Campfire Stories

Work Week.

Good news: I put in hours and actually made some bucks. I woke up Friday morning planning on going to the lake, however I had a sudden premonition that perhaps I should do some work like normal people. So, in the last five days I worked two eight hour shifts and three six hour shifts. You read about the first one, and here's how the rest of them have gone:

Saturday I wandered into the Bellagio to experience some of the tournament vibe and really got bummed that I am too broke to play in any of the events. I posted up in a 15-30 limit game and basically felt like I was sitting in a dentist chair for six hours. General torture, you know how that goes. I lost $626 and was never up.

Sunday I went into the Wynn for much of the same, was never up, and lost $639 in six hours.

So much for a great confidence booster on Friday.

I did feel much more comfortable and confident playing limit, but with that confidence and comfortability came the torture of incessant riverings that come with limit.

Mondays and Tuesdays are dedicated to the Palms for the next few months. They are having a $1,000,000 freeroll with the qualification period ending June 30th. Anybody who plays 300+ hours is entered in the tournament.

Yes, you read that right. A cool million. They're expecting 300 players, but are currently only on pace for 150. Even if they get 300 players, that's a $3,333 equity per person, and the quality of the field is going to be the worst ever for a million dollar prize pool for obvious reasons. I figure my equity to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k. In an effort to qualify more players, the Palms poker room has made Mondays and Tuesdays double hours days, so I only need to play 150 hours in the next 11 mondays and tuesdays.

They spread a 2-5 NL game with a $1k max buy-in, and the quality of the game is all over the place. Sometimes it's incredible and sometimes it's a bunch of guys like me there to get more hours for this freeroll.

Monday I played six hours in a game that was very good for a large period of time but I managed only to scrape together $342 in profit.

Tuesday I worked eight hours and won $744. I was pretty happy with my play overall, but I made one mistake with AA out of the SB that cost me a few bucks, and then I made a call on the turn that was questionable that I'll discuss in a moment.

There was a guy pretty similar to me with a ton of money on the table, and we were both naturally trying to figure out a way to get each other's stacks. He raised one limper to $20 and I looked down at AA in the SB. I elected to just call which was a pretty poor play. I had re-raised him at one point pretty big out of the SB with JJ and he called earlier, and being out of position I was actually putting myself in a dangerous spot rather than setting a trap for him. Oh well.

Then, I raised one limper from middle position with the KxQ and got three callers with the original limper folding. The flop came K T 6? . Check, check, I bet $60, and the girl to my left made it $120.

Little history here. She's dating a friend of mine who is also a professional poker player. She has the ability to bluff/overplay hands, as she stacked off to me earlier very light overplaying a hand, and she's generally straight forward other than that.

She had about $180 more after the $120 raise, so I elected to call and see what developed on the turn. It came the 9 , and she visibly did not like that hand. I checked, and after some genuine hemming and hawing she decided to go all-in.

Ok, first: It's costing me $186 for a shot at $506, about 2.75-1, pretty decent odds. I knew that she did not have better than two pair based on her tells and speech. How many outs did I have? I had her on this range in this order: KT, AK, KQ, KJ, most likely the first two, but possibly the latter two. Assuming she does not have the A , I have 9 outs, 3 J outs, 3 Q outs, and could possibly even have the best hand or freerolling if she happened to have KJ or KQ. So, I decided to call, and I'm still not sure if I like it or not or if it just doesn't matter enough to worry about.

Well, she rolled over A A ! Wow. Where did that come from? I found myself having 6 outs instead of the 15 I thought I had. The 2 river sealed my fate and she won the nice pot. Well played, good trap. I never even saw it coming.

But, of all things that happened tonight, my highlight was kicking Jim's ass at Rock Paper Scissors for $5. He still doesn't believe that it's a game of skill...

Just kidding buddy.

Peace and good luck,

Devo

posted by Devo @ 2:06 AM |