Life As Nick Starr

This past week has been crazy and chaotic. Tuesday was my 27th birthday, Friday was my brother’s wedding, and on Monday (hopefully) I am driving the 3,000 miles to California to move.

I’ve had a storage unit with a lot of my stuff including some big couches, bed, etc for some time now. We got most of the small items out over the last month or so, and some of the large stuff out the other day. With the wedding though there has been no time with the truck to get everything out.

The truck is now down in south Florida with my brother as he is on his honeymoon. The storage unit was supposed to be cleared out by today, the last day of the lease. There is still 2 couches, a bed and bench/coat rack in there. I don’t know anyone else who has a truck that can help me get it out. My brother’s friend was supposed to help today and he was going to keep the couches, but he has been MIA most of the day.

On top of all of this, my check engine light came on today. I believe that the guy who pumped my gas didn’t put the cap on, thus causing the light to come on, but I am going to see about heading out to the dealership on Monday early to double check.

It’s been quite the stressful week. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the 51″ Sony HDTV that I paid over $1,600 for a few years ago has gotten ZERO feedback when I’ve listed it on Craigslist twice. I am going to see if I can get a pawn shop locally to give me a few hundred for it.

UGGGGGG! I can’t wait till all of this madness is over, the tv is gone, the stuff in storage is gone, and I am on my way to California.

Let me start off by saying that I couldn’t of been more excited about my Vegas trip, until…well my Vegas trip. I get to Vegas and head straight towards the strip. Stopping at the first hotel I see, the MGM Grand. Dawn and Drew are there and we head to dinner, along with Rin. My flight was delayed 1 hour, so it was about 1:30am Vegas time (PST). After dinner we sit at a few slot machines and get some free drinks. They retire for the night, and I set out on what I came to Vegas for, poker.

I go over to the MGM Poker room, and it is awesome. Pretty good sized room right next to the lions. The tables are a very soft felt with marble around the outside. Auto-shufflers on every table, and you can even swipe your Players Club card for $1/hour in comps while playing. I sit down with $200 (table max buyin) at a $1/$2 NL game, and decide to wait till the blinds get around to post. My first hand in the big blind, and I see AA. Amazing I’m loving Vegas already. Someone raises pre-flop to around $15, one caller, then of course I call. The flop is 7(h), A(h), 3. Someone bets $25, I raise with my trip aces to $50, one guy calls, then the first better raises all in. WOW! My first hand of poker in Vegas, and I’m forced to go all in? What is going on here? I look down at my cards again, having the best hand I have to call. The third person calls as well.

In Vegas you don’t have to turn over your cards in table games, but one guy turns over a flush draw, the other trip 7’s. Wow, he hit his trips on the flop…good thing I had a higher set. The turn and river are no help to the flush draw, and I take down a $600 pot. This starts to look like a great night. I finish playing around 8am and head off to the Luxor and Excalibur for some tournaments. Left the table with just over $500. The Luxor poker room was $50 buy in max, so money was easy come easy go there with not much room for error. I tripled up once, then got knocked down to under $50 the next hand. The tournament at the Excalibur paid out 6 people and I ended up blinded out in 7th. Luxor wasn’t that great, I got called on a semi-bluff and lost that one as well. I was done with tournaments in Vegas.

Played some quick table games, Carribean Stud, Roulette, Let ‘em Ride, etc and made money on each one. Things were looking pretty up for me. I went back to the Luxor poker room and lost about $100 there. It was now after noon, and I wanted to pick up my Segway that I was renting for 24 hour. I take a cab (mistake 1) to where the rental office should be. They apparently moved not more then a few days earlier, so I try to find my way there. By 2pm I finally arrive, and they then inform me of a $500 deposit. I had cashed out the only bank card I had brought with me, so I had to pay the deposit in cash, leaving me with not enough for poker at some of the rooms I wanted to play. I decided to put poker off till the next day, when I had the deposit money back.

