A Bad Beat Story

Ok, so it isn’t a true bad beat, I know I know, but I just have to get it out. Hold ‘em is an incredibly sick game, and the reason for this is definitely the community cards. Shared cards make for great drama. In the end though, when all the money is in the middle, there will be five cards face up that anyone still in the hand can use at their disposal.

$100+9 buy-in $20k Guaranteed Tournament on Pokerstars

Pokerstars has the best selection of Tournaments on the internet, hands-down. US Players are welcome and they make it very easy to deposit including a number of deposit options such as EPassporte

They also offer a 100% deposit Bonus up to $50. Not nearly the best promo out there but hey, it is a free $50. End shameless plug, now back to the hand.

This is a good Guaranteed Tournament because although it is a larger buy-in, you start with 3000 chips instead of the usual 1500. This makes for more play and when registration had ended, there were 306 players in the tournament making First Place a whopping $7700 and paying out 36 people.

When I sayI ran ICE COLD I am making an understatement. There was a player who had a pretty good size stack that was raising a ton of hands pre-flop. He was also making continuation bets on the flop and slowing down on the turn if his flop bet got called. He had also gotten quite out of line a couple hands earlier and lost some of his chips. He seemed ready to tilt if not there already.

Almost every pot at the table was raised, but there hadn’t been too many giant pots until this same guy raises to 300 with the blinds at 50/100 and I called him from the cutoff with AQ. I had about 2500 left of my orginal stack and he had me covered by about 1500 chips.

He makes it 300 to go, and I call deciding to see a flop before I make any big decisions against this possible live wire. Both blinds fold and the flop comes down:

Q82 rainbow.

I believe this is a good flop because this was the kind of guy at this point, who would take 99, TT, and JJ all the way here. However I’d be in real trouble if I was behind at that point as I could be drawing slim-to-dead against a number of hands as well.

So he bets 400, his standard continuation bet, and I make it 1100 leaving me with 1300 chips left. He thinks for about 2 seconds and moves all-in. SHIT. Now I had some thinking to do. I ruled out a set because I reasoned he would just call my flop-raise with a set since there were no real draws out there, and I probably wasn’t raising half my chips that early with a gutshot. AA, or KK he would have probably limped in very early position as I saw him do in the beginning of the tournament with KK when he was UTG. He was now sitting UTG +1. I had my cursor over fold, was ready to click and got this feeling in my gut that it was a bad decision. Not being 100% sure of myself, I called and to my delight, the villain shows AcKc!!!! I wasn’t sure if my call was right or not, but I was jumping up and down and patting myself on the back when he only had 3 outs against me!

Then on the turn came the awful, awful Ten of Clubs making the board:

Q82T with 2 clubs and giving him a lot more outs.

Long Story Short—He rivers a club and I am out before the first break.

Now I realize that you can say that this wasn’t a true BAD BEAT because he had me Dominated before the flop—–HOWEVER in my defense, when did all the money go in?

Yep, quite a sick game this is that we play? Why do we torture ourselves day in and day out?

…Because there is nothing like the feeling of all the chips going into the middle at a crucial point of a multi-table tournament. While not necessarily good, it sure is quite a RUSH

Heart racing a million miles an hour, thoughts swirling in your head so fast that none can be comprehended, and the relief after the river card is dealt and yours and someone else’s chips which are now also yours are being slid your way. Thats what I play for.

WSOP LIVE

I am quite late on this but I just came across it today. You can watch a ton of Final Tables from the 2007 WSOP either live or via their archives. It costs $49.95 for the year and WSOP Circuit Events seem to be included. Personally, I would rather wait to see them on ESPN, with Norman and Lon’s entertaining commentary, but these webcasts actually show ALL of the hands played at a Final Table. You can really learn a lot by watching these webcasts as far as final table strategy goes. Check it out here:

http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/mediacenter/index.asp

What is your Poker IQ?

I also came across a very interesting Poker IQ Test. It consists of about 50 questions relating to Poker Strategy. At the end, you get a score, and for $9.95 payable through PayPal, you can get a very in-depth review of your results. I think the review is well worth it. You can take the test here:

http://www.donkeytest.com

I wasn’t aware that it takes the amount of time the test takes you into account while assessing your score, so make sure you have time to take the test all the way through with no interruption. any other info is in the FAQ on the site. Good Luck!

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Poker Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.