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2011-01-17 - 1:08 p.m. A decent-sized winning day. IMOM also had a good win, so it was another great day for the team. A bit stressful for me, though. The day was already off to a shaky start when I realized that one of the dresses I'd pulled out of the back of the closet had a hole in it. I guess I'll be tossing that one. On my first table, I had a bad loose player who called all-ins very light. However, while I was getting settled in, I got stacked twice.
Hand #1: Can Anything Good Come from Flopping Two Pair? I struggle along for quite some time but eventually my comeback starts with a pair of Queens.
Hand #2: You're Calling A Shove With Say What?Now that I'm deep and keenly aware of the Loosey Goosey who acts three places after me, I want to establish an image that I'm willing to play with him, and I also want to get involved in a lot of hands with him. I'm still stacking chips and don't catch much in my blinds, but now it's my button. Time for a humor hand.
Hand #3: Fun With 74 OffI've been sitting in seat 10 all this time, not my favorite seat. I prefer 1, 5, or 6. However, I don't move into 5 or 6 for almost three hours, because there's a skilled player in seat 7 who seems to think on my level and read me pretty well, and I don't want to give this player position on me. Finally, he leaves, and there's a game of musical chairs, and I end up in seat 5, with an Armenian jeweler (I sometimes wonder if all Armenians are jewelers, or if it's just the ones you meet at the poker table) in seat 6. He offers to sell his watch to his admirers for the low, low price of $165,000 American dollars, and, needless to say, since it's a lowly 2/5 NL game, he doesn't get a lot of interest. Thanks to the pocket Queens and some back-and-forth, I'm making a decent comeback from my bad start of the day, and I now have about $800 in front of me. 180 big blinds is enough to allow me to see a lot of flops and run a lot of plays, especially when I have a loose bad player in the mix. Loosey is in seat 2, so I've got much better position on him now. Here's the result.
Hand #4: I Play a Monster Pot at LastEven after my terrible start to the day, I'm now comfortably ahead for the table. I decide to take an early dinner break, because my stack is larger than I like for a 2/5 game. I head off to the deli for some Matzo Ball Soup, but they make me wait about 30 minutes while they hunt and kill the mighty Matzo. Just as I've finished eating, IMOM and an old teammate from the blackjack days turns up. B. looked about 19 all those days years ago on the team. Now I guess he looks about 30. It's disgusting how he never gets any older. Anyway, we peppered him with questions about his world travels -- after he cashed out of the team, he first traveled Latin America playing blackjack, and then, when he ran out of blackjack games to play, he traveled China teaching English and also played 1/2 NL and 1/3 NL all over Asia and Australia. Now he is taking his ill-gotten gains (ha!) so that he can find a cheap condo in Vegas and retire to a life of leisure. Well, there are sure as heck a lot of cheap condos for the cash buyer, so I don't think he'll have any trouble with that project. He's quite a character. "What languages do you speak?" I ask. "Mandarin and Spanish," he says. "A little German." About like my sister. Nothing like learning those closely related language groups, is there? We asked him about poker play in Macau, and he says they used English at the table, because in Hong Kong it's Cantonese and in Macau it's Mandarin. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) "Also, a lot of guys will sit at the table, and they look Asian, but they open their mouth, and you realize they're from California," he says. M-kay. That's pretty good to know. I guess I thought people who spoke Cantonese could understand Mandarin and vice-versa, sort of like the Portugeuse can understand Spanish, but if everybody has to poke along in English, it makes it all the easier for those of us who barely speak one language. Then it's back to the wars. This table didn't hold any noticeably god-awful players. I'd just call it a random table with some decent and some meh. I got off to another terrible start. It seemed like I was just bluffing off my money, to tell you the truth. I also made a $65 river call that I probably didn't need to make. This really stinks, I'm thinking. I've won my biggest pot, by far, of the entire trip today, and it would just be unbelievable if I turned it into a losing day. I looked at my watch from time to time and considered quitting early, but then I decided instead to take advantage of my blufftard image to play a little tighter and maybe get paid off if I ever hit a hand. From time to time, though, I still took some stabs. Bit by bit, and chip by chip, I started to recover, although I was still around $500 down at the time. A few moments before the crucial hand, there was a string of limpers, and I pick up K ♠ T ♠ in the small blind. I decide it's time to remind people of my loose raising standards, so I raise. Everybody folds. "Ace King," darkly mutters the Asian man who just joined the game. "Close," I say. "You have one card right." I flip over my hand, and then it's on to the next.
I now have a $530 stack. The next time I'm Under-the-Gun, I pick up A ♦ A ♣ and I make my standard open-raise of $20. The guy immediately on my left is a good, observant player who may be a professional but is certainly a good semi-pro who recognizes a lot of moves. He makes it $45 to go. He may want to isolate the loose player, but I think he also has a pretty good hand here. It folds back to me, and since I've never been shy to three-bet in the past, I'm not gonna back down now. There's $70 in the pot, and I make it $110 to go. He four-bets to $325. I five-bet all-in. He calls. I flip over my rockets, and he shows pocket Kings. The dealer runs out the board, and my hand is good. IMOM has walked over just then and sees the hand. I realize that he's getting ready to leave, and I don't mind, because it has been a crazy wild ride back to victory, and I'm pretty much ready to call it a day.
However, I play another orbit and I pick up J ♠ J ♦ Under-the-Gun on my very last hand. I have a large stack here, since I've completely recovered from my downswing, and the other guy has me covered or close to it. He's an unknown player, who has not yet played a hand that I've witnessed, and he's on the button. I limp, maybe I pick up a couple of hitch-hikers, and he raises to $45. It folds back to me, and I could smooth-call the raise here and try to pick up a set. That's a decent play out of position, and it's the play I often make. However, this time, I decide to see if he's just making a button-raise, allowing me to re-steal the hand right here. Or, since he has done nothing but fold so far, maybe he has a real hand, and he'll give himself away by either 4-betting or smooth-calling. I make it $110 to go. The limpers get out of the way. Keep in mind that the dude has 1) just seen me show down Aces a few hands ago, and 2) just seen me limp/re-raise on his happy ass, which is very, very, very often Aces or Kings in these games. I believe that he has every reason to believe that I have a strong hand. His response? He makes it $250 to go. I'm either beat, or I'm going to get out-played, so I see no reason to put anything further into this pot. I muck, and he shows his pocket Queens. Good fold, Peachfront! I am the poker god. On the other hand, I could have seen a flop for $45 and tried to out-draw the turkey, but whatever. I probably have to call one flop bet anyway, unless it's a two broadway board, so I'm satisfied that I lost on the low side of what I could have lost on the hand. We get back to the room and watch some show about the Gyrfalcons. The male is a hopeless bum, who sits preening his pretty feathers while the babies starve. This is the stage last year when the young died, intones the narrator. The female finally can't take it any more. She leaves the nest, hunts and kills a rabbit, tears it up -- Gyrfalcons don't normally do this, Eagles do this, we are informed, but the rabbit is too big for her to carry -- and somehow struggles back to the cliff. Here, she lands at the foot of the cliff, exhausted, unable to lift the weight any higher. The male continues to preen, oblivious. One of the babies is gasping out its dying breath. Finally, heroically, she catches her breath and gets the rabbit to the babies. All recover and, eventually, all fledge successfully. The male continues to be clueless, and there's a humor scene where he delivers some tiny pea-pickin' mouse, and she takes it and blesses him out and sends him away to catch something bigger. Right now, Peachfront is catching the rabbit, and IMOM is catching the mice. But it could so easily turn around the other way, so I'd better not get cocky. Either way, the team is doing a bit above expectation at the moment.
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford
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