A buddy of mine told me about a small poker room about 10mins from his house. The room is called “The River Poker Room” in Milford New Hampshire and they were running an interesting promotion for their first tournament of the year. It was an $80 event with a maximum of 2 rebuys that could be used at any time, each buy in and rebuy worth a 15,000 chip stack. Also, if you went ahead and put in for the full $240 before your first hand you were given another 10,000 chips. The winner of this event would be awarded the first place cash prize as well as entry into a promotional, “Best player in New Hampshire” tournament to be held the following weekend. Win that event, and you get a seat into the WSOP Main Event. Since I was back in the Boston area visiting my family for New Years anyway, I decided to trek up to the woods of The Granite State and take my shot against what I expected to be a soft field.
I put down $240 to start the event and right out of the gate had 55,000 in chips. With 20 minute blind levels and a very irregular structure I wasn’t really expecting to see a huge amount of play later on regardless of the grossly inflated stack sizes. Never the less if it just becomes a turbo late I should still be more experienced in proper shoving ranges, stealing, restealing, and all the other tricks that make up short stack play. As expected, the field wasn’t anything to write home about. There were players on the first level, 25/50, opening the raising for 1,000 chips, “because they didn’t want limpers.” There were players that were just limp/calling with 84o, 73s type hands for big portions of their stacks, smashing the flop, winning big pots, and then repeating the cycle until they eventually would miss and just bluff like they had it.
The dynamics of the table with that many chips in play to start I will admit through me off a bit. I was a tad uncomfortable with the stack sizes being the way they were early on in the event. Given the level of play at the table it was almost like the big stack was nothing more than insurance against bad beats, which came in handy for me a few times. Being a chip leader and having the ability to KO someone from the event is only really an edge if the other players adjust how they play because of this. If shorter stacks just keep ramming and jamming trying to play big pots then you are left to bide your time until you yourself hit something big. You can’t really out aggress an aggressive nutcase at a poker table regardless of how many chips you have. I understand there are other ways to combat these types of players, but the point still remains that having tons of chips just doesn’t make as big of a difference under those circumstances.
I didn’t play particularly well early. It took me a while to adjust to just how stubborn some of these players were. For example, I had to stop continuation betting as a bluff all together because people were calling with two overs, bottom pairs, 3 card flush draws with one over, and all sorts of hands that had they turned their cards face up I still would have bet thinking they would never be able to call anyway. Couple that with flopping trips and losing about half my stack to a turned flush I wasn’t exactly a destructive force for most of the event. That said I did manage to pick up some steam knocking out two shorter stacks, both hands sucking out with a worse hand, and as the field thinned from the starting 42 players down to two tables I was able to actually maneuver a bit. The blinds got big enough where people didn’t want to mess around anymore and the players that had just kept calling down were mostly gone by then. I was able to gather up 45,000 by the time we reached the final table of 10, with the top prize of about $1,800 looming and the top 5 players getting paid.
I didn’t really pick up any good hands or good spots for the first orbit or two. I had a solid player to my right and to my left, both of which would have made some thin call downs were I to ship or reship on one of them. Finally, at 2K/4K with a 500 ante I picked up AsKc and a favorable spot. 3 limpers come in before me and I make the trivial shove with my hand and only 35,000 chips left. Things folded around to the middle limper with a stack of around 160,000. He is a solid player and has done very little to get out of line. He tanked for about 2 minutes before finally making a call. The final limper was the solid player to my right. He started tanking as well for a solid minute and a half before shoving for 120,000 in total. At this point, I’ve been sitting here with all my chips in the middle for about 6 or 7 minutes now. It’s not normal for me to get anxious during a session but I genuinely wanted there to be some kind of resolution to this hand so we could run it out. Were I to win this hand, I’d have more than tripled up and be right back into the thick of things. Once the third player isolation shoved, I felt pretty solid my hand was good. Sure enough the first caller folded and I turned over my AsKc and was way ahead of the isolation shove with AcJd.
The flop came down JcTcXx
Oh well I thought, still two more cards to come. My buddy at the table called for a Q as the dealer burned and turned.
Turn Qc
Cool, I’m back in the driver’s seat. The dealer without really any hesitation dealt out the river.
River 7c
Without blinking my buddy went, “That’s absolutely gross.” I wasn’t exactly sure what happened at that moment, but I knew I was out. I saw the nut flush my opponent held and quietly went off to the rail. My buddy went bust in 8th and the two of us left shortly after his KO hand.
All in all, I’m impressed with The River poker room. If there was a little bit more action and some more players in the event I would highly recommend anyone within an hour’s drive to take a trip up for the special events they run. As for me, I head back to my day job for this week and next to finish out my time before I return to grinding for a living once more. I have a feeling some of the smaller rooms in the region like The River will be places I’ll be spending quite a bit of quality time in the coming months.