So my dad has a weekly poker game at the country club near his house in Memphis every Wednesday night. It's a pretty juicy game with $200 entry (10k chips) and $100 rebuys (5k chips each) and sometimes includes an add-on as well for another $100-$200 (5k and 10k options). I've heard stories about this game for years. How my dad crushes, stories of standard bad beats, and other typical poker stuff. I went with him a couple years ago and nothing interesting came of it. Only having 8 days worth of time in Memphis and not being able to grind online the whole month of June, I was excited to go play in it again just to add some hours to my limited Vegas grind time.

I had heard a story or two from my dad about how Moneymaker came to their game and how they're BFFs now. I figured this was classic dad exaggeration and at MOST he had come to their home game once or so. I ended up going twice to this game this month, cashing both times. Moneymaker was indeed there both times. First week I was at different tables from him and it was a small turnout overall. Second week (just this past Wed), we had 20 strong with ridiculous amount of rebuys thanks in large part to Moneymaker's maniac aggression during rebuy period.

The guys in this game have the most fowl mouths of any group of "friends" I've ever seen. For their age group (40-60) I found it an uncomfortable combination of disturbing and amusing. There are a few Jews and Arabs pitted directly against each other with no qualms about attacking each other. Nothing is off limits in this two thousand+ year rivalry.

Anyways I played about 3 hands in the first 2 hours. I literally was dealt 92o and 73o about 12 times each. Meanwhile almost 80% of the hands being dealt were allins like JT vs A2 vs 55 or whatever. Chips flew and I just chilled on my initial buyin and used no rebuys. After my initial 10k stack dwindled to 8k at the end of rebuys, I did get the max addon for 10k more chips, putting me up to 18k.

After rebuys I still didn't get many hands for a while. I eventually was able to pick AK and double through AJ his button to my SB. A few minutes later, holding QJcc on J63cc 7c turn and blank river I was able to get Mr. 100VPIP (Moneymakers rival of the night) to bluff it all on the river. Suddenly I had a huge pile of chips (around 60k out of 420ish) and had only played 5 hands in 2 hours.

We consolidated to a "final table" 10 handed with payouts being announced for the final 4. 4k, 2k, 1200, 800! Not bad for a weakly home game!! I had immediate position on Moneymaker after redrawing seats. This was probably the best seat in the house. He continued raising 40+% of hands and putting himself in incredibly tough spots over and over. I used my supernit image against him to float and bluff turn a couple times successfully. He was getting antsy (he had to be somewhere else as well) when he raised T9s in the Sb and I picked up KK. I decided to 3b small to like 25k with only 30k behind. He didn't notice my stack size and he doubled me up real good.

I went on to chop 3 handed for 2k bringing my ROI lifetime in this homegame up to 170%. No offense to Moneymaker or any of the other players, but this is the juiciest games I've ever seen being played for these meaningful stakes at least since 2004-2005.

Some classic quotes that were made by various players that night were "well why don't we chop...what's that thing called, INM? ICM?" After offering a retarded chop favoring the short stacks at about 3x their actual value, the same guy says "well with ICM the short stacks are actually worth more than the big stacks". There were other classics involving 50 year olds try to talk about ranges without really having a clue what they were saying. It was cute though.

Anyway, in actuality Moneymaker is a really nice guy. He had a funny remark the first week when we were at opposite tables. My dad was sitting to my right and taking lots of heat with everyone calling him the LUCKIEST PLAYER EVER. Moneymaker chimed in from across the other table saying "HEY! What about me??" :D Classy and humble imo.