HugePoker

After my ugly Ace-whooping 10-minute blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in the $1000 bracelet event on Thursday, my frustration continued. The only apparent benefit of busting out after TEN MINUTES in the Noon event was that I could go ahead and play the 1PM $200 event (also at the Rio). As I was putting together a pretty good run in the 1PM, I thought it would be funny if making my (by far) fastest ever exit from a WSOP event would lead to my best cash for the year. But, as it turned out, what would be funnier still, according to some poker god with a sick sense of humor that I do not appreciate, would be to have me last six hours instead of ten minutes, and then have me bust out by HAVING MY ACES CRACKED AGAIN. The hand went a little differently, and this time the culprit was deuces instead of Kings, but still, I mean, COME ON!

Friday the sadness continued. I went back to the Wynn to try and salve my wounds by beating up on the idiots, but at first I played badly to lose half of my stack, and then I lost by turning a flush when someone else had a higher flush. I lost at the Wynn so fast that I could pop back over to the Rio for the 1PM deepstack, I had one fun hand there early on where I actually bluffed a guy off of a set (the river put a fourth club on the board) and then showed him my 4-2 of diamonds. I don’t usually show bluffs, but I thought this guy was weak and possibly drunk and that it might tilt him. It didn’t seem to - we ended up talking about the hand, and he started to seem not all that drunk or all that weak, and we became pretty chummy. So instead of tilting the guy and making him play bad, I figured out that he wasn’t as bad as I thought he was - not the benefit I was looking for, but helpful nonetheless. After that I never really built a big stack, and when the blinds got big enough I had to shove 65s, got called by AJ - not the worst thing I could see, and I said “OK, I like it”, and then the dealer laid down JJ3 and I said “I don’t like it” and I was crippled, and out soon thereafter. I finished 160th out of 500 - another sort of decent run but not really close to winning the money. After that I went for a third time to the cleverly named Pho Kim Long for Vietnamese food with Josh. I got a call from Mark that the numbers were good for the 9PM $550 mega satellite, which I was thinking about playing anyway, so we hustled back to the Rio and I got in about 20 minutes late. Compared to the other tournaments I’ve been playing the $550 mega is kind of a psycho-turbo - you start with only 4000 chips and the blinds go 25-50 50-100 100-200 100-200/25 200-400/50 yikes! This one was just dreary for me - I was card-dead from the start and barely played any hands until three hours in when I had to shove with 44, and lost a coin flip to A9. So yesterday was a triple-header bust.

Today I got up early enough to walk over to the Gold Coast to have my Breakfast of Champions - the TGI Fridays $4.99 breakfast special (eggs, hash browns, sausage and toast), and got back to the Rio almost in time to register in time for the 1PM $1060 mega satellite to take a second stab at a $10,000 main event seat. More dreariness, with just a slightly different flavor: In the first hour I had *seven* pocket pairs, all 66 or lower, saw flops with all of them, flopped no sets, and lost every pot. I somehow managed to get to the first break with 5000 of my 6000 starting chips, but soon drifted down as low as 4000 before hitting my first hand, turning a straight with KQ. When a third diamond fell on the river it gave me a little bit of a scare, but it may have just allowed my opponent to bluff at the pot - I called, he grimaced, I said “I have a straight”, and he mucked.

An even bigger thrill-ride came when the Pokerstars Pro on my right (not sure who he was, but he had the jersey and the patch) shoved from the cutoff with Q8-spades for most of my stack, and I was happy to look down and find KK. I was not so happy to see the flop of 85J with two spades. We’re pretty much flipping a coin, as he needs any eight, any Queen or any spade to beat me. Sure enough, Queen on the turn and he has two pair and it looks like I’m pretty much out. BUT WAIT! A Five on the river gives me a better two pair, and the Stars Pro makes his exit, and suddenly I’ve got a big stack.

