Skipping past Writober and Nanoblomo . . ? Shit, I dunno. I'm as bored as you are.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
“You Can Blow Me.”
Hey, The Internets! You play poker a lot, right? Then surely you’ve had one of those hands . . . the magical, I’ve-waited-all-my-life-for-you hands? Like you’re holding a pair of, say, eights and the other two eights come up in the flop? How are you gonna keep from bursting and still get the other fools to give you all their money?
Well, first wait for them to come to you. Bingo! The first guy to act throws in five bucks, and the other guy still holding cards goes all-in. It’s not a giveaway to call the all-in, as it doesn’t add up to a huge bet. The first guy calls, too. Fucking AWESOME! Okay, the Turn card is something that doesn’t matter, but you wince in a very non-poker-face way, sending out a “tell.” The first guy moves all-in to push you off the hand. You say, “I call” and drop the quad eights on him. End scene.
Yeah, this happened. And it was fucking awesome. But I wasn’t the guy with the quad eights.** No, I was the “first guy” with pocket fours (so, two pair . . . ouch). Anyway, not an awful day of poker tournament action; I did score a $5 bounty for eliminating one player. I finished tied for fourth out of 12. One (and a half) players from getting my money back. In retrospect, I did okay, but I should’ve known that guy’s “tell” was fake. (It was pretty obvious . . . likely why I noticed it to begin with.) Still, I dream about doing that to other people. Except my quads beat a full house . . . or something better than two pair, anyway.
I’ll have to tweak my strategy a little, I think. It kept me from chasing bad cards, yes, but I didn’t follow up with effective betting. I won less than a quarter of the hands where I paid to see a flop. And one of THOSE was an instance of everyone folding to a big bet after the flop. (I guess a pot bought is not a pot lost.)