last night i got a pity invite from hao to join a poker game with some old high school buddies (one of them being my good friend potter). anyways, this was my first time playing poker in months ... i had played with some chem buddies during the school year, but never seriously. but boy, did i get up to speed.

the buy-in was $10, which wasn't a big deal, but we had about $70 in the pot ...

i started off weak, keeping relatively quiet the first 5 hands or so, until i blew up. i pushed potter to go almost all-in on a game of blind baseball (where 3 and 9s are wild, and you play flipping over 1 card at a time from 7 cards) ... before the last flip, potter was showing a flush, and i was showing a 3 of a kind. the pot must of been at least $30 ... but i didn't wuss out. i decided to stay in to the last flip of a card.

and whoa. i got a 4 of a kind. nice! after that i had a few more big hands (i lost _huge_ in a two high-low games in a row, knocking me back at least $20)... about 7 hands before the game was over, i had to go all-in on a risky chicago low game. but luckily i was able to pull out a pair (?!) and split a huge pot.

the last hand was stressful. it was just me and hao in a standard texas hold-em game. we both bet big (at least $10 each) ... and it turned out we tied. phew! i got scared cause hao said he had a full house, but it turned out that all he had was a pair. i had the exact same pair so... kind of an anticlimatic ending when our last huge hand was tied.

i ended up exactly $10 up... made me happy.

damn poker is addicting. what have you done, hao?!