Chris Halverson’s Blog

Holding On Too Long

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

I made a conscience decision on Thursday night to not just lay down good hands when facing a large bet. In limit this is usually not a big deal because in the worse case you can just check/call a bet. In no limit you could be facing a huge bet that you must call to stay in the game.

I was at the Gaming Club playing 50/1 NL and was up about $40 (buy in of $100) when I get AKo. I pop it to $3 and was reraised to $6, which I call. The flop comes KJx (rainbow). I’ve got TPTK and throw out a $5 bet. The other guy immediately raises to $25. Hmm…Now alarms should have been going off, but I had resolved myself to not just roll over. I had a good hand (VVP would say it was a monster), so I called. The turn brings a Jack and now I’ve got a gutshot to the nut straight. I wuss out and check and the other guy goes all in for another $60. Damnit. I use up my time trying to figure out if I’m still good. There are a lot of things that can beat me, but I’m not good enough to lay down that AK in that situation so I call hoping for a K or Q. It’s a brick and he flips up his rockets and I’m down to $25 watching a $200 pot being pushed to him.

Now there are about 4 places where I could have laid this down, but I had been laying down hands that would have ended up winning all too often lately and it was starting to frustrate me. Of course, laying it down for a $5 bet is very different than calling a $25 bet without the nuts. I got married to the hand and it kept improving. It just figures that this is the one time that it runs into pocket aces. I was behind the whole time drawing to two outs for a win and four more to tie. The guy didn’t even slow play it, so I’ll give him credit. I’m sure he was jumping around not believing that I was calling.

Surprisingly (to me anyway), I didn’t let it bother me. I had been playing well until that point and continued to do so after that. I was up $60 on my other table and doubled up on the “down” table to end that session up a few dollars. I played a little bit after CSI and ended down about $15. I felt I played well, the second session was abbreviated (and I was also playing a bit distracted) so that I could watch some TV with the Mrs.

ESPN Tilt

Oh my.

Much like others, I’m sure I’ll continue to watch this, but…Wow.

In some ways this may be good for poker, after all they showed how to get paid off playing such monsters such as:

T6o (to beat the “bitch end” of the straight)
34s
22 (in MP facing a 40x BB raise, yes, 40, not 4)

That is unless they think that all the casinos have cheating rings setup in order to get the vacationer’s money. At the poker tables of all places. Oh, and don’t forget that if you claim you were cheated make sure to show up 2 hours earlier than you planned, that way the tapes may not be erased yet.

You also have cameos by Daniel N and TJ Cloutier. What’s ironic (beside Daniel saying he wants to find an easier game) is that early in the show they show Daniel throwing the dice. Come on…if you’re going to have a pro make a cameo playing craps you must have TJ doing it.

“Best” quotes:

“I reraise bitch” - as player #2 pulls out a bigger gun than player #1 in an underground game after #1 tries a string raise.

“When I was 12″ - as we find out that the woman has been a playa since she was 12

“I bet like I had a pair because I have a pair”

“$8000? When I run out of toilet paper I wipe my ass with $8000, $9000 if I’ve had chili” - The Matador

I’m sure there are more, leave ‘em in the comments if you want (what’s funny is that I’ve got 4 comments today for the posting I did in August 2004 about this show! leave ‘em here now guys).

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 9:32 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.