Taking the Segway, which took all of 2 minutes to get used to, around the strip was awesome. Lots of comments from people about how cool it was, how they should rent one, etc. I had a blast with it and was able to go right into all of the casinos and see the sights of the strip.

I had checked my bags at MGM before poker, but was staying at Treasure Island (TI). I took my rolling bag and rolled it behind the Segway all the way to the hotel. Met up with Schultzman there and we unpacked and got ready for the Dawn and Drew meetup.

I was told I made quite an entrance on the Segway, especially since no one even knew I was coming. The meet up went well, In-N-Out burgers for everyone, a Wii later on, and lots of people rode the Segway. Dawn somehow fell off and it kept going…oops.

Afterwards we went to Slots-o-Fun for $1 blackjack, and I was getting quite tired at this point. Left around 4-5am to go see the Fremont Experience (which the lights weren’t on the entire trip), and retire for the evening.

The next morning hit up the strip for a while, riding the Segway up and down taking pictures. I returned it around 2pm, and went to the Stratosphere with Nikki. Rode all 3 of the rides up there, XScream was scary as hell. We went and had dinner with Schultzman back at the Belagio. Thanks again for putting me up and for dinner, Justin.

Afterwards, I determined it was time to get my poker on. I wanted to head back to the MGM, but the traffic was horrible, so I went and played at Harrah’s instead. Amazingly, there was a clock in this room. The first one I had seen the entire Vegas trip. I buy in for the $200 max, and start to play. Players seemed tired and one girl had been trying to rack up 40 hours of play to qualify for a WSOP satellite.

I decided to play a bit loose, raising on a bluff, and even showing my bluff to get players to call next time when I wasn’t actually bluffing. This strategy worked out pretty well for me, and I was able to get callers (and even raisers) on some nut flushes and straights I had. I worked my way up to around $500 in chips. Finally I get a huge starting hand KK. I make it $15. Seat 1 raises to $30 and the girl at the table waiting on the WSOP satellite goes all in. Now she’s representing aces, but just not more then an hour or so earlier told me she was sick of me raising her big blind, and that she would call me with a cocktail napkin and the cut card. So I was pretty sure that she was bluffing, or trying to protect a low pair.

I hesitate only for a second and call her all in (about even in chips). Seat 1 sits there and can’t believe what is going on. He thinks about it for quite some time, then folds AK.

I asked her if she wanted to roll her cards, she agreed and she had 55. She was dominated and it was almost impossible for her to win the hand. The flop is A/K/rag. Now her chances of winning the hand are all but dead. She had no straight outs, and only a runner/runner flush draw. Well wouldn’t you know…she hits her runner/runner spade flush, and takes down the $1000+ pot. It was such a bad beat, that I had to leave to avoid going on tilt, that and it was nearly 5-6am.

The next day, I try to make it to the Paris for their breakfast buffet I had heard so much about. The line was 1 1/2 hours long, and it wouldn’t even be breakfast by the time I would make it in. I ended up having some amazing French Toast for $8.

I bought my only Vegas souvenir, a magnet that I’ve turned into a chip protector at TI. I head down to the MGM for some more poker. Buy in at $200 and things just aren’t going well. I have to rebuy, and now I’m down $500 of my own money, with $200 of that on the table. This was all I was planning on spending in Vegas, so it was now or never.

I sat and folded nearly every hand. I tried to play a few and got raised out of them when I couldn’t catch the flop. I was simply card dead. I had about $75 left after a few hours of trying to limp and catch something. It just wasn’t happening.

Finally, I get JJ and decide this is going to be it for me. I push all in pre-flop. 2 callers and the cards are played out. Not a single card over my jacks is put on there, and I take down the hand. Next hand I win as well, followed by the next. I’m now up to around $700. Sweet.

