Home game madness

On Friday, my friend Ryan and I went out of town to a house on a farm to play in a home NLHE cash game. It was siiiiick!

There were 8 players for the majority of the time and the blinds started out at $25-25. There was an awful lot of money at the table... probably close to 100k total on the table. Some of the older guys had stacks of around $15-20k. I just bought in for 100 big blinds.

The game was crazy. It was $25-25 but definitely played more like a $25-50 game. Huge open raises, 5-way pots when someone raised to 5xs the bb UTG, massive 3-bets, $20k pots, etc. Many hands, the UTG player would do a live straddle making the game a $25-25-50 game. Actually at the end, there was both double and triple live straddles... meaning that the SB would post $25, BB would post $25, UTG would post $50, then UTG+1 would post $100, and UTG+2 would post $200.

So towards the last 1/4 of the session about one in every 6 or 7 hands was playing like a 50/100 NL or 100/200 NL game. Madness.

I ended up playing for about 13 hours in total and finished up about a buyin.

There were some absolutely crazy hands. Some of them nearly unbelieveable. I saw one of the players stack off for like $8k in a $16k pot with a flush on a paired board... when there were like 3 or 4 raises on the river. He lost to a boat.

Another huge hand happened when a decent player had the bottom boat on a 6699X board vs an inexperienced player and the decent player shipped it in with 6X on the river after he bet and got raised. The decent player said that he thought the inexperienced player was overplaying a rivered flush... but he actually had 9X to scoop a massive pot.

A player that appeared to be quite solid and good even messed up in a massive pot. He had a set of 3's on a 356 flop with a flush draw out there... c-bet the flop, then on a 7 turn he check-raised all in for like 6k more!?!?! He got snapped off by 89 and got felted in a pot that had to have been close to $20k.

But the most important thing was, that the game was a ton of fun. All of the players were very friendly and very sociable. Many of the players in the game knew each other or were friends, so there was plenty of good natured jabs/ namecalling/ etc, which was pretty hilarious. I really enjoyed myself and I hope I get a chance to play in the game again sometime soon.