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For those who don't know, I participate in ranked home games of Texas Hold 'Em every Wednesday. Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em? will be a weekly feature on this blog recapping my good plays, bad plays, desperate plays, suckouts, and bad beats!
I'll write up a post about how we organize our "league" shortly, but here's how things went down last night.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 (S04E01): Twelve players showed up to to our fourth season opener, so we split into two tables of 6 and combined to one table once we were down to 9 players. I made it to the final table with about $24,000 in chips, a mere $4,000 above the starting stack. The cards were pretty dead for me in the early goings and any hand I played just couldn't connect with the board. I managed to steal one modest pot just before we merged with a nifty bluff on the river. If I hadn't done that, I would have been pretty short coming onto the final table.
However, once we merged things went from "meh," to "bleh." My stack was dwindling because of ill-timed bluffs or simply not having the goods. I managed to make it to six-handed with only $7000 left. Here's my first desperate maneuver to double-up. I didn't want to make the move here, but I kind of had to with the BB coming to me in the next hand.
I was actually ahead Paul in this hand even though he had a pocket pair. Suited 9-10 is a slight favourite because of the flush and straight potential, not to mention they were also over-cards. So yay me! Double-up.
Several hands later as the big blind (BB) was also key for me. Blinds were up, there was lots of pre-flop limping action, and I was dealt a monster. I would have preferred isolating one player here preflop but I was actually lucky that the chip leader decided to make a somewhat loose call in the hopes of bouncing us both. My two callers were sharing some outs!
Things went smoothly for me after that. Glen and Jessica were quickly bounced and Jesse made a play at Paul that didn't work out too well for him. Eventually, Neil's pocket 3s held up against Jesse's AQ offsuit and we were down to three-handed with somewhat balanced chip stacks.
At this point I thought I had a pretty good read against Neil, who was the chip leader with over $100k in chips. I made a standard raise against him pre-flop to 3x the BB from the small blind with AQ offsuit. He quickly announced his re-raise. "I raise... all-in," he said with a bit of a cocky smirk on his face.
I was pretty sure he had a low pocket pair at best, but I didn't even give him credit for that. He'd caught a ride to the game with Glen who was now out of the game waiting around for Neil to finish up. Neil had made several all-in re-raises in the last 15 minutes and I'd seen the wide range of cards he was playing. My gut told me, "This guy has a big stack and wants to push you around. He's pretty sure you'll fold but wouldn't care if you called and won either because he doesn't want to keep Glen waiting around forever."
On top of that I felt AQ offsuit was a monster three handed -- and it is. The only hands that have me crushed are AA, KK, QQ, and AK. A pocket pair JJ or lower is a race, and I'm heavily favoured to win AJ or lower. Any two cards that aren't an ace or queen has me a roughly 1.5:1 favourite.
So I made the call and he chuckled turning over A3 offsuit. Here's how the cards landed...
Doh! Even though I had him dominated he still sucked out on me, LOL. As Doyle Brunson would say, "That's poker folks." I wasn't too pissed because he did make the move back at me hoping I would fold and even so, A3 is a pretty good holding three-handed.
So, I finished in 3rd place last night, which puts me 3rd place in the league after week one of this season. I also placed in the cash which paid 1.5x my buy-in. Not great, but at least I walked away with something. See you next week!
As a special bonus, here was my hero call of the evening!
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