake hands and shake our heads at my crazy run and wild turn of events. We kind of just stand there for a minute chatting about the last 10-15 minutes - he reveals to me that he saw me running so well that he thought there was no way I could have had it every time, otherwise he might have folded his bottom set. I then sit back down and take a minute to get organized and count my chips. I took a picture of my stack, shown below - the count after level 4 was 78,200, with blinds in Level 5 going up to 200/400/400. In other words, 195 Big Blinds! 78,200 (195BB) after a wild Level 4. Levels 5 through 8: My remaining table-mates are shocked to find out I've busted another player during the break, and I'm obviously having a great time with the table talk. In the second hand of Level 5, I pick up TT from late position and raise to 1,200. The player on the button shoves for ~10k, and action folds back around to me. I call, and he flips over AJo. The board runs out without an Ace or a Jack, so I bust yet another player and run the stack up to nearly 90,000. The players are bursting out in laughter as this is a pretty insane run. However, as many of you know, there can be large swings in poker, specifically in tournament poker and even more specifically at the lower buy-in tournaments like this one. So this moment winds up being the high point of the event for me, even though at the time I wasn't thinking about anything else other than the fucking Mirage (bad Rounders reference there) :) Other than one spot where I called an all-in with my A4 vs. an AJ (the AJ held, so I lost about 11,000), nothing too consequential or significant really happens to me until the break, so we head into the break and through the end of the registration / re-buy period with 80,500. Although, the last hand of level 8 had a 4-way all in that many players of our table and about 10 players from other tables stopped to watch. Because of the crazy action, it took a few minutes to get all of the counts and side-pots going. After it was all said and done, a pair of pocket Kings held against a lower pocket pair and two other Broadway cards that I can't remember, and off we went to break. Level 9: Table #35, in the back row of the poker room, breaks. The dealer runs out an unnecessary high-card (I'm actually not sure why this is done as we're randomly given seat cards...but whatever), and I get moved to Table #28, seat #3. A player whom had bought in later and was at my original table was also moved to this table - I had raised pre-flop in level 8 with a KJo and he called with a raggy-Ace, hitting his Ace on the turn, to which I joked with him that he'll "play any Ace". This does become important later on. In Level 9, blinds are 500/1,000/1,000 and about halfway into the level, I get into a hand that is my favorite of the tournament and I'm very proud of how I played it. I have about ~80,000, and the action folds around to me in the CO. I look down at Jh8d, and decide to raise it up to 2,500. At this point, I haven't been very active since my meteoric rise to nearly 200BB a few hours prior, and haven't opened a pot yet since being moved to this table, so I specifically went into this hand with a plan of applying pressure to my opponent if I thought that they were not very strong and if the board + player(s) involved favored such a strategy. The BB calls, and the flop comes T76 with two spades with 5,500 in the pot. The BB checks and I lead out 3,000. The BB thinks about it for a bit and calls, so the pot is now 11,500. The turn is a off-suit 5, giving me some additional outs. The BB checks again and I think he is in check-call mode with something like a pair of tens, some Broadway cards (over cards), or some suited-connector hand like 87 (but I do block some combos of 87, 98, or T8 with my J8 holding, and also take away some of what he could call a raise in the BB with - hands like KJ, QJ, or even JT). I think about what bet-sizing I want to use, knowing full well that, at this point, I am going to be triple-barreling no matter the river. I bet 5,500, and again he tank-calls. There is now 22,500 in the pot and the river is the 3s. So now, there is a flush on board and hands like 64 get there as well. The BB once again checks and I lead out for four grey & yellow 5k chips. This was a big, nearly pot-sized bet at this point in the tournament. The BB goes deep into the tank and I can see the pain on his face. I honestly thought he would eventually fold, but after well over 2 minutes of deliberation, he does pull the trigger and tosses out 20,000. I immediately say "Good call, you got it", and he turns over AT for top pair. He lets out a huge sigh and complements my play, telling me how "polarized" my river bet was and he got very lucky in how we played the hand, that he almost nearly folded, etc.. While his compliments on my play were nice as the other players were hearing his comments, his hero call cuts my stack in roughly half, lower than the tournament average. I definitely give the player a lot of credit for making the call - a call I did not think he was capable of making under the circumstances. Winning that pot would have put me up to over 100,000, which would have been very nice and on a good pace to make it to Day 2 with a nice stack. Unfortunately, I am now below average and the blinds are once again going up soon. However, I am very proud of the way I played this hand. In the past, I would have never considered anything other than a