HugePoker

After 4 lovely relaxing days on Curacao (Iguana stew for lunch yesterday) involving no poker whatsoever, Mrs Huge and I took the half hour morning flight back to Aruba. We got settled in to our rental condo, did some grocery shopping for the week ahead, and then I headed off for the opening tournament of the Aruba Classic.

I paid my $540 to enter, and when I sat down I was amused to see a guy I got to know a little last year in Aruba. We played together a few times last year, and at one point I didn’t quite have enough money in my pocket to enter the afternoon tournament (I had just busted out of the main event, cashing for $13,200, but they didn’t pay in cash so I didn’t have the $300 I needed), so I asked Bret if he could loan me a couple hundred and I swear I’m good for it and it’s totally fine if you don’t want to etc. He looked at me like I was crazy for even hesitating to ask, practically threw the two hundreds at me and acted like he didn’t really care whether I paid him back or not (I did though). So today when I ran into him again and we figured out each others’ names I brought the story up to him and we laughed, and then when we started playing he raised twice from late position and both times I re-raised, forcing him to fold. We joked about what an ungrateful bastard I was, picking on the guy who had been so trustign and gracious towards me only a year ago, but when he raised again from the cutoff and I looked down at Queens in the small blind, what am I gonna do, fold? I re-raised him again, an amount small enough that he might just barely think he had fold equity against me if he pushed in the rest of his chips. He fell for the trap perfectly and shoved, and I insta-called, and he had Ace-Four-offsuit. Really? He looked pretty well caught until an Ace on the flop turned the trapper into a chinchilla stole. Oh well. I actually battled back from that point, but didn’t manage to cash, finishing 40th out of 127.

I then headed over to the Excelsior Casino at the Holiday Inn, where they had the insane tournament last year that I final-tabled. They’re running the same event again this year and I wanted to see what was happening. They didn’t have any single-table satellites available, but I decided to play a little cash game since the players there (if last year was any indication) are truly terrible. It’s time for bed now, so I’ll make this brief…

limp-limp-limp Huge has QQ and raises from $5 to $45, thinking that might succeed in narrowing the field, but no - three people call. Flop is 6-7-9 two spades. Villain goes all in for $240-ish and maybe he flopped a set but he’s a terrible loose bluffy player and I just can’t put him on a great hand. I call and he turns over 8-5-off for the straight. I got to give him this: he certainly was successful in deceiving me by CALLING $45 WITH 8-5 OFFSUIT! Yeah, that wasn’t quite in the range I put him on.

Later in same game I join the limp parade with KJs and am pleased to see a flop of J-J-3 rainbow. More pleased to see the big blind betting into me. There are no draws to worry about, so I feel OK about just flat-calling to try to get all the money in on the Turn. I check, turn is an Ace, and I know he didn’t limp with AJ so I’m pretty sure I’m good. He bets $60 or so and I wish I had more chips but I shove my $25o-ish stack and he instantly calls. I have KJs he has J8o and the river is an Eight and I don’t have any more money in my pocket to play with, so I roll my eyes and drive home to type this.

Tomorrow morning is a pro poker seminar with Phil Helmuth and Annie Duke and some other Ultimatebet pros. If I can get myself out of bed in time I’m going to try to soak up some poker pearls of wisdom…

Day One, one tournament one cash game net loss $1,076.

It can only get better from here, right?

-huge

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.