the end of august

An interesting game last night. As has been the trend for me the last few Fridays, I went down in chips early on, the reloaded, found my rhythm and scored a decent profit. Perhaps my biggest mistake last night was to try an ill-timed, multi-barrel bluff against Marc, who can be a bit of a calling station.

However, since I knew Marc's strategy was to take a lot of small shots (nearly every hand, he raised preflop and bet the flop), I knew a lot of the time he'd be in there with total air. I managed to make a big call on the river against him with nothing but an ace-jack high, which turned out to be the best hand. This pot definitely helped restore my confidence and set my game back on track.

Also, I stacked Andrew no less than three times in the game, and though he was using a short buy-in strategy, the pots added up nicely. I flopped a set of eights against his aces, hit a straight against his top-pair-top-kicker AK, and picked off a preflop all-in bluff with two sevens (he had the nine-deuce offsuit!!).

Marc, maybe by sheer virtue of being in almost every pot, was hitting a lot of boards hard for the first half of the night. He was getting especially lucky against John, putting him on tilt. In one pot, John held pocket kings and flopped top trips, only to have Marc hit a four-outer straight on the turn against him. However, he made much of the money back when he and Marc both held top pair of queens on the flop and improved to trips on the river. John's AQ outkicked Marc's KQ, and he raked in a nice pot.

Last Monday's tournament had some interesting pots as well. The key hand in the early stages of the tournament came for me when a three-way all-in pot happened between Lori (queen-high), Justin (KK), and me (AA). This pot gave me the chip stack I needed to make my way to the endgame and therefore the points and money. Eric, who ended up winning the tournament, got his early chip lead when he made a tough all-in call on the river against Andrew on a dangerous board with a lot of possible straights holding only top pair with a weak kicker.

It got down to three-handed play, and Eric had the decisive chip lead. Eric folded the button, and Justin called in the small blind (we were at $0.75/$1.50). I looked down at QT of clubs and raised it $9 on top. Justin called after a lot of deliberation, leaving himself $12.25 in chips, which he promptly shipped into the pot on the flop, which came jack-ten-nine. Having hit too much of the board to possibly fold even if I knew he had the jack, I called and he showed down two fours. My hand held up and we went into two-handed play. Despite this pick-up, I went into heads-up at about a 4:1 chip disadvantage, and eventually the final hand occurred. Eric raised from the button and I reraised all-in with the ace-ten. He thought about it for a while and called with two deuces. The board bricked out, and my tournament was over.

Fortunately, my second-place finish allowed me a further extension of my first-place points on the leader board. With August coming to a close, I'm excited to go into the final third of the year with a fairly solid lead over the rest of the field. Still, placing outside of the points on any given night when there are a lot of players playing could allow players like Chip to gain ground. Barring any cosmic mishaps, though, that won't happen.