Travel With Me … Atlantic City and Foxwoods - Part IV

by Daniel Negreanu | Published: Jan 03, 2003

If you've been keeping up to date with my journey thus far, you have visited three Canadian cities (Toronto, Vancouver, and Windsor), and two American cities (Las Vegas and Los Angeles). From Las Vegas, it's about a four-hour flight to our next destination, Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Connecticut.

Foxwoods is a getaway that is near and dear to me. Walking from the Two Trees Inn to the casino, you get a chance to breathe in the crisp, clean air that you can find only at the heart of a forest. The casino is overwhelming. The first time I drove to Foxwoods from Toronto back in '96, I remember driving for more than 30 minutes deep into a dark forest. I thought for sure that we were lost. Then, out of nowhere, there was a powerful blue light over the trees. It was either the casino or an alien UFO that was surveying the land. Luckily for us, it was in fact Foxwoods. How beautiful it is.

Foxwoods - and the entire East Coast, for that matter - is seven-card stud territory. Hold'em is played as well, but it's stud that is usually played at the higher limits. When I first started going to Foxwoods, $20-$40 and $30-$60 were high enough for me, so I mainly stuck with the hold'em games.

Inasmuch as stud is the dominant game, the selection for hold'em wasn't great, but I was pleasantly surprised with the style of play. There was more limping than raising, and when people bet, that usually meant they actually had something. That just made it much easier on me. The Foxwoods hold'em games are at the other end of the spectrum in comparison to the games in L.A. In L.A., when you get check-raised, you could be up against a set, a flush draw, top pair, bottom pair, no pair-no draw, a gutshot, or an overpair. At Foxwoods, getting check-raised meant you'd better get out if you didn't have the goods.

The games were weak and passive. They were not all that loose, really, but not every game can be the poker heaven that Toronto was in the early '90s. The players at Foxwoods were trying to play well. By well I mean, they played good starting hands, and did little bluffing and no chasing. Meanwhile, I played virtually any starting hand, bluffed a lot, and chased just so that I could steal the pot from them if a scare card hit!

In the tournaments, this held true even more, as the locals who entered the events tried even harder to "play well." They folded hands to a raise, then told the entire table that they threw away A-Q in their big blind. (Mental note: Raise that man's big blind every chance I get.)

I've written about Foxwoods previously, in a column called "Foxwoods, a Hidden Gem," and it is just that - a hidden gem.

A couple of hours' drive from Foxwoods stands the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, our next stop. I've had mixed emotions about Atlantic City. I've had some good trips (winning the main event in '99) and some bad trips (turning a five-day $50,000 winning streak into a seven-day $80,000 losing streak). All in all, though, the city has treated me well, and I find the side games to be quite good during the tournaments.

Much like Foxwoods, Atlantic City is a stud town, and there are some excellent stud players there. The regular hold'em game is 10-handed (yuck), $50-$100, but during a big tournament, they'll spread $75-$150, $100-$200, and even $200-$400 on occasion. Again, much like Foxwoods, the regulars in these games are what I like to call "careful" players. They try to play the game as fundamentally correct as possible, but in doing so, they actually play too carefully. They miss bets, fold hands they should play, and so on.

I'm not there during nontournament times, but from what I hear, it's the stud games that go regularly, with hold'em being played on the weekends, for the most part. It seems that every year that I go to Atlantic City, there are new kids on the block with million dollar bankrolls. And I wonder how they did it. Of course, they played very well, but there is no way they could make that kind of money on the West Coast. After having played in the stud games there for a while, it was clear to me how they were doing it. For stud players, the weekends can be extremely lucrative at the Taj. They'll often spread games in the $300-$600 and $400-$800 range, and sometimes much higher.

A few of the younger players there have worked very hard going through the ranks. They've gone from as low as the $1-$5 stud game to $30-$60, $75-$150, and finally, with a little bit of luck, to taking shots at games even bigger than that.

I was very impressed with the local players there. They all were polite, for the most part, and were interesting people. I really appreciate how well I'm treated when I step on their "turf" during the Taj tournament. I don't know if they are always like that, or if they just appreciated my giving them back the $50,000 I was ahead, as well as $30,000 of my own money! Nevertheless, The A.C. Boys, as I like to call them, showed me a very good time the last time I was there, and really made me feel at home. Here's a "What up, Player" to all of you (inside joke).

Next, we'll cover some more of the Northwest when we travel to the Bay Area to meet with Matt Savage and Phil Hellmuth, and then we'll go down South to Tunica, Mississippi, to play in Jack Binion's World Poker Open, followed by a trip up to Reno for the World Poker Challenge.