From there I mostly treaded water for a while, getting down to 1/3 of the 480 entrants, by which point my big stack was a merely average 20K chips. I won a coin flip 77 vs. AQ to chip up to 27K, I bounced between 30K and 40K until we were down to 75 players, and the tension was starting to mount - 45 of us would get $10,200 and the slightly unlucky 46th place finisher would get $6600 in cash. It was here that I pulled off the first (and the milder) of my two luckbox moments. It was folded around to me in the small blind, and the short stack in the big blind started mumbling about how if he had anything at all we were going to tangle - a pretty clear attempt to send me the message that I’d better just give him a walk if I didn’t want to gamble. He had about 3.5 BB, so I was going to shove on him with any two cards, because honestly I knew that all his mumbling was just bluster and that he would fold if he didn’t have a pretty good hand. But when I saw A2s there was no thought required, and when he actually AGONIZED before calling with 99 I knew my assessment was right about his calling range, which didn’t much help with the fact that he had the better hand. The 445 flop brought a little hope, but the Ace on the turn was the real killer, and MAN was he pissed as he walked off.

As we got closer to the bubble I had another nail biter when I shoved with A4s and the SB thought forever before folding AQ face-up (WHY on earth do they do that??? I mean do they WANT me to ravage them over and over?? What does he POSSIBLY hope to gain by showing the table that he’ll fold a good hand in the blinds?). I told him “yeah we were racing - I had Jacks” and then followed up with “we both didn’t want you to call”.

With 53 players left I had blinded down to a very precarious 28K, and was about to get chewed down further in two more hands, and AQ looked more than good enough, setting up luckbox moment number two. I shoved, the button asked for my stack to be counted down and started a long process of deliberation. Now on the one hand if he’s thinking that hard he’s not likely to have me badly beaten, but on the other he’s likely to have a pair for a coin flip, and even if I’m ahead I’d rather just have him fold this close to a satellite bubble. When he finally calls I just pray he might have AJs, which would be a bad call but possible, or that I can win a coin flip against Eights or something like that, BUT WAIT! He has … pocket Queens! Yuck! So it’s actually to his credit that he had a card time calling with QQ that close to the money, and afterward he said that it might have been a bad call, and I agreed - it seems borderline … with KK I think he has to call and with JJ or AK I think he has to fold, but QQ is pretty tough. He wouldn’t be crippled if he lost the hand, but he would go from a very safe stack to a pretty vulnerable one. Oh, sorry, you want to know what happened. Well, that’s simple - Ace on the flop, and on the river for good measure, and I double up to 64K, eight spots away from the money. And now I’ve got a pretty safe stack.

There were a few tense moments when I got shorter and some super-short stacks tripled or quadrupled up, but after an orbit in which the big stack inexplicably gave me a walk, and then I stole the BB from a stack who couldn’t possibly call me with anything, I was pretty close to a lock. After a few minutes of the old hand-for-hand, and surprisingly little talk of trying to orchestrate a 46-way deal, the true bubble-boy busted out, and then the $6600 booby-prize-winner, and we were all in.

I collect $10,000 in buyin chips and $200 in cash. This doesn’t require me to play the main event (I could sell the chips for cash) but I will. I was feeling pretty confident of playing the main event after a few small successes lately and I’ve been feeling pretty good about my play for the most part, but it still would have been difficult to pony up the $10,000 if I were to burn through a few thousand bucks trying to win a seat without success. Now I just have to win two or three more so I can play the main event as a totally relaxed freeroll. This is the big mega-satellite weekend, so there will be lots of opportunities…

Oh yeah, the title of the post … in recent years all the cool internet kids started saying “Bink!” when a card would come to win them a hand, or they would win a tournament, or just generally anything good would happen. Then the *really* cool thing was to use it as a verb, as in “I binked the 5 on the turn for the gutshot and stacked the donkey” or in my case “I just binked a main event seat! How awesome is that?”. What could be cooler and hipper than bringing it back to nounhood with “binkage”? Answer: none cooler.

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