Chad Blackburn Remembers

My old friend Chad “I Had” Blackburn, who now works in real estate in Madison (Chad still plays a lot of poker play card games as well), recalls four interesting hands from the old days.  When Chad had just begun playing poker on the Madison circuit in about poker 1992, the following hand came up in the $2-$3 pot-limit Hold’em game at Nora’s Bar (the game was later moved to the Crossroads Bar).  Chad  remembers me coming in at 10:00 p.m. and blasting (raising and reraising) every hand before the flop, and then betting the pot size on every flop!

            I did generally come in at 10:00 p.m., chiefly so that I could hang out with  my wife and son a while longer; besides, the game of cards started at 4:00 p.m.,  and by then there were a lot of chips on the table.  “Blasting” also sounds right to me.  After all, the game was relatively tiny compared to the $400-$800 games and the huge buy-in poker tournaments that I had become accustomed to by then. 

My theory at the time, picked up after years of trial and error, was to play superfast with nothing (winning many pots on the bluff ), and then bust someone when I did finally have a big hand.  That is a very volatile way to play pot-limit Hold’em poker game, but it often worked well for me, as this story demonstrates.  In the middle of all the blasting, chad decided to check-raise me his last $360 on the flop.  The three on the turn put a big smile on his face-until I showed him pocket Q-Q.

            The second and third stories involve us playing “monkey poker “ (playing hands in the dark in the pot-limit Hold’em game) while Chad was dealing the card games.  Chad remembers me betting and raising hands without even looking at them until the flop (at that point, I would sometimes look at my hand, sometimes not, but I would always bet). 

One hand, there was a lot of action between Dewey Weum ( a tough table presence) and me.  The flop came down 4-5-7, and I had bet out $120 without looking at my hand, and now Dewey called the $120 and raised me $360, whereupon I looked at a six, and knew that I had at least on open-ended straight draw; the other card, which I looked at after I moved all-in, turned out to be a three. I had played the hand in the dark and flopped a straight with 6-3 off suit European poker tour!

            After I busted Dewey that hand, he said, “How can you beat a guy who plays like a monkey ?” Thus the term “money poker event ” was born.  Four hands later, after Dewey had rebought for $1,000, I had about $250 in the pot before I even looked  at one card.  After Dewey bet the flop, I looked at one card, a king, and saw a board of K-8-8.  Everyone knew I had looked at only one card (they watched me), and when I raised Dewey’s $100 bet on the flop $180 more, on the strength of looking at my one card on the flop, Dewey decided to move all-in with 9-9.  I might have folded, but my other card was a king, for K-K, and a board of K-8-8!

            Chad’s final recollection was a hand he played against a local player, Tommy Hun.  Chad had borrowed $50 from Big AI Emerson, and was down to his final $13 in the small blind with 10-3.  The flop was A-10-3, and Chad moved all-in, only to see that Tommy had flopped the top two: aces and tens.  But the final card was a three, and Chad ran that money up to $1,800 for the night poker.

            Right before that game began, chad needed to be “comped” a free meal at Denny’s by Wayne Wolf.  The very next night, chad was eating at a four-star Madison restaurant, the Blue marlin, and drinking Dom Pérignon  with dinner poker fundamentals.  And he was buying! In fact, that little $13 eventually became $10,000, all because of a miracle last-card three.