How Many Aces Must A Man Get Cracked, Before You Can Call Him A Man?

Joey 'Bats' Pistella: I thought you said the good times were gonna last forever.
Bobby Bartellemeo: I thought we'd be dead by now.

”The Crew”

Anybody who doesn’t get a laugh out of that movie isn’t somebody I want to meet. I can’t explain why, but I find the good in any easy going comedy no matter how easy going they may be.

And just quietly, that is my best post title to date. I'm not-so-secretly proud of it.

Full Tilt is still going well, and I suffered my first lot of bad beats there last night and still came out with a little profit, so all is looking good. I have decided that the $1/$2 games are easier than the 50c/$1 games because people know how to fold. Man, look at me! Talking about the finite differences at $1 tables – if I wasn’t the WGPBE it wouldn’t be worth it.

In 138 hands last night, I had the rockets 5 times. 5 freaking times! I took the blinds and a raise 3 times, and lost 10BB pots the other two times with rivered flushes – to the same guy! He called a capped pre-flop out of position with T8h the second time, and said he was “just feeling lucky”. There was even an Ace on the flop, but he chased it all the way. Normally this would put me on tilt, but I just laughed along with him in the chat box and let him get away with it. He cashed out not long afterwards, so I never had a chance to get my money back, but there were plenty of others willing to take his place.

On the good side, nearly every other big hand I had held up which is probably a good thing otherwise I would have been really angry. I also made a bit of a mistake when in a big pot, the river brought out a flush and a straight chance, and I had position over the other guy in the pot. I had top two pair, and was probably beat but I think with a 15BB pot I have to see if he is telling the truth. I accidentally pressed fold though, and even though I am 90% sure I was beaten I wanted to see what he was playing and was willing to pay $2 more for the pleasure. Never the less, we move on.

I finally broke my duck at the full tilt SNG’s (since I know DuggleBogey loves me explaining Australia to my friends on the other side of the world – in cricket, when you get out for 0 runs, it is called a “duck”. So when you “break your duck”, you get off zero. I could have said I lost my cherry, but then I wouldn’t have had all this bracket explaination that fills up the post now, would I?). I was playing in a $10 + $1 when I saw some horiffic play when we got down to the bubble.

Here is the scene:

Rock - $900
Heafy - $1600
Maniac - $4500
Maniac2 - $6500

Blinds were $150/$300.

As to be expected, the two maniacs are raising every hand between them, not letting the two small stacks see a flop cheaply. This is good playing – how ever, they also are getting into a few hands with each other fighting over our blinds. This was amazing, because they were betting furiously on draws against each other! Now I can see why you would attack the other big stack when you are holding the nuts, but when you have 8 outs going to the river? I couldn’t believe it! Sure enough, the chip leader was bounced in eventually by the other Maniac and brought us two small stacks to the money positions with him – I had gained a few chips but lost then when I doubled up the small stack when he had Queens on the BB.

The maniac had over $10K of the $13.5K at the table, and it was clear that we were playing for second. I was happy with that anyway, because even third meant I had finally cashed in these games.

On the BB, I call a minimum raise from the rock with 64o, just because I didn’t want to look like an easy blind steel. The flop comes K69 rainbow, and he checks. I decided to push, because there is a chance he will call with Ace high and I don’t have enough chips to do anything else but push or fold. He calls and shows AK, and I turn a 4 to suck out and eliminate him. Oh well, I guess sometimes the bad beats work in your favour.

Heads up with the manaic, and he has a 10-1 chip lead over me. Lets see how this works. He raises pre-flop, and I push with King high. He fold – but still has a massive lead. Ok, next hand I raise pre-flop with K8. Why? Because I only just found out that Q7o is the “computer hand”, for the unitiated that menas that out of all the possible starting hands you can have, apparantly Q7o is exactly in the middle – the “mean” hand, if you will. Therefore, against any unknown hand heads up, there is a 50% chance that Q7o is ahead or behind, which means that if I am ahead of Q7o, I have a greater than 50% chance of being ahead in the hand! I’m a genius! I also did it because the maniac was trying to muscle me so I wanted to make a stand on this hand and let him know that he can’t push me around – either double me or eliminate me.

So anyway, after that little tangent, I raised pre-flop with K8o. He re-raised me the minimum, so I went all-in. He folded again – this was getting fun. His 10-1 chip lead was now 3-1 and I hadn’t seen a flop yet.

So he lets me see the next one, and with 53o I hit the three on an ace high flop. He makes his minimum raise again, so I push with my bottom pair no kicker. This time he calls, with JQ. Did I mention there was a Jack also on the flop? Anyways, the turn was a 5 and I had performed the same suckout to take the chip lead. I even apologised for this one though.

Long story short, we get all in on a AKx flop, where he had Ax and I had AK. That’s pretty unlucky heads up, but what can you do? It was pay back from the poker Gods for me for loosing so many chips with AA last night. Besides, even though I did suck out pretty hugh twice I felt like I was in controll all along and when you come back from a 10-1 chip disadvantage you need a little luck, don’t you?