The WSOP

I won three hands at the WSOP. Two were late position raises of 3.5x the blinds that no one called. The other was a call of a bluff with A high. The bettor seemingly went out of his way to look shifty and made a bet that looked to me to be completely irrational. He also had the strange habit of intently following each card as it was dealt to each player, peering over the top of his shades as though he could divine the fronts through concentration. So that pissed me off enough to warrant a call.

The table was extraordinarily tight as we did not lose a player until almost the first break. Our chips were rotating the table until shifty guy went all in with QQ and ran into KK. I made it to the first break with more chips than I started with but quickly lost about ¼ of my stack when I was unable to call a number of raises. At the 50/100 level, I picked up QQ in the cutoff and raised to 350 after it was folded to me. The button bumped it to 1000 and both blinds folded. What to do here?

A call was out of the question as it would have left me with only 350. A fold would have given me 1000 to do future battle. The button had been aggressive by re-raising others throughout the day. He seemed to know what he was doing, so I thought he could see that his bet would pot commit me if I called. This made me think he did not want the call, so I immediately discounted AA or KK as he had enough chips to want action with those hands. That left me with AK, AQs, or QQ-TT to consider. Now, I am no poker genius but even I could figure out I was a favorite against that range of hands. Working against me was the fact that Joe Speaker had been knocked out on the same hand earlier. Well, it can't happen twice right? I pushed my last 350 and he called with a “good luck” and flipped over Aks. Of course, an A came on the flop. (At this point, I uttered “Fuck” which we had been expressly warned not to do about thirty minutes earlier. I followed that up with, “Well, I guess I am on the rail for ten minutes. Fuck again.” Not clever I know, but I wasn’t real happy).

I am not a sore loser. I just hate it worse than anything. I felt I had let everyone down. I reviewed the hand over and over and realized I would not have played it any differently if I had known his cards. A double up there would have put me in second chip position at the table and the ability to get pushy with the tightwads present. I consoled myself with the $10 discount at the Rio buffet provided by the WSOP. FOOD FROM AROUND THE WORLD! I would have preferred good food from one part of the world. “Well it’s mediocre, but I can eat Chinese AND Mexican on the same plate. Wacky!”

It was an experience I am ecstatic to have gone through. At no point did I feel overwhelmed and honestly, how could I after playing so much with all the Bloggers. Let’s go ahead and start having qualifiers for next year. One a month so we can send a Dirty Dozen of Bloggers to descend upon Vegas. Warms the heart.