HugePoker

Tomorrow will mark a week in Vegas for me, and until today it has been a frustrating grind. I have only played one WSOP bracelet event (the $1k on Saturday), and it didn’t go well. I’ve had a couple of good runs where it looked like I had a good shot at a decent cash, but they have fizzled or exploded before making it to the bubble. In the $1k event I basically had three hands go wrong that I couldn’t really avoid, and with the shallow structure of that event, having three hands go wrong is pretty much fatal. The first blow came when I reraised from the small blind with AKs against a steal-ish looking button raise. When the flop came ragged I decided that a continuation bet was in order, but when my opponent raised me I knew I was pretty much cooked. Next was a hand in which I called a raise in position with T8s (reasonable), floated a continuation bet with middle pair (speculative, but I expected the tight woman in the BB to fold, leaving me alone with position on the raiser - she didn’t), and had to reluctantly call a small bet from aforementioned tight woman on the turn when I made two pair. Luckily the board got super scary on the river and she checked, but when I checked behind, she turned over top-two-pair. The final nail in the coffin (crucifix? too self-aggrandizing?) came with the blinds at 75-150 when I called a shove with my measly 1400 chips and a nice looking pair of Tens. My opponent had A-J, and the flop of 5-4-3 was not *too* bad, as I started muttering “no deuce”, but the turn was the dreaded deuce indeed (maybe I should have said it out loud instead of muttering) and there was no happy chop on the river (with an Ace or a Six), and I was out of the tournament four hours after it started (instead of doubling back up to an average stack and being back in the thick of things).

I had another opportunity for the “No Deuce!” cry, in the 1PM Deepstack tournament at the Rio. I had built up a nice stack but then ran into a nasty beat - a short stack limped for 200, middle position raise to 700, I find AA in the cutoff and make it 1850, wanting to play the hand heads-up with the raiser, but they both call, which is weird since the short stack now had about a third of his chips in the middle (I can’t even imagine what hand would make sense there). The flop comes 2-3-7 and I’m feeling pretty good about my Aces, but the limper surprises me again by shoving his remaining 4000, and the raiser makes the call. I raise enough to get him pretty well committed, and he agonizes for a long time before folding JJ face up (Crap!). The weird-playing short stack turns over 5-4-suited (REALLY??? Almost a third of your short stack flat-calling a reraise with 5-4-suited??) giving him a straight draw, but two of his outs are in my hand. He’s got 6 outs, but two of them give me good redraws … the turn is fine but of course he hits the Six on the river and more than triples up at my expense. So I no longer have a great stack, but I’m in decent shape. After that I make no progress though, and the blinds get high enough that shoving with JJ is a no-brainer. I get called by the big blind who turns over AK. Once again the flop looks pretty good even though it adds an extra ugly out for my opponent: 2-2-2. This time he’s gone from having 6 outs to 7 (instead of 10 outs on the 543 flop) and I feel more confident to call “No Deuce!” out loud, but this time, due to the possibly inferior quality of the players, two people look at me like I’m crazy because they actually don’t know why I wouldn’t want a deuce to come. The turn is some rag, and when the river is (of course) the last deuce, the other players still don’t get it and act surprised when I start packing up to leave and the dealer pushes my chips to the other player. One of them finally understands and says “Wow! I woudna even thought o’ that!”.

So things were not going well, and I was getting discouraged. I decided this morning to head over to the Wynn for their Noon $225 tournament, which has often been my fallback, my haven, my solace. The players there are about the worst I’ve ever seen in a $200+ buyin tournament, and I’ve won it or come in 2nd several times (they don’t get a lot of people, so winning it doesn’t yield a big box of hundreds, but a win is a win, and when you’ve been striking out over and over again, there’s nothing like rolling over a bunch of donkeys to get your confidence back). When in the first few minutes the unter-the-gun player said “I check” before the flop and got all embarrassed when the dealer said “you can’t check, sir - it’s 50 to call”, I knew I had come back home. They only had 16 players, so it was really a 2-table sit-and-go with the top three getting paid. I actually dropped some chips in the beginning, from 10000 down to 7200, and I thought I might be in for another frustrating day, and wondered where I could go for comfort if I couldn’t even win at the Wynn. But then I hit a couple of hands and maneuvered the donkeys into paying me, and I was a little above average in chips when we thinned down to 10 players at the final table. There were four guys from Russia at the final table, only one of whom spoke much English, so he could occasionally translate when the others didn’t understand what was happening. Things got a little comical after I busted him out, as there didn’t seem to be any chance of enforcing the “English Only” rule. The Russian goon on my left had a ton of chips and was pretty annoying until he doubled me up by putting in 45BB with A5 on an A4467 board (I had AQ) hurting his stack pretty badly and making me the chip leader with 6 players left. I must confess that I ran well at the final table, picking up AA and QQ several times, and never having them cracked. I lost the chip lead for a while to the crazy Hawaiian on my right, but took it back when my AA crushed his AQ on an AK79K board. He and I busted all the remaining Russians, and when it got down to the money with three players, it was me, the crazy Hawaiian, and an Iranian guy who kept saying “ahh, just you and me, my friend” whenever he would get into a pot with either one of us. We jousted back and forth for quite a while, and I bounced between being substantial chip leader to being roughly even with the other two, but I never really fell behind. When I knocked out the Iranian I had a 2:1 chip lead on the crazy Hawaiian dude, who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the concept of position, especially as it applied to heads-up play. I would whittle him down and then he would hit some weird hand with starting cards that he never should have been in there with in the first place, until I raised with A8 and he called, out of position, with J5o, and when the flop came AAJ he just couldn’t get away from it.

$1552 for first, which doesn’t get me even for the trip, but it does wipe away most of my losses, and puts me in a slightly better mood about this whole stupid poker thing.