Poker Articles

I’ve been spending the last night trying to remember key hands and situations from day 3.  The more that I think about it I was basically just cruising thru not playing too many hands and just chipping up very slowly.  I ended up doubling my stack very turtle pace and without any huge pots or big all in pre flop situations.  Something I tried my best to avoid the entire tournament.  So slowly that it was hardly noticeable for the other players.  In normal tournaments to chip up this way would be close to impossible but with this structure I truly found out why that guy yells, “This is the greatest tournament in the world!”  

A very weird situation did occur on day 4 and I wasn’t even in the hand.  To set the hand up we had been playing a few hours already and the player in the one seat had come in the chip leader with the intent of steamrolling the table, like he had probably done the first 3 days to accumulate all of those chips.  I was in the 7 seat and watch him stack off about 75% of his chips in nearly 2 hours.  He wasn’t getting it in too bad he had a combination of very bad luck and relentless aggression.  You could definitely tell that he was steaming about as bad as you can be.  Two seats to my right was a Latin American player who had his Latin fan boy/ reporters sweating him all day.   They would come by and speak to him in Spanish asking for chip counts and updates quite frequently.  The dealer asked him where he was from and then spoke two sentences of Spanish to him.  You could tell that he was just happy to be using the language he had learned to speak and was kind of trying to show off a little at the same time.  Regardless it was pretty harmless attempt by him but none the less a bad decision for the dealer to be speaking a language other than English at the table.  The tilted ex-chip leader in the one seat was in no mood for joking though and was sure to let the dealer know immediately that he certainly was in the wrong and wanted to know what he had said to the Latin player.  The dealer told him that he had just asked him how his day was and where he was from.  The player player 2 seats to my left, who I later found out to be AmachaikAA on pokerstars was also in a joking mood and said, “Just watch now the dealer is going to deal him Ace Ace!”  It seemed to me like he was kind of needling the one seat for making such a big deal about it but it was clear the dealer got the point and that would be the end of the non- English speaking at the table.

I was in the big blind and the player under the gun raised all in committing his short stack.  AmachaikAA re-raised isolating the under the gun raiser and basically screaming, “I have a monster!”   I thought it was very likely he could have AA and how funny would that be after the comment he just made.  When it got around to the Latin guy it was very interesting to see that he was not so quick to muck his cards.  He thought deliberately for a moment before announcing a re-raise all in!!   When it got back to AmachaikAA he had a befuddled look on his face.  “Do you seriously have AA he asked the Latin guy?”   “This is just way too weird.”   Finally after a little moaning and groaning he pushed in his stack which was very healthy and had the Latin guy almost doubled.  The cards were exposed,  Utg had Ace Jack AmachaikAA had KK and the Latin guy had AA!   All hell broke loose at the table and it wasn’t for about another 10-15 minutes before play resumed.  The floor was called over and AmachaikAA was explaining his case to the floor and how it was just too much of a coincidence what had occurred.  I tried to calm him down a bit explaining how hard it would be to stack a deck to the point where you are dealing a player in the 4 seat AA and a player in the 9 seat KK.  It was clear nothing was going to calm him down it was just too much of a coincidence what had occurred and he wasn’t buying it.  The end result was AmachaikAA almost got a penalty and the dealer was removed and probably written up for speaking a language other than English which basically sparked the mess of a normal AA vs KK situation into an episode of the Twighlight zone.

The rest of the day ran pretty smoothly for me.  I had been playing very few hands which made a very high percentage of my bluffs go through and I was chipping up without any showdowns.   People don’t like to see you accumulate chips without showing any hands and I could tell it was kind of rattling the players at my table.  On the other hand nobody really wanted to be the first one to force me to showdown a hand.  So it continued to work out for me.

With the blinds 800-1600 I raised utg with JJ and was called by second position.  When he called I was pretty sure he had some sort of medium pair or AQ AJ type hand because I don’t think he was playing too wide of a range against me here.  With quite a few players left to act I’m fairly sure he would’ve re-raised me pre with QQ-AA and AK.   Both the blinds decided to see the flop as well and the board came out 8h 3h 3s.  A very good flop for my JJ, I bet out 10.5k a little over half pot and the first caller calls and the blinds fold.  When the turn hit a non threatening 2s I decided to check it and make my hand look like a missed AK and our stacks were perfect for me to check shove it in.  I check he bets 21k and I shove in for 60k and he thinks for a while and folds.  Another hand won without showing down and I bagged up to end the day with 220k.