An hour or so later, I switch tables and within the first few hands, run into the same hand I started with on my first day at the MGM, AA. Pre-flop raising starts with other players, and I end up bumping it up as well. There is nearly $300 from 3 players in the pot pre-flop. Position one after seeing the flop, A, 10,8 goes all in. Now I’m sitting with trip aces. I have the absolute best hand, and there is only a runner/runner backdoor diamond flush draw, which I am holding the ace of diamonds.

I stop to think that maybe he is holding J/9 (with an open ended straight draw), but with nearly $300 in pre-flop, that’s impossible. He flips over his cards, and he as J/Q off-suit. I’m in for $700 with another HUGE advantage against this guy. The only way he can win is to catch one of the four 9’s left in the deck. One guy says that he folded pocket 9’s, so now there are only 9 left in the whole deck.

What would you know, a 9 fell on the turn…of diamonds. He hit his straight, but I still had still had outs. Any 10, 8, 9, ace, or diamond and I would take down the $1800+ in the pot. The river, was…..

Deuce of clubs. The lowest card in the deck, and a crippling blow as my Vegas poker experienced ended on that note.

If that had only been the worst part of the story, in my next post…. the “trip” home which almost never was.

I started a 2nd job 2 weeks ago. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, but I’m trying to save up for a truck, so getting a second job sounded like a good way to jump start this effort.

The job was processing criminal background checks. This sounds more glorious then it was. The background checks were done by agents the company has throughout the nation, as well as online searches. My job was only to type in the information found in the check.

Well the first week was training. The “trainer” like myself had a day job, but she seemed to take this second job less serious. She would basically tell us to go through the powerpoint slides on a chapter and take the test. The training manual said for her to go through the slides with us so that we would be taught something by her. She decided that we should just learn on our own while she surfed Yahoo, MSN, eBay, and other online shopping sites.

Oh well, so she wasn’t the best trainer in the world. The problem was that there was only 2 people in the entire training class. This Hispanic girl and myself. The trainer couldn’t find the time to go through the material with us? Anyway moving on.

She did help us when we had questions while taking the test. I say help, what I really mean is she would press the button on her screen (which was visible to us on the projector) to show what the correct answer was.

Well there was one question where the answer on the screen was one thing, yet the training had said something completely the opposite. There apparently was constant changing of this item, so she left to find out the current and correct answer. She was gone for about 20 minutes, and I had a question on one of the test items. In following the same manor on which she had “trained” us by simply displaying the answer on the screen, I walked up to her desk and pressed the button to see what the correct answer was. She would of done this herself if she wasn’t off who knows where for the past 20 minutes.

BTW on all of the tests so far I hadn’t gotten worse then a 95%. I tend to grasp things pretty quickly, so this training seemed like it was dragging on forever.

Training was supposed to run from 5p-10pm daily, but we would be out of there by 7pm at the latest. The first day I didn’t mind, but I was there for a paycheck, and getting pair hourly I wasn’t getting as much as I had hoped for.

Come the following week, I go in and things seem a bit off. We still hadn’t gotten our badges to get in the building, so we would be stopped by the security guards and held up. The previous week they would just let us in, but they weren’t letting me in until someone came and signed me in.

I get to the training room, and I log onto the network with the generic training login; however, my personal training password isn’t working. Strange. I ask the other girl in the training class and she is able to get in. Huh. Well it turns out one of the supervisors comes in and pulls me aside telling me they have decided to terminate my employment.I asked why, and they said they had screen shots of me cheating on the test. WHAT? How can I be cheating when the teacher is essentially giving us the answers we don’t know? Turns out there was a security camera in the room, and they had seen the footage of me checking one of the answers. The trainer wasn’t smart enough to do this as some sort of a “setup,” non the less I was without employ at this place any longer.

Easy come, easy go I guess. I’m still looking for a second job, and maybe even a third depending on what my schedule is like. I have some pretty big plans that I would like to see come to light. Need to start saving up pretty big for it all to fall into place. If it all works out, and I will give more details as plans are more concrete, I will be blogging quite a bit more from far beyond Tampa Bay.

Stay tuned…