It was a very busy weekend. Up early on Saturday morning to go to Architecture 'charette' at Calvin (pre-arct. students work all day on campus design problems then have their solutions trashed by local architects at end of day - fun stuff). The poker game at my apartment pooped out big time, we played four handed for about an hour then quit. On to poker game #2 with GVSU/drop-out lame-o's. When we got there they were playing Cincinatti or Cleveland or some stupid thing where everyone gets 5 hole cards. It's basically Omaha 8/B but you can use any number of your 5 hole cards. It was taking about 5 minutes per hand, and I was not having any fun. We hung there for a while, I spiked $5, and Alex managed to finish off the $25 I threw him back at the apartment game ($175 and counting, Alex).
Sunday morning got call from Pete and remebered that there was a $30 rebuy tourney at the Warehouse at 12:30. There were 9 players and at least that many re-buys, so the prize pool turned out to be decent. I didn't rebuy (second time I've managed that) and ended up coming in second to a pretty amateurish player. I only played two big pots against him throughout the tourament, and they were in perfect order for him...I think I played both of them decently.
I called with K-rag from small blind, AP is in big blind and checks. Flop comes KTx, I check. He bets 200, I raise to 500, he calls. Turn is a Jack. I bet 500, he calls. River is a Queen, I check. He goes all-in (only player at table who has me covered). I obviously fold, and show him the K. He shows AT. Great.
Skip ahead to the final hand. Blinds are 100/200, I have about 3500, he has over 7000. I get KTos in BB, he doubles the blind from the SB, I call. Flop comes KJx, I check, he bets the minimum (200), and I moved all in. I remembered the previous hand where I had the Kings and he ran me down to make the straight. I wanted to put him to the test and maybe make a big mistake by overcalling with a weak hand. He did call, but he had KJ, so I was drawing pretty dead. In retrospect his little 200 bet on the flop now makes perfect sense to me. He thought he had an unbeatable hand and he wanted to sucker me in by betting small. No Limit hold'em is about forcing your opponents to big descicions and causing them to make big mistakes. What was I going to call him with for 200? If I had Q9 or T9 I would be getting great odds to draw to the gutshot, so I think that betting 200 there was soooo bad. Of course I had one of the two or three hands that he was actually going to win any chips against, so it worked out well for him.
Of course, Pete isn't satisfied with only $27 in rake for the day, so we started a $4/$8 cash game afterwards and to my suprise everyone played. Going from a $30 buy in sit-and-go to $4/$8 is a big jump, maybe a factor of 5 in terms of $ risk. I bought in with my tournament winnings ($160) and promptly lost all of it. All and all there were really only 1 or 2 real suckers at the table, I guess for the first hour and a half I was one of them. The thing is, AP (amateurish player, remember him?) was still sitting at the table with over $100 in front of him, so I went to the ATM and bought back in for another $100. Through a little good luck and quite a bit tighter play I was able to run it up to $220 when we cashed out, so all in all I was up about $100 for the day.
I enjoyed playing in the cash game because it was very challenging. Dan, Rob, Nick, John B and myself. Each of these players has a very distinct playing style, none of them are desireable opponents especially when heads-up for a pot. I decided not to run a lot of bluffs and pretty much play ABC and not worry too much about out-playing or getting out-played. I had raised earlier with 96s under the gun, and I know they all remembered that.
"Just when you thought you had everything figured out, eh Rob?"
- Me, re: showing 96s at showdown after having raised u.t.g.
