/ Matthew Pitt / 08 February 2011 / Leave a comment
A new player joined the table, who we later discovered had only arrived in England from Pakistan three weeks ago, holding a sheet of paper with hand rankings on it! I kid you not. He plays his very first hand and the entire table is licking its lips. Four handed they get to the turn, at which point our new fish asks the dealer if it is OK to look at his cards now
Although I absolutely love playing live poker it is actually quite a rare occurrence when I do venture out to my local casino and rub shoulders with the complete donkeys who frequent it. Live poker is by its very nature a time consuming past time and when you have two kiddies in the house and a Mrs it is often much easier to simply sit on the sofa and play online poker.
That said I did actually leave the house to play poker last night and entered a £10+£4, yes you read that correctly, the tournament had 40% rake, but in its defence the casino did add £250 to the coffers, which coupled with 45 runners and the fact you started with 10,000 chips meant it was a nice little tournament to take part in. Early on I raised it up with 6c6d, flopped a set against two opponents but the four flushed board meant I only won a small pot. Then I basically didn't play a hand for a level as I watched in horror and bemusement as people showed down 86o, J3s and other such tripe regardless of the action before them.
I won a few nice pots, one with AxTx when I flopped two pair and managed to get paid off against a weaker ace then I played a hand that should have netted me more chips than it did. A young lad opened in the cutoff for the three millionth time and I re-popped with the monster that is Ts9s. He calls and we see a TdTh3c flop. He checks and I check behind. The turn is a king and he bets around the size of the pot, I then miscount his stack and move all in and he shits himself and folds, showing me pocket nines. This put me up to a quite healthy 1.5x average stack.
Then the most ridiculous thing every occurred. A new player joined the table, who we later discovered had only arrived in England from Pakistan three weeks ago, holding a sheet of paper with hand rankings on it! I kid you not. He plays his very first hand and the entire table is licking its lips. Four handed they get to the turn, at which point our new fish asks the dealer if it is OK to look at his cards now! He ends up getting lucky in several hands and finds himself amongst the chip leaders.
I've now moved up to around 34,000 with the average being 21,000 and find black pocket tens. Our fish raises, I bump it up bigger than usual to fold everyone out, they oblige and fish boy calls. The flop is 9x9x6x and he 300 into the pot of around 4,000! He's got about 17,000 behind and he's calling here with a bare ace so I put him in. He double checks his cards and if he is going to call with a bare ace he is also going to call with 9h6h for a flopped boat. Nice hand sir. No suck out for me and I now look like I could be going home relatively early. However, that changed when the next hand I get dealt AsJs and raise it up UTG, only our fish calls from the SB and the flop is a beautiful Ks-Qd-Td. He leads, I shove and he snap calls with Kx6x and I doubled back up!
A few mistimed moves later and blinds that have more jumps in them than the local slapper and I find myself with around 15 bigs and looking to make a move. I picked up the blinds, antes and some dude's raise when I three-bet shove with Qh9h then disaster strikes as an oldish woman opens with a min-raise, I shove my red sevens and she tank-calls with red jacks, which obviously hold as I never suck out and I bust 14/45. Oh I forgot to mention had badly I run in general. Finding myself hungry I decided to order a ham and cheese toastie only to discover, as it arrived at my table, that there was a free Chinese buffet for the poker players! So everyone is sat there scoffing spare ribs (my favourite), spring rolls and the like whilst I burn myself with grease and have hot cheese stuck to my chin, both of them.
The fella who I went with was still in decent shape so I decided to play some cash games whilst I waited for him. I sat down with £75 at the £0.25/£0.50 games and we were five-handed. The play was extremely passive but I couldn't take advantage of it as I was getting tripe like 74o, 92s, J3o which wasn't a problem for these fish but I have some sort of standards. I lost one pot after UTG straddles to £1 and the entire tables calls! I bump it to £9 and get two callers, and the dealer puts out the king-high flop but three spades. The small blind checks, I bet 2/3 pot, UTG calls but now the SB raises about £60! I muck, as does Mr UTG and the small blind proudly turns over 8s5s for a flush. Well played you tard. I then lost a significant pot when I flopped two pair with 97o on a 9x-Ax-7x flop. Villain, who is worse than our Asian fish from earlier leads out, I raise hoping to get action from him and he gives action by shoving. I snap-call and he flips over Tx8x for an open-ended straight draw, which hits on the turn as the 6d shows its ugly little face. No boat on the river and I am down almost a buy-in. Balls to reloading I thought as it was late, though I did manage to win more than half my losses back by firing pretty big on the flop and turn in two separate hands.
I checked the clock and it was rapidly approaching 0145 so I did one as I was completely knackered from watching the Super Bowl, pissed, and later found out my mate came fifth. Congrats. The standard was ridiculously bad and I am definitely going to go down again in the near future and maybe even make it a regular bi-weekly or monthly trip, maybe using my rakeback as my live bankroll as I'm pulling in about £50 a week on that front so a four buy-in shot once a month could be quite profitable!
I'll leave it there and let you know about the rollercoaster ride I am having playing online cash in another post. Until then, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!
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