April 29, 2005

Thursday Night Poker

Supposedly I'm not playing poker these days, but I do make it to the occassional friendly home game to keep up with my friends on the GR poker circuit. I finally made it out to the Thursday night game at Quentin's appartment last night and it was, well let's say "interesting." Bunch of stoners and such made for a unique evening of cards. There were two tables running and everyone in the tiny appartment was smoking (cigarettes, etc). I didn't know very many people but I was glad to see a couple of familiar faces.

I started off with $20 in a $0.25/0.50 NL game. I was amused by how much the game reminded me of the one on 1st VW last year. Almost every single hand someone was all-in and no one had much more than $20 in chips in front of them because whenever someone busted out they just bought their chips back from the guy who won the pot and that guy took the cash out of play.

A few other humorous elements: all the colored chips were worth $0.50, so someone would say "Raise it $4," and push forward a jumbled stack or reds, blacks, greens and blues. Sigh. I can't stand playing poker with multi-colored chips that are worth the same amount. Of course my OCD kicked in and I had to organize all of mine into separate stacks, but really I just think that when games fail to assign values to different color chips it represents a lot about the type of game that it is. Frankly, I find it to be lazy and lowbrow - prove me wrong.

$20 later happened to align fairly well with the start of the $5 rebuy tourney, which I enjoyed quite a bit more than the cash game (partially because the chips actually had different values!). My first rebuy was after I flopped a straight and got beaten by a running flush - no problem, still in it. I managed to hold onto that stack and build it up a little bit, but with the rebuy action and loose play most people had me well covered in chips. A few minutes after the one hour rebuy period ended I picked up 77 under the gun and tripled the blind to $150. The cut-off reraised 700 which put me all in for 520 more and I decided to gamble as I had to post the next hand. He turned over what I hoped for - Big Slick. Flop came 678. Beauty, now he's dead to runners just to chop the pot. Ok, so we chopped that pot, ugh.

I busted in a totally anti-climatic attempt to buy a pot when I was drawing dead against two other players who called. Fortunately a heads-up tourney got started and I got a chance to vindicate myself a little. Although we only started with 25 chips and the blinds at 1/2, I felt good about doing the heads-up thing. I used to hate playing NL heads up but I've gotten a lot of practice recently (i.e. - incessant freeroll heads up against Alex). I won all three rounds and won the thing relatively easily, although I did put a pretty bad beat on Quentin in the first round.

The final hand was against Jesse. I had won a large pot by calling him down with 33 in the hole at a board of KJK22. I put him on a draw when he called my raise on the flop, and his bet on the river was suspicious/small enough for me to look him up. So I had a nice chip lead going into the final hand and following Jesse's raise from the button I looked down at two Aces. I didn't have to think about how to play them very long, I just shoved knowing that he would call. He did and showed 99. I love getting all-in and flipping up aces pre-flop, but who the hell doesn't. Of course I did this knowing full well that it wasn't over yet. The flop accentuated this point: QJT. Jesse had just tripled his outs, two 9's or four 8's left in the deck would give him the lead. Boom, eight on the turn. No problem, I still have a lot of chips...but what's this? A King on the river finished it. An ace-hi straight over a king-hi straight is not the way I would have anticipated winning with AA vs 99, but I'll take it.

Watch out Phil, I'm gunning for that heads-up title!