Wed, August 4, 2004
Bad Beat
Poker Agony
Well, my plan was to come home and (finally!) write the poker recap from the July tournament I was in, but now it's going to have to wait because the poker at McRace tonight was so awful that I can't even think about poker right now. I won't even be reading Positively Fifth Street before falling asleep. Just Letterman and Clinton and that's it. (Okay, maybe porn.)
Anyway, things were going relatively well. I knocked Andy out of our little mini-tournament pretty early by raising huge with A8 after the flop came A76. He called me which made me nervous because it told me he probably had A7 or A6. However, I had more chips than he did, so for some reason I felt like it might even be fun trying to come back from a tiny chip stack if he beat me, so I continued to bet pretty big after the turn, which was a King. He called again. Terror! The river was a King as well, at which point I felt pretty good. Now, if he had called me with A7 I would win because I'd have Aces and Kings with an 8 kicker and he'd have Aces and Kings with a 7 kicker. (I think Phil Gordon calls this "being counterfeited" and it seems to me like the ultimate injustice.) So I had a large amount of chips at the time Andy left. It was just me and Arksie and I was ahead of him by – not a lot, but enough.
However, from that point on, I just got terrible cards. Awful. It took about twenty hands for me to even see a face card, and then it was 
AKK. The bastard had flopped Kings full of Aces. (Almost, but not quite, the Nut Boat. Certainly it was between our hands, though; I didn't have pocket aces.) I was four to a straight, sure, but straights don't beat boats. I practically threw up. A few minutes later, we decided to go ahead and finish dealing the community cards. We all assumed I was drawing dead, but my Jack was a spade as was the Ace and one of the Kings on the board, so technically, I could also draw a royal flush if the turn and river provided me with 
How awful. But this is the sort of thing that happens when you only play once every week or two. I should really be playing four or five tournaments a week. Then it wouldn't matter if I got tremendously outflopped on a pitiful all-in every once in a while.
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Joe Mulder — Wed, 8/4/04 11:36am
"At one point, he masterfully slow-played a full house against my two pair (Kings and nines) and we all celebrated how very disciplined I was not to call him when he raised me all-in."
And you were. Fantastic laydown. In a just world, you would have come back and beaten me. But as Hellmuth will tell us, there is often no justice.