Outer Monologue

"A Bad Read in Reading" (aka, Recent Tourney Wrap-Up)

As promised in the previous posting, here's the wrap-up of the poker tourney I recently attended. I was also going to summarize my current online play, but the tourney description is just too damned long.

A quick front page summary:

Live Poker == Not so Good.
Online Poker == REALLY Good.

More after the flip.

The 2nd "Annual" North-South Poker Showdown was held this past Saturday, 4/2/05 up at Pitt's new (and quite nice) house up in Reading.

There were, I believe, 22 or 23 players in attendance. Unfortunately, due to the lateness of the scheduling and several conflicts, the South Shore contingent was quite small, consisting of only 3 core members of the SSP crew and one occasional player.

A quick rundown of the structure:

It was a $20 buy-in NL Hold'Em tournament. Every player started off with a stack of 500 chips, and the blinds started at 5/10 with escalations every 20 minutes, which made for a fairly well-paced tournament. Escalations went 5/10, 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 25/50, etc.

The prize breakdown was 50% for first, 25% for second, 15% for third and 10% for fourth.

I myself went out exactly halfway through in 11th position (by my quick count), which was a bit worse than I had hoped, but not so bad as to be overwhelming.

The other two core members of SSP (Rich and Terry) went out 7th and 6th respectively, while Matt, the other SSP player in attendance went out somewhere around 16th or 18th.

All-in-all, not a bad finish for our crew, especially with the sheer numbers stacked against us.

I was fairly happy about my play, to be honest, because I played a very good tight-aggressive game.

I started out very tight, only playing premium hands (position-dependant, of course).

As the tourney progressed and the blinds began escalating, I loosened my game up a touch, made a couple of key steals and caught some good cards to build up one of the larger (if not the largest) stacks in the tourney.

At the halfway mark, I caught a really good run of cards, and reached the pinnacle of my stack.

It was, in fact, this that caused my undoing.

A run of two hands, back-to-back were what did me in.

The first hand, I started with pocket aces, the best starting hand in Hold'Em. The player immediately to my right (who had significantly less chips than I did) went all-in before the flop to steal the blinds (which were at 20/40 at that time, I believe). Obviously, I loved it.

I went all-in over the top of him, to push everyone else out, so I could eliminate him, knowing I was well-ahead of him and probably had him dominated pre-flop.

I was right. When we went head's up, he showed his pocket kings. Now Pocket kings are an amazing hand in Hold'Em, and I would happily go all-in with them in almost any situation. But against pocket aces, they are a severe underdog (I think 80/20), so I justifiably felt pretty comfortable (and pretty good about my play, I still do, regardless of the outcome). I did make the comment to him, before the flop, that I've had (and seen) aces get beat many times, so I wasn't counting my chickens.

Unfortunately for me, he drew out to a king-high straight on the river, taking a bit less than a third of my stack away, and again proved that the odds are just that... odd.

Okay... I shook it off. I mean, bad beats happen, I've dealt them as often as I received them, and I was still easily one of the top stacks at the table.

So, next hand deals around, and I look down and see Big-Slick, Ace-King (suited, no less). Again, I'm pretty damned happy.

Now I'm no fool, and I'm very leery of Big Slick, as it is NOT a made hand, and it's very easy to miss a flop entirely with it.

This is a bigger deal in a limit ring game though. In NL Hold'Em, Big Slick is a more powerful hand, especially when you're sitting on a big stack, as it gives you the ammo to play through a well-grounded semi-bluff.

So this was all in my head as play worked its way around to me...

And lo and behold, the guy immediately to my right yet again goes all-in!

I mentally paused for a moment, but not for long enough, and this was my only real mistake of the entire night.

From my observation, this guy was a fairly tight player. He wasn't splashing around overly much, and was rarely, if ever, caught stealing.

I think my head was still a bit bothered by the beat though, and all that the very short pause gave me time to think was, "He can't have Aces or Kings again, it's just impossible." I figured he was sitting on Ace-Big (Queen or Jack) and was on a rush, or at WORST was sitting on a healthy middle pair or low high pair (somewhere around pocket 8's to pocket jacks).

So my far-too-quick mental calculations put me at, at worst, a 50-50 shot.

So I again went all-in over the top of him, as there were two people left to act after me that had stacks nearly my size or slightly more than I. I couldn't just call, as this would give them far better pot-odds without risking the majority (or all) of their stacks to potentially knock out two players.

Such an occurrence was a long-shot, but you have to protect against it.

It was folded around again and I was left head's up against this man, this behemoth, this nightmare of mine.

And what did he flip up? Only one of two hands that could have dominated me.

Yep.

He had Pocket Kings.

AGAIN.

The board went as expected. I believe he actually made a set of kings by the river (yay, I had a pair of kings!)

It was all a blur, to be honest.

So that hand cost me most of the rest of my stack. I had, I believe, enough left for one or two Big Blinds, and they were almost upon me.

At that point, the tournament was pretty much over for me, but I did make a valiant effort at it.

I managed to build my stack up to about 10-15 Big Blinds again through some savvy bluffing and good cards, but lost it all to a race about 15 hands later (I was the one holding the overcards that time).

So as I said, all-in-all, I was fairly pleased with my play.

The Ace-King all-in was, at best, a vaguely questionable play. It would have been an amazing laydown, had I been able to do it, but I don't think many players would fault me for it. I may have even been able to have made the laydown, had I thought about it just a bit longer.

Ah well. It was definitely a good learning experience, and had the cards fallen a different way on that first all-in (AA vs. KK), there's a good chance I would have made it to the final table, and probably even into the money.

Unfortunately, I followed those good choices with a series of bad ones.

The first, and worst one was electing to join the "loser's bracket" ring game that was going on.

Big mistake. After the way the tourney ended for me, there was no way my head was in the right place to sit down and play more poker.

But I dropped another 20 bucks in and sat down and quickly blew through most of my stack.

I finally realized what I was doing a few bucks before I completely burned away my stack, but by then, it was too late to do anything but pick a hand and make a stand (which I, unsurprisingly, lost).

So yeah, that's 40 bucks I'll never get back, but at least 20 of it was spent playing, to me, excellent poker and learning a bit of something.

I will NEVER make the same mistake with AK again. And given the stakes of such a hand, I think that's a lesson worth 20 bucks. Maybe even worth 40 bucks.

That's it for now. Next post will be the summary of my online play.

Ciao!

Posted by Campbell at April 4, 2005 07:00 PM