check/fold or possibly checking it down to see a cheap run-out. But I've been working on my game and am continuing to improve, finding spots just like these to put opponents to high levels of stress and decision-making. In the long run, I should continue to find these bluff spots as I do believe that they will work more times than not, in key situations against players likely to fold to high-pressure spots. Level 10: Blinds are now 500/1,500/1,500 and I'm roughly at ~35,000 chips at this point, when the player that "Plays any Ace" from my previous table raises it to 3,000 from UTG, with about ~10,000 left behind. The LJ (Low-Jack) calls and the action folds to me in the SB. I look down at AKo, and with my 25BB-ish stack, I have one and only one viable option - I shove. The player snap calls and almost flips his hand over, until he realizes that the LJ is still in the hand. He thinks about coming along for the ride, but ultimately decides to let it go. The Any-Ace aficionado flips up AJ, and is dominated. The board run out is very nice for me, as the dealer reveals the other two aces left in the deck and I knock out the player and build my stack back up to over 50,000. I start talking to the player on my left who is a nice younger guy with noise-cancelling headphones on, and we start talking about the tournament structure, that we're both going to make a comeback in this event, and other poker-related hopes and dreams. The remaining tables are being broken, player stacks are getting much larger than mine, and we're now down to 4 tables in this flight. I'm once again in the SB, and the player in the CO who was recently moved to our table makes it 4,500 to go. I don't have any specific reads on this player and have never seen him before. The action folds around to me and I look down at AQ. I really want to play this hand and am not really in the mood to fold it at this point, given that I was once a monster stack in this tournament and I'm now trying to hang on and survive. I definitely don't want to call, even if I do decide to lay it down, so I'm left with two viable options: Fold, or Raise. In regards to a raise here, I also think my options are quite limited to a shove. I have exactly 52,500, so if I do three-bet, I can't really make a min-raise to something like 9,000 as I'll be out of position for the entire hand. So I start thinking about what amount to three-bet with in this spot, and I'm thinking that a bet of 16,000-17,000 might be good. The problem is then that I'll have like 35,000 left, which will really put me in a tough spot the rest of the way if I don't connect with this upcoming flop. I ultimately decide that if I shove, I can double-up if I get called and win, or I can take the pot down right here and be up to ~60,000. So I do decide to shove with about 35BB and the player in the CO does make the call with KK. The flop isn't very helpful, and neither is the turn. I'm down to a 3-outer...an Ace from Space as Tony G says...the river card had other plans, though, and it bricks off and I don't win the pot. We count up the chips and amazingly, we had the exact same chip stack at exactly 52,500. That actually made me laugh. I wished the table "GL", and that was that. Due to family commitments and the fact that I do want to spend time with my wife and kids whenever possible, I am not able to play in any of other two Day 1 flights, so my Seminole Hard Rock June Big Stack Special is over and I'm off to the next one. Final Thoughts / Up Next: Obviously, I'm disappointed that I was not able to survive to Day 2. Looking back, I think I could have folded that AQ hand that I busted with and found a better spot - hopefully in a later position - to reclaim some lost chips. So for future tournaments I'll definitely want to try to avoid playing for stacks and out-of-position with hands exactly like AQ or lower pocket pairs, given that my opponent could have woken up with a big hand, which happened exactly as described. However, I do think I played well overall, met a lot of nice people and had a great time. I'm also looking forward to having all of the regular tournament grinders back in town after the summer, as I'll be able to do some good name-dropping in future posts :) Looking at the upcoming schedule, there's a really interesting Seminole Turnpike Series event, a $250 buy-in, $250,000 guaranteed, multi-day tournament where players can qualify at either the Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood or the Seminole Coconut Creek Casino, as Day 1 flights will run simultaneously at both properties. Day 2 of this event will be at the Hard Rock (probably due to logistics - Coconut Creek's Poker Room can't handle the volume, unless they were to bring in tables and use the pavilion like they did for the WSOP-C series back in February. There's also the Florida State Poker Championship event at the end of July at the Isle, in Pompano Beach, FL. I really hope to be able to play in the Main Event of that tournament, with a $300,000 guarantee and, I believe, a Day 3 final table (I've made Day 2's in tournaments but never a Day 3 - so that alone would be really cool). Final Results: Entered For: $130 (1 Bullet)Position: ~35th of 153 on Day 1ENet: -$130 TL;DR: Played in the event described above where, after running like Robert Varkonyi in the 2002 WSOP ME Final Table, I ultimately busted in Level 10 of Day 1E. Edit: Fixed a couple of things. |
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