It's Just Chips

Frank Nugent : You can't be lucky all the time, Jack.
Eddie Bunker: You can be smart every day, though.

"16 Blocks"

Back to the Turkish game last Friday night, and it was very up and down for me. I had pocket aces cracked by the Hiltons and lost to another two outer later on but managed to hit quads twice on the night. Typically, on my two big hands I didn't really get paid off but on the two outers? You can bet the suck out came after I had pushed all the chips into the middle. Still, I ended the night in the positive so who is to complain?

I had an almost perfect read on one player during the night, but I never had the cards to take advantage of it. He would love to bluff big on the river, but he never did it against me which was a shame.

The two times I hit quads were both from the big blind. The first time was with 23o – which was funny, because the player I was up against has a real history losing to 23o. As I made my last value bet on the river – which was really small just so he would call and I would show, all I said was "What hand always beats you?". The look on his face was priceless as he knew straight away what I was holding. Coincidently, later on in the night he would hit a miracle river card to take me out on a much bigger pot.

The other quads was 88 with an 8 on the flop and river. The opponent in the hand mucked but claimed he had aces. He played them extremely slow if he did.

Online poker has been steady of late, with some little wins and no huge losses for a while so the bank slowly grows for the month of August.

In cash games lately I have been mainly grinding out small wins here and there. I don't seem to be winning any big pots, and when I do get mixed up in big pots I am folding to (what I consider) well made bluffs or making calls I know are no good. For the first time in a long time last night, I made the correct call on the river when faced with an overbet. The pot was $10 I think from memory, and the bet was $18 in front. I had flopped a set of 2's, but the board of AdKd2dxx wasn't all that pleasant. When I called it turned out the other player had QT with no diamonds, so I think the overbet was a little bit obvious. And to tell the truth, the fact that it was so obvious was what made me think it might have been a bad call for me. I do have a tendency to over think these things some times.

While grinding it out on 1 or two tables, I have come accustomed to looking through You Tube of late, mainly for Daily Show clips or Ali G/Borat and whatever else I can find. Of late my favourite has been the video clip from Ok Go – I think the song is called Here we go again or something, but the clip is the four guys of the band (I assume) doing a choreographed routine on 8 treadmills lined up in 2 rows. It really is very clever and all shot in one single take which is even more impressive. If you haven't seen it, you should look it up.

When I couldn't find anything to watch on You Tube, I decided to see what the biggest game going was on Full Tilt at this particular time. There was a 6 handed $50/$100 game with Farzad "Freddy" Bonyadi, $10K buy in. While I wasn't really watching every single hand, I did see Freddy take down a $20K pot with AK vs AQ, and then his opponent rebuy (and go on a run to nearly triple up). But as that $20K slid across the digital felt, I couldn't help but be amazed. Time and time again this happens, when you see what ridiculous sums of money are spent on the turn of a card. This might be the thriftiness in me showing, but even sometimes I am shocked how I can bet $50 on a single hand. The sensation doesn't usually come all that often anymore, not as much as it once would.

While watching some of the $50/$100 game though, I kept thinking what that last pot would have meant if I had won it? What bills I could pay off if that pot was slid my way?

I also noticed that 9 out of 10 pots don't see a flop at this level. I guess that is how poker is played when the money actually